For many Catholics, clarity about the state of life and more particular vocation to which God invites them comes early in life. Despite cultural trends that mitigate against making serious, lifelong commitments at younger ages, there are numerous Catholic men and women today marrying, rearing children, and committing confidently to other forms of serving God, such as the priesthood and religious life, well before they hit the age of 30.
The stories Catholics tell most often about great saints tend to reinforce the notion that such clarity should come at an early age. Catherine of Siena, for instance, was certain even as a little girl that she was called to a spousal relationship with Christ as a consecrated virgin and she was a Dominican tertiary by sixteen. Thomas More, who considered a Carthusian monastic life in his early twenties, discerned efficiently that he belonged in the world as a layman engaged in both political and scholarly pursuits. He was married by age 27. Likewise, Francis of Assisi was in his early twenties when he began upsetting his wealthy father with his poverty-loving activities. He was not yet 30 when he composed the Primitive Rule of the Order of Friars Minor which quickly gained papal approval.
By contrast, many other Catholics today experience uncertainty and confusion, even into middle age, about their personal, Christian callings. They can even be discouraged, rather than consoled, by the stories we tend to repeat most often about our famous saints through the ages. They are rarely presented with saintly examples that encourage them specifically with respect to their sometimes years of hesitation and perplexity about their particular missions in life.
This is not, however, due to a shortage of such models in the Church’s rich and vast history. Indeed, some truly great and influential Catholic men and women over the centuries were, in earthly and vocational terms, late bloomers.
Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the storied Jesuit order, is among them. In 1540, at the time that Pope Paul III approved the Society of Jesus that had initially formed in Paris five years earlier, the Basque nobleman was a few months shy of age 49. He had only been a priest for three years by then.
Almost two decades earlier, starting in 1522 when he was already past 30, Ignatius wandered about for years doing penance, praying, visiting various friends and religious sites, and––as he tells us himself in his autobiography––letting his curly hair grow out and never brushing it and letting his fingernails and toenails also grow to unseemly lengths.
In hindsight and in Jesuit iconography, these “pilgrim years” of Ignatius have been celebrated as those during which he composed his famous Exercises, which would later become foundational for Jesuit spirituality. Yet Ignatius was, at this time — certainly from ecclesiastical officialdom’s standpoint, as his multiple run-ins with the Spanish Inquisition demonstrate — a relatively uneducated and by some accounts strange and aimless-seeming, unmarried layman with a suspicious number of lady friends to whom he gave unlicensed spiritual direction.
These ladies enthusiastically lavished resources upon Ignatius to support his years of discernment. They helped him to enroll in a grammar school in Barcelona in which he was the only student in his mid-30s learning basic Latin alongside boys who were generally between the ages of 10 and 14. The saint’s lady friends also helped to fund Ignatius’s subsequent, many student years in Paris, too––up to the time he founded the Society of Jesus––from his late 30s into his mid-40s.
Other saintly late-bloomers of the early modern period include Teresa of Avila, Camillus de Lellis, and Louise de Marillac.
Teresa, although she entered a Carmelite convent in her hometown of Avila in Spain at the age of 20 in 1535, did so by her own testimony more from fear of damnation than out of any serious attraction to religious life. She also did so against her father’s wishes. It was not until Teresa was about 40 years old that she experienced her first mystical vision that, in time, she recognized as the major turning point of her life. And she was 47 when she began the work of reforming the Carmelite order and writing her first book––that is, when she began doing the work for which she would be most remembered and eventually even honored as a Doctor of the Church. Because she, too, was scrutinized by the Spanish Inquisition, she would actually never live to see any of her magnificent book manuscripts receive permission from censors to advance to publication.
Almost two generations younger than Teresa, Camillus de Lellis — who was canonized in 1746 — was a Neapolitan priest who lived from 1550 to 1614. Born to a mother who was herself nearly fifty at the time, Camillus once he came of age became a soldier for the Republic of Venice during its wars with the Ottoman Turks. Leaving the army with a wounded leg at 25, Camillus began repenting of his gambling habit and other vices and attempted to pursue a possible vocation as a Capuchin friar. But the Capuchins denied him admission. So, he ended up spending several years in Rome, working odd jobs at the Incurabili hospital in exchange for a bed, board, and basic care there.
In time, however, a priest named Philip Neri began giving Camillus spiritual direction. Then, in his early 30s, Camillus founded a new religious congregation instead of gaining admission into any existing one. He was 34 when ordained as a priest by an expatriated Welsh bishop, Thomas Goldwell (whose own vocational discernments had played out even more slowly than Camillus’s, thanks to the turmoil of the Reformation in the British Isles). And he was 36 when Pope Sixtus V recognized his new congregation as the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm. Also known as the Camillians after their founder, the order at first ministered to sick and wounded soldiers but expanded to help plague victims and many others, eventually running many of its own hospitals. Camillus’s order is still active today in many countries, including the U.S.A.
