by Mary Beth Bonacci

Well, the first National Catholic Singles Conference was a smashing success.

Nearly 400 people attended, from 30 states. As a single Catholic, there’s nothing quite like the experience of standing in a room with 400 other single Catholics – 400 other people who have experienced what you’ve experienced, 400 people who have also felt like the only single Catholic in the world.

It was awesome.

I’m not the only person who enjoyed the conference. I’ve been getting amazing feedback. It seems that wherever I go in the country now, I run into someone who was there, or who knows someone who was there – someone who was profoundly moved by the experience.

I’m finding it interesting that, literally every time someone talks to me about their experience at the conference, they mention one particular part of the talk I gave there – the part where I spoke about “vocation.”

Specifically, I asked the question, “Is the unconsecrated single life a ‘vocation,’ in the sense that the Church understands vocation?”

It’s a danged good question, if I do say so myself.

We are, of course, all accustomed to feeling invisible within the Catholic parish. But, recently, I’ve noticed a trend emerging. People within the parish who used to talk about the two vocations, marriage and religious life, are now adding a third, the “vocation” to the single life.

I’m grateful that they’re acknowledging us, but from the first time I heard it, something rubbed me wrong about the concept of a single “vocation.”

Reading the Holy Father’s letter on women, Mulieris Dignitatem, reinforced my suspicions. In that document, John Paul II says that God calls all women to give themselves in one of two ways – in motherhood or in consecration to Christ.

No mention of singleness in there.

In fact, I find no mention of an unconsecrated single “vocation” in Church teaching anywhere. As far as the Church is concerned, it doesn’t exist.
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