I’m very sorry. I did not mean to put your post under the microscope. I realize that most posters on this forum are not vocation directors. Most are not religious or diocesan clergy. Even diocesan clergy do not understand male religious life, by their own admission. They don’t understand it, because the canons that govern religious life are not part of the program of studies in diocesan seminaries nor is Christian Spiritual Theology. Both are studied only in religious houses of formation for men.
That being said, what often happens on the vocation thread is that people will try to help and make suggestions that are untenable. One of the suggestions that is often made to men who cannot be priests for some reason or another is to become a deacon or a brother. I believe that it happens because many people believe that the diaconate and the male religious life are alternatives to the priesthood. How many lay people or diocesan priests and deacons know the Church’s doctrines on the consecrated life? For that matter, the Church’s doctrine on the diaconate is fairly new to the Latin Church. It goes back to the Apostles, but it was shelved for many centuries in the west.
My attempt to to help the OP and others who read the thread to understand that the call to become a religious is unique and only for a select group of men who through no special merit of their own have been called to this way of life. They do not enter this way of life as an alternative, but as the only possible way to save their souls. One of the things that one has to vow, the night before making first vows, is that you are entering religious life because your faith tells you that this is the only way to save your soul. You’re not entering this way of life because it’s an alternative or because you’re being forced to do so by circumstances. You understand that there are many ways to get to heaven, but this is the only way for you. That’s how serious the Church takes the profession of religious vows.
Moving along to another point, the OP is correct in saying that in most religious communities of friars and monks, you may only be ordained if Christ calls you through the superior. For those of us who are monks and friars, that’s not a big deal. We don’t enter our respective orders to be priests. We enter to be religious. The priesthood is a vocation within a vocation.
There is one other difference. There are religious communities that are clerical communities: Dominicans, Jesuits, Fathers of Mercy, Salesians, Passionists, O"Carm and others. In these communities, it is understood that the man who enters is going to be ordained after he makes perpetual profession of vows. They all have Lay Brothers. A lay brother is different from a non-clerical brother in a monastery or a friary. They make the same vows, but their relationship to the community is different. The Lay Brother’s vocation is to make things run so that the ordained can take care of the needs of the Church outside of the religious house. The non-clerical brother in a monastery or friary is part of the ministry be it contemplation or service to the local Church.
Again, I regret that if my post sounded as if I were taking your post and placing it under the microscope. That was not my intention.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
Thank you.