Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704), the ‘king of preachers and the preacher of kings’ who gave many invited sermons at Louis xiv’s court, had faced obstacles on his way to religious vows. An early biography recounts the young Bourdaloue stealing away from home to join the Jesuit novitiate at Paris. Bourdaloue's father immediately set out to bring his headstrong heir back to Bourges. Nevertheless, the father soon became convinced that his son's rash actions were rooted in an authentic vocation, and he promptly relinquished him to the Jesuits.Footnote ¹ Whether or not this account approximates to the actual course of events, it reflects the preacher Bourdaloue's own subtle position on parental involvement in vocational choices.

This article will examine clerical teaching in mid- to late seventeenth-century France on the proper role of parents in vocational discernment and the choice of a state of life – the married, the religious or the clerical state. Persuasive efforts to promote grown children’s vocational liberty are evident both in literature consumed by devout elites and in texts destined for wider audiences. These texts were influenced by the social, cultural and legal conditions of early modern France; by longstanding canon law principles of free consent to vows; by increased theological attention to the concept of vocation; and by the rise of a theologically rigorist milieu in France. Insofar as the laws and the cultural habits of patriarchal elites were in tension with vocational freedom, these clerical writers sought to integrate parental oversight with children's liberty to follow God's call.

Much scholarship has focused on the legal and social conditions under which young men and women in early modern France made these choices, with special attention to coercion, freedom and the motivations of both parents and children. Entering into marriage or taking religious vows normally involved a wide array of family members and others.Footnote ² During the 1990s historians shifted from positing a strong binary opposition between parents and children to exploring their shared values.Footnote ³ Individuals’ vocational choices almost always involved familial property, status and emotions, and hence French elites generally favoured strong protections for parental authority.Footnote ⁴ With the help of a series of edicts and decisions, issued between 1556 and 1697 by the Crown and the parlements, parents could determine their children's future state not only through informal pressures and social expectations, but also through legal procedures.Footnote ⁵

These secular norms in France were at odds with Catholic doctrine and canon law, which had long opposed parental control over the vocations of marriage, religion and holy orders. In 1563 the Council of Trent strengthened medieval canons on vocational liberty, imposing anathema on those who forced a woman into a monastery, prevented a woman from entering a monastery without good reason or, similarly, violated free consent to marriage; and it anathematised the view that parental consent was necessary for a marriage.Footnote ⁶ The decisions on marriage were especially galling to the French Crown, with whose encouragement the council's French delegation had pushed to require parental consent for valid marriages.Footnote ⁷

Yet clerical views of family authority over vocational choices varied, and there was no strict secular-ecclesiastical divide. French Jesuits, for instance, were virtually alone among the French at Trent in opposing requirements of parental consent for marriage. The French bishops were not, however, mere hirelings of the Crown, as many Catholic reformers since the late Middle Ages had sought the requirement of parental consent.Footnote ⁸ French clergy found ways to impose stronger restrictions that served the mutual interests of parents, the Church and the State to curb the liberty of the young.Footnote ⁹ Church courts and many individual clergy usually cooperated in enforcing secular law, and later marriage edicts severely penalised priests who failed to do so.Footnote ¹⁰ Notwithstanding jurisdictional squabbles, the disobedience of refractory clergy and the complex relationship between law and practice, lay and ecclesiastical courts increasingly worked together over the course of the seventeenth century to bolster familial authority.Footnote ¹¹

Despite the scholarly attention paid to early modern French conflicts over parental consent and coercion of vocations, little has been written on the persuasive efforts of clerics who sought to dilute familial authority. Preachers and writers of devotional and catechetical works acted pastorally, rather than through the law, to promote the liberty of young men and women to choose a state. And yet, sharing the patriarchal values embedded in French society, these clerics sought to integrate those values with Catholic theology and church law. If familial will necessarily affected and even determined young people's choices, clerics who wrote and drew from these works maintained that individual freedom could fit with rightly understood parental involvement.

These vocational writers combined older traditions of theology and canon law with more recent developments in spiritual theology. Around the twelfth century, a consent-based model for marriage and religious vows became canonically normative, establishing the basis for later vocational teaching and practice. Popes and canonists of the high Middle Ages ultimately rejected parental will as having a role in the individual's consent to vows. They determined that the use of ‘force and fear’ to gain ostensible consent rendered marital vows null. Soon the same principles applied for monastic vows.Footnote ¹² The Council of Trent strengthened these laws and enhanced ecclesiastical penalties for violators. With these principles established in law, the seed was sown for spiritual writers to assume individual discernment and choice, with freedom from familial coercion.

