is there Catholic monks, and if so can someone help me find a monk order in southern ohio cause i feel a calling to live my life completely to God I’m not entirely sure yet cause idk if i want to get married or not i’d have to think it over more
I’ve noticed, from your “Religion” designation, that it seems you are in the process of converting to Catholicism.
I likewise was raised outside the Catholic Church, and I likewise felt an attraction to monastic life while in the process of converting. In my case, this attraction continued and strengthened after my reception into the Church, and notwithstanding many twists and turns it has continued to this day, seven years later, though I am still hesitant to take the next step and contact a monastery for a variety of reasons.
Anyway, my main piece of advice would be to take your time in your discernment process, especially since you are such a new convert, not even fully received into the Church yet.
It is natural and normal to feel an attraction towards the sacred at this time. A call to prayer, to peace, to holiness, to wholehearted devotion to Christ. In the monastery these things are more visible than perhaps in any other part of the Church. The monastery is the contemplative heart of the Church, the vision on earth of the life of Heaven, the spiritual center of the world if I may make such a bold original statement, or a gathering around the center, anyway. But relatively few people are actually called to live there, devoted to contemplation in the freedom of the evangelical councils. It is a beautiful vocation, but a hard one (naturally speaking), and often a very prosaic one. It was probably never God’s intention for it to be the vocation of the majority of Catholics.
Most people will be called to some form of active vocation, whether as a married or single layperson, a member of an active religious order (or an order which considers itself fully active and fully contemplative, which in my opinion is just a prayerful way of looking at the active vocation), or an active priest. The attraction you feel towards monastic life may actually be rooted in the universal call to holiness, and your true vocation may be to bring that holiness out into the world, to order temporal or ecclesial affairs according to God’s design, spreading the Gospel in word or deed, while keeping a sort of little monastery in your heart. Or you may indeed be called to the monastic life. Or even to something in between, such as being a Benedictine or Cistercian oblate.
My own initial discernment process has probably been too extended, through my own fault. I don’t hold myself out as a role model in this. Nevertheless, giving yourself time to grow in your new Catholic faith before attempting to discern a religious vocation may be prudent. Don’t reject the feeling of a call, but direct it for now towards the process of becoming Catholic and growing in your understanding and living of that faith. When a few years have passed since you became Catholic (not necessarily as many as seven!), that will be the time to start seriously considering contacting and visiting monasteries, if you still feel called to that way of life.
thank you edit:I’ll keep the Trappists in kentucky in mind cause i got a good feeling about them