If I had known secular institutes were a recognized vocation within the Church, I would have been spared a good deal of trouble. But secular institutes have been one of the best kept secrets in Catholicism. When I first heard of the secular institute to which I now belong, I was a grown woman, comfortable in my professional life, but vaguely uncomfortable with the limits imposed on my Catholicism.

In my youth I prayed for vocations – for priests, for women religious, and even for the single life. But as a single woman by choice I didn’t feel acknowledged in my parish, though I taught religion classes, served as a lector and eucharistic minister, and usually attended Mass each day. In a parish filled with married couples and families, I found myself somewhat apart from others. I regarded myself as alone in my engagement with my faith, and I knew I was alone in trying to be a faithful Catholic in my career as an academic.

Although I didn’t recognize my discontent, God led me to this new and exciting vocation as a member of a secular institute. How God drew me to this vocation requires a sketch of my life.

KEEPING THE FAITH

Growing up in New Mexico, my Catholicism seemed a living faith, fllourishing amid opposition. To my public-highschool friends, my Catholicism seemed exotic, even threatening to the prevailing mainstream Protestantism. College far from home occasionally brought me nearer to God in ways I could not have imagined. I spent weekends on retreat, sought God in the liturgy as often as I could, acted as sacristan to the visiting priest, and fed the small Newman Association by buying cinnamon rolls for Sunday brunch after Mass.

Graduate school seemed inevitable, so I went on to earn a Ph.D. in English. With the pressures of academic performance always uppermost in my mind, I prayed for inspiration, for guidance. It always came with surprises in ideas, in chance encounters, in parishes with tolerable and sometimes dazzling liturgies, in professors who shared my faith and sometimes my questions.

I began my teaching career at a distinguished liberal arts college in New England, where I still teach. At a cocktail party in my first year, I remember being asked if I were religious; none of the other new members of the department had said they were. My response came almost without thinking: “Yes, I am a Roman Catholic, and I have just registered in the nearby parish.” Silence fell on the wholly secular crowd. But having said that benign “yes,” I was branded as the believer. And a believer I was.

I began to turn my literary mind to scripture. I joined a prayer group, served for a time on the pastoral team, and went to a Bible institute one summer. Little did I know that another member of the pastoral team was watching and praying for me.

A few years after the prayer group disbanded, a saintly older woman on the pastoral team stopped me after Mass, saying, “I have something I think you would love as I do.” She handed me a pamphlet about Caritas Christi, a pontifical secular institute, adding only, “I’ve prayed about this for more than three years.”

IRRESISTIBLE ATTRACTION

I read it and put it in a drawer for some months. In the summer when I began to study in earnest the Bible as literature, a secondary teaching field to English Romantic poetry, I found the pamphlet and dashed off a letter to the national chaplain listed there. He responded instantly, and in no time at all I met a dozen women just like me–committed to God first and to all other commitments second. I was hooked, irresistibly drawn.

This particular secular institute exists in several cities in the U.S., including an interdiocesan group in the Northeast. We meet monthly at a House of Prayer. One weekend eight months out of the year our group takes over the house, inviting our Jesuit chaplain to give us conferences and celebrate the liturgies, while we share our faith and our responses to bulletins from the group’s national and international leadership. Each summer a full eight-day retreat with splendid spiritual directors is planned by an elected National Council. The retreats, held far and near, are never the same, and the members of Caritas Christi who attend always impress me as fine women struggling and succeeding in making Christ known and loved in the world: the Caritas Christi ideal.

Each member of a secular institute is “consecrated” to God. Consecration means we are never truly alone, for God is always sharing the moment in the mobile chapel of the car, the charged moments of a difficult meeting, the sometimes profound moment of silent commitment to a God-given responsibility. But when we can get together to pray with those who believe as we believe, our prayer is explosive, the conversation sustaining, the bond of our vocation eminently satisfying. Our mutual commitment is to live out our baptismal promises to the full.

We take vows of celibacy and make promises of obedience and poverty consistent with our circumstances. Celibate chastity places us in the condition of being a friend to all and in service to others for the love of God. The promise of obedience is to God, rather than to a superior in the secular institute. Each member individually discerns God’s will for herself in loyalty to the Church as to the institute’s law of life. Poverty calls the member to be detached from material goods and committed to social justice. It also reminds us of our dependence on God, whether in youth or age. We remain financially independent of the organization of the secular institute, but we give a “portion for God” to maintain the institute so it can serve us.

Our hallmark and that of all other secular institutes is that we are lay and consecrated. Members include doctors and nurses, professors and teachers, social workers and secretaries, hairdressers and models, editors and writers, lawyers and financial advisers. A few are pastoral ministers or work for the Church, but most of us live and work in a very secular world, where opposition to what we believe makes us strong and where we can bring Christ to others by witness and practice. Our mission is to carry Gospel values into the wider world, to love God, and to make God loved in our jobs and in our social and political lives.

SUPPORTED AND INSPIRED

Just how all of us manage to do that endlessly inspires me. Although members of Caritas Christi are dispersed throughout the country (and in 40 countries throughout the world), we share a strong sense of communion through common prayers, bulletins, local, regional, national, and even international meetings. Over time, I have become friends with many of these women and spiritual companions to a few.

Part of the joy in the Caritas Christi vocation is to have a sponsor, a spiritual friend, who oversees our “formation” (or religious growth) and who continues the formation after our initiation into the secular institute. For my formation, my sponsor and I discussed scripture, theology, the charism of Caritas Christi, our individual spirituality, and the constitutions of the institute. When I was received into Caritas Christi eight years afer I began the formation process, my “definitive dedication” (similar to “final vows” for a nun) was one of the most moving, humbling moments of my life. I felt free to be the woman God intended me to be.

My vocation had always been there, but I was led to it only by my own restlessness and inability to settle into marriage or be content solely with my professional work and parish life. Like many members of secular institutes, I was in my 30s when I was first received into Caritas Christi, and in my 40s when I made my definitive dedication. But had I known of Caritas Christi in my 20s, I would have begun my journey sooner.

Secular institutes are not well known because members don’t readily reveal their membership so as not to be set apart from other lay people. Still, although we are low-key about our vocations, our consecration matters tremendously. Everything I do seems done for God, whether it be teaching a good class, counseling a student, or writing an essay or book. Consecration calls me to remember what I have promised in daily prayer, acts of kindness, and unbegrudging generosity.

Without my own commitment to “first things,” I could not be a leaven for the world around me. Without the love of God and the support of my secular institute, I could not be or bring Christ to others as effectively. Without filling up, I would run on empty. My vocation to Caritas Christi gives me the energy and will to make a difference in my world–in my profession, in my parish, in my family, and among my friends. The God within still calls, and I say ever more firmly, “Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will.”

Patricia L. Skarda is a member of Caritas Christi Secular Institute and a professor of English at a New England College.

 This article first appeared in Vision: Vision 2001 Religious Vocation Discernment Guide, p. 102.