The Church's laws of liberty were supplemented by grassroots developments in early modern spirituality. Foundational were the Spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), at the centre of which was the section on ‘election’ or ‘choice’, which included methods to discover God's calling to a state of life.Footnote ¹³ Later Jesuit writers further systematised Ignatius’ approach and summarised the three elements of vocational discernment as prayer, deliberation and consultation with one's spiritual director.Footnote ¹⁴ Ignatian discernment also helped to inspire the ‘brief method for knowing God's will’ of Francis de Sales (1567–1622), the Jesuit-educated bishop-in-exile of Geneva.Footnote ¹⁵ In his Treatise on the love of God (1616), he elaborated the same essentials of prayer, deliberation and consultation, followed by a prompt and confident choice. Both Ignatius and de Sales treated the choice of a state as an ordinary concern, as if all Catholics would have the liberty to choose freely.

Starting in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, clerical advice on the choice of a state of life proliferated in France, but this advice – rooted in canonical, Ignatian and Salesian principles – was coloured by the rigorist tendencies that had taken hold in French theology and pastoral practice.Footnote ¹⁶ Applying the label ‘rigorist’ to any given author or work is not always simple, and French rigorism is not coextensive with the Jansenist movement. Rigorism may be considered a spectrum, and French Catholic discourse began to be centred on the more rigorist side of this spectrum around the 1630s and 1640s. It is often best to ask whether an author or work is rigorist on a particular question of theology or pastoral care, such as views of grace, moral advice given in confession or withholding absolution from habitual sinners.Footnote ¹⁷

This latter approach enables us to speak specifically of ‘vocational rigorism’, the idea that choosing a state of life wrongly – that is, choosing a state of life other than that to which one was called by God – would entail both great suffering in this life and likely damnation in the next. Charles Gobinet (1614–90), for example, a doctor of the Sorbonne and long-time rector of the Collège du Plessis-Sorbonne, wrote in his Instruction for youth in Christian piety:

Louis Bourdaloue's preaching echoed this view:

Claude Joly (1610–78), the bishop of Agen, spoke in similar terms:

Vocational rigorism cut across the theological and institutional divides of mid- to late seventeenth-century French Catholicism. Joly – ‘rigorist, anti-regular, and friend of Port-Royal’ – was a disciple of Jean-Jacques Olier at St-Sulpice, and he famously suspended all priests’ right to hear confession in his diocese, with an eye toward promoting rigorist reforms in sacramental practice.Footnote ²¹ Bourdaloue, even if he sometimes spoke severely, was a loyal Jesuit who defended his Society against accusations of laxism and rejected Jansenist theologies of grace.Footnote ²² The votes of the secular priest Gobinet at the Sorbonne show him an enemy of Jansenism, and his spiritual doctrine drew (somewhat cautiously) on the gentle François de Sales.Footnote ²³ And yet all three of these authors were vocational rigorists, in that they held the right choice of a state to be a virtual prerequisite for salvation.

This rigorist sense of urgency about vocational choices explains the seventeenth-century proliferation of advice literature on how to discern God's call. Often, the advice was an elaborate variation on the Jesuit-inspired three consultations (consulting God in prayer, oneself in deliberation and one's spiritual director).Footnote ²⁴ Yet Jesuits were not alone in promoting these commonplaces, as is clear from the variety of authors cited here. This type of vocational discernment advice remained a constant presence in western Catholic spirituality at least through the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ A more exhaustive study might reveal shifts in these tropes over time and the specific relationships between these works and legal or political events. An initial look at relevant texts suggests a basic tendency for concepts first aimed at dévot elite readers of spiritual treatises later to appear in works directed toward a wider segment of the faithful, including catechisms and model sermon collections.Footnote ²⁶ Fundamentally, the theological, legal and social contexts of this literature were in place throughout the mid- to late seventeenth century. It is therefore fruitful to explore how a number of vocational advice texts from this period dealt with parental authority.

A basic contention of most clerical advice on choosing a state was that young people actually had choices. Bourdaloue argued that, although earthly fathers could determine a child's temporal affairs, only God's ‘sovereign paternity’ gave him authority ‘over the spirits and wills of men’:Footnote ²⁷

Vocational liberty was not thus an absolute good, but rather would serve as a means for young men and women to respond to God's call. If the right choice of a state of life was a moral imperative, then one must ‘hate father and mother’ (Luke xiv.26) and ‘obey God rather than men’ (Acts v.29).

Many others argued that parental authority simply did not extend to the choice of a state of life, despite the commandment to honour father and mother. The secular priest Jean Le Jau (1570–1631), in one of the earliest French-language treatises specifically on choosing a state of life, made puberty (fourteen for boys and twelve for girls) a turning point in children's liberty. Parents could nullify a prepubescent child's vows, but puberty marked the ‘age of discretion’ when young people became personally responsible for conforming to the divine will in all things, including the choice of a state.Footnote ²⁹ Jean Cordier (1597–1673), a Jesuit, argued that, by the age of fourteen or fifteen, young persons were ready to choose, because the remainder of their lives would be their own spiritual responsibility, not that of their parents.Footnote ³⁰ Defenders of vocational liberty further bolstered their claims by citing authorities from the Church's tradition. Le Jau referred to councils (such as the tenth synod of Toledo in 656), patristic writers (such as Ambrose, Chrysostom and Augustine), scholastics (such as Aquinas and Antoninus of Florence) and even Roman civil law.Footnote ³¹ The Jesuit writer Thomas Le Blanc (1599–1669) highlighted the examples of saints from different epochs who disobeyed their parents in entering religious life.Footnote ³² Some works reminded parents of the excommunication imposed by Trent in cases of vocational coercion.Footnote ³³ Since parental authority seemed as old as humanity, successfully undermining it demanded arguments from yet stronger authorities.

