Worldwide, vocations to the Dominican Order "remain quite steady, but there has been a significantly large increase" to one particular Province, reports the vocations blog for the Irish Dominicans: the Province of St. Joseph.

The entry cites with admiration the words of Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, O.P., Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments-and a Friar of the Province of St. Joseph-who spoke to the Provincial Chapter last month about the vocations boom. The Archbishop said that "God is sending us these vocations because the Dominican charism is urgently needed in the Church today."

That charism, he said, hinges on a "powerful combination" of key factors, including an "appreciation of the inner intelligibility of everything that God has revealed about himself and us," confidence in reason as a tool to discover truth, "a healthy realism about the peril of the human condition apart from ... grace and mercy," which are, moreover, "sheer gift, unmerited and otherwise unattainable", and "a wholly admirable resistance to all purely moralistic accounts of the Catholic faith".

The Archbishop also noted that, in contrast with previous generations, today's vocations "have been radicalized by their experience before entering the Order," marked by their encounter with "the moral relativism and eclectic religiosity of the ambient culture".  They have "recognized it as a chaotic but radical alternative to Christianity with which no compromise is possible," having discovered in dramatic fashion that "human authenticity is possible only by living in conformity to Christ."

To read the full text of Archbishop DiNoia's address to the Provincial Chapter, please click here.