AFTER living in Rome for seven years, I was in Dublin when Pope John Paul II died. Returning the following evening, I went almost immediately to St Peter’s Square. The death had been long expected, but emotions are less predictable. I wondered how I would feel. Wandering through the square on my own among thousands of others, I felt a sudden heavy sadness and a sense of absence. This pilgrim Pope was regularly not in residence but now in a different way he was not there. His absence was palpable. And almost at once people began asking about his legacy.

I had gone to Dublin to speak about nurturing vocations to the ordained priesthood. There are many fewer these days and this Sunday is a day set aside among Catholics to pray for them. But what do we mean when we speak about vocation?

Vocations are not confined to ministerial priesthood and the religious life. Politicians, particularly during an election campaign, may make promises about public services and say that money will be made available, for example, for schools, hospitals, the police — but it will all be waste unless there are people with the gifts and commitment to make these promises come true. We need teachers, nurses, doctors and police with a sense of vocation, as well as priests, but a major crisis in our Western society is the stifled sense of what a vocation means.

It is often described as a gift, and people will then say they have not received it. But this gift is not a package, distributed to some, withheld from others. Everyone without exception has some such gift. It comes from God, whether we believe in God or not. We have it deep down in our very depths, waiting to be discovered. What will stir it into life?

Most of us who are commonly said to have vocations will acknowledge the influence of someone we have admired. But notice what happens. We may want to be like them, whether in our professional or personal lives (the scope of vocation is far wider than people often suppose), but we don’t wish simply to copy them. Rather, their example speaks to us and evokes a response.

When I first wondered about being ordained, I knew a priest who was always active, full of energy, but, if you needed his help, you had his full attention — as if you were the only person who mattered in all the world. I make no claim to match that example, but it supplied me with a model of care for others which guides me still and which stirred in me the beginnings of my own desire for ordination. Then by coincidence I had visits recently from two friends of mine, both priests for many years, one working in London, the other in Tanzania. We had been at school together. Their experience had been the same. They confirmed independently of each other the influence on them, and indeed on a group of others at that time, of another priest. What had touched them? Holiness, of course, but then intelligence and a readiness to take hard questions seriously. Here was a way of life which commanded respect. It stirred in them something waiting to be discovered.

None of us wished to be mere replicas of those we admired, nor could they be said to have given us our vocation. Their example was rather the catalyst which helped us to recognise a gift we already had.

As people reflect more calmly on the legacy of Pope John Paul II, I wonder how his life and the dignity of his dying may help them discover gifts they never knew they had. He had an actor’s skills, but was never a manipulator. He was a man of deep faith who communicated profoundly with so many because they saw in him someone who was utterly genuine, who valued them and was true to himself. Who knows what dormant gifts they may find he has awoken in them? Perhaps they will recognise in his integrity and commitment a desire in themselves to be of service. If his legacy in our society were to revive a sense of vocation, what a legacy that would be.

Monsignor Roderick Strange is the Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome.