Girls, What About You?

Originally published in The Way on July 19, 1941.

Many of us have had the opportunity to marvel at the difference in a parish when Sisters are there. We congratulate them and express our desire to help them.

There are many little ways in which we can locally help the work of the Sisters, but first of all we must have Sisters to help. If our young girls do not constantly enter the convent, there will be no Sisters to help.

Girls, what about you entering the convent? What about becoming a Sister? If the world is to be reconverted to the faith of Christ, more priests, more religious men and women are needed in every country and especially are they needed among our people.

Our orders of Sisterhoods who conduct schools, orphanages, homes for the aged, have not been recruited in the degree needed for the expansion of their work. They have not been recruited enough even for the most efficient maintenance of existing institutions conducted by the Sisters. Girls, our religious orders need you!

True, to give up all and enter a convent may not seem easy. However, should the difficult keep us away? Not if we have the calling. It may be difficult in the beginning, but those who go do not regret. If the beginnings seem too hard gather courage from St. Theresa who certainly was no weakling, yet, she confessed that at the moment of leaving her parents she suffered so much that she thought death could not be worse, yet she left them.

Nothing great can be done without love, but a heart burning with love everything is possible. Speaking of love, we don't speak of the transitory enthusiasm of a day or of an hour, but of deliberate love, of clearsighted generosity.

“Bless you, Lord,” said a girl of twenty, “for giving me a warm heart.” This reminds us of the words of Papini in his Life of Christ: “The summits are cold for those who are not on fire.”

Give yourself to Christ with your eyes open. “What a joy,” wrote St. Augustine, when he understood what it meant to give himself completely to God. “What joy it is to be rid of trifling delights! Now that I have seen better, the good is not good enough for me.”

Girls, 40,000 Russellites or Jehovah's Witnesses are out every day to win recruits for their cause, cheerfully subjecting themselves to humiliation and insults. The Communist counts neither time nor money nor sacrifice in his zeal to serve Stalin.

What about you, girls? Do you lack a similar zeal to serve God? Think of your responsibility in this matter. Ask yourself what God requires of you. Do not miss your vocation.

Catholics who are the “elect of God”, who owe so much to God, should, at least to the extent of many thousands, join the ranks of the religious even if there were no other reward than the interior peace and joy and happiness which it would bring them. But there is that solemn promise of Christ that those who do leave home to work as consecrates of God “will receive on hundred-fold in this life, and in the end life everlasting.”