Louise de Marillac, who was canonized in 1934, lived from 1591 to 1660 in France. She might best be described as a person called to two distinct states of life at different periods, as well as a woman with a late vocation.
Louise is best remembered alongside the more famous Vincent de Paul for co-founding the Daughters of Charity––one of the most successful women’s religious congregations in the Church’s history. But she was well over 40 when that happened, and she did not even live to see the Daughters recognized in Rome as a legitimate women’s congregation, which happened in 1666.
Prior to forming the Daughters in Paris when she was still a laywoman, Louise had experienced years of vocational turmoil. As a little girl, she had been forced to grow up behind the cloister walls of a Dominican convent due to the fact that she was the illegitimate daughter of a royal official whose wife refused to adopt her into the family. Then, when she desired to become a nun herself as a teenager, she was persuaded by powerful relatives to instead marry a nobleman, Antoine Le Gras.
As Antoine’s wife and as the mother of one child, a son named Michel, Louise continued feeling tugs toward a religious vocation––tugs that made her feel very guilty. Once she was technically free to pursue such a vocation when widowed in her mid-30s, she spent eight years sorting out how such a decision would affect her son and whether or not any existing women’s congregation was suitable for her. Thanks in part to a friendship she was forming with De Paul, she decided to form a new congregation unlike any others she had known, dedicated to serving the poor, the sick and infirm, and neglected children.
Due to the Daughters’ semi-active and semi-contemplative character, her new congregation gained royal support in France but faced serious opposition among ecclesiastical officials who felt required by the norms of the Council of Trent to enforce strict claustration on all new women’s orders. Louise was pressured for decades to change course with the Daughters and turn them into a lay confraternity dedicated to social ministries. She resisted this easy, open path. Partly because of her persistence (which was judged as stubbornness by some Catholics she knew), officials in Rome only after her death came to accept that the Daughters, and other new congregations imitating them, could both have a religious rule and serve needy people in the streets, hospitals, prisons, schools, and orphanages.
Closer to our own time, saintly late bloomers include Edith Stein and Gianna Beretta Molla. Stein converted to Catholicism in Germany at the age of 30 in 1922 and supported herself through her work as an unmarried, unconsecrated teacher and scholar until the age of 43, when she joined the Carmelite order. She was 46 when she made her perpetual vows and was a nun only four more years after then when killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.
Molla, for her part, married late for her era, at the age of 32 in 1955. She had chosen in the meantime to complete medical studies and early professional formation as a pediatrician. She was 39 when pregnant with her fourth child––the one that she refused to have aborted even after it was clear that she would likely die, as she did, if her doctors prioritized the baby’s life above her own.
Catholics today who are experiencing uncertainty, confusion or delays not of their own choosing where vocational commitments are concerned can look for encouragement not among such famous saints, but also among the many other figures the Church holds up to us who are not yet canonized.
An especially remarkable story in this regard is that of Catherine McAuley, an Irishwoman who lived from 1778 to 1841. McAuley founded the now worldwide Sisters of Mercy. Her legacy was such that Pope John Paul II declared her to be Venerable in 1990. Her cause for sainthood remains open.
McAuley was a never-married, never-consecrated woman of 43 years of age, residing in Dublin, when she unexpectedly received a large inheritance from an elderly Quaker gentleman, William Callaghan, whose late wife had also been a friend to her. She had served in the Callaghan’s household for many years, employing her free time to teach catechism to the Catholic servants they employed and to others who wanted it in their village just north of the city.
It was only after this that she began to pursue educational and charitable ministries on the larger scale for which she is remembered. In 1827, she and two companions opened a refuge for destitute women, an orphanage and a school for poor Catholic children. McAuley was just shy of 50 at this point. Encouraged by Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin to form a religious institute rather than to operate such institutions as an unmarried laywoman, McAuley at age 52 became a novice with the Presentation Sisters and soon after separated from them, with the archbishop’s authorization, to found the Sisters of Mercy.
Although McAuley lived only ten years more, she lived to see her institute approved in Rome in 1841, a few months before she died, as well as to see it grow to include more than 100 women and many institutions around Ireland. The Sisters of Mercy spread to many other countries in the following decades.
Should McAuley’s cause for sainthood eventually succeed in Rome, perhaps late vocations could be included among the things for which she is made a special patron. In that role, she would join Ignatius Loyola, Camillus de Lellis, and several other male saints, including Alphonsus Liguori––a lawyer turned priest of the eighteenth century––who are already invoked by some Catholics who are discerning later than others about what state of life and special mission God has in mind for them.
Regardless, those of us who are close to Catholics still finding their way in mid-life––or who are ourselves among them––can be assured and grateful that we have many such late-blooming, saintly friends watching over us in heaven, not only vocationally precocious and efficient ones.