Many of these clerics further challenged parental control by associating it with worldly motivations, especially of greed. Cordier and Bourdaloue compared forcing a young woman into religion to ritual human sacrifice.Footnote ³⁴ Ecclesiastical benefice-seeking was especially highlighted as a common form of avarice. Post-Tridentine reformers sought to link the reception of tonsure more clearly with real intentions of priestly ordination. Reforms, however, took effect unevenly in France over a long period of time, and so persuasion was necessary, sometimes through parish-level catechesis.Footnote ³⁵ The catechism for Luçon and La Rochelle stated that to put a child in orders ‘under the hope of some benefice’ and ‘to serve one's avarice and ambition’ was ‘a very great sin that attracted the curse of God on parents and children’.Footnote ³⁶ In the catechism for Agen, Bishop Joly excoriated parents who ‘force their children into the Church, even though they be unworthy of it, or only to have more wealth, or to keep some benefice in the family’: ‘They are the cause of the damnation of their children, and of the sins that they commit in that state, and they are damned with them … They will answer before God concerning the scandal that their children have given to the whole Church.’Footnote ³⁷ The Meaux catechism produced under the renowned pulpit orator Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) said that the chief condition for receiving tonsure was ‘to be called by God’, explicitly opposing parental benefice-seeking to authentic vocations.Footnote ³⁸ Such catechisms served as bases for catechesis even of rural laity in France, and so the influence of vocational theology extends here far beyond elite dévot circles.Footnote ³⁹ Opposing vocation to avarice, these texts demonstrate the interconnectedness of institutional reform, spiritual theology and the catechesis of the laity.

Yet coercion did not stem only from the love of money, since natural human affection might also be prioritised over God's call. Rather than dismissing emotional rhetoric as a mask for financial strategy, clerical advocates of liberty acknowledged the affective motives for parental pressure.Footnote ⁴⁰ Some preachers cited favouritism among the children.Footnote ⁴¹ Others noted parents’ excessive attachment to their children's presence, which led especially to fear of a child's strict cloistering or faraway missions. Le Jau responded to this fear with a quotation from an early monastic Father, John Climacus: ‘It is better to sadden one's parents than to sadden our Lord Jesus.’Footnote ⁴² Cordier suggested that parents who saw religious vows as a sorrowful separation should consider how they might respond to a child's accepting a faraway position at the royal court.Footnote ⁴³ Quoting Jerome, Le Blanc advised children faced with their parents’ ‘pleadings’ and ‘tears’ that ‘cruelty, in this case, is the only true piety’.Footnote ⁴⁴ If parents’ authentic natural affection might undermine their children's supernatural good, true parental and filial love demanded putting divine love first.

Despite these principles of freedom from parental control, very few writers advocated excluding parents altogether. In a treatise published in 1667, however, Emanuel de La Croix took just such an extreme approach:

La Croix's position is one possible logical conclusion of the principles of liberty. And yet on the question of parental influence, his view is not representative of vocational advice in seventeenth-century France.

Most advice sought to preserve parental involvement, asking parents and children to share responsibility for vocational choices. Above all, children were to listen, even if they need not always obey. Gobinet thought that parents’ wishes could help spark the discernment process: ‘If your parents wish that you be an ecclesiastic or a religious, examine first whether God calls you to one of these states.’Footnote ⁴⁶ A young person who discerned no such calling could decline and ‘make this resistance with all the respect that you owe to them, by remonstrating modestly with them, showing your inability to do what they desire, the reasons you have, and above all the repugnance you have toward the state to which they are carrying you’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Gobinet applied the same principle when a young person followed a religious or clerical calling against parental wishes. By contrast, once a young person chose to remain in the lay state, he wrote that parental wishes should normally be obeyed in choosing among lay professions and conditions.Footnote ⁴⁸ All vocational choices were to be made with consideration of parental counsel and with the utmost filial respect, even if disobedience became necessary.

Bourdaloue's position was similar. Despite having vehemently denied parental authority over vocations, he commanded young persons to consult their parents:

This might leave young men and women struggling to discern whether their parents were too worldly to be obeyed or whether their own reasoning should trump that of their parents. Bourdaloue's exhortation to parents was similarly ambivalent:

Good Christian parents were to ‘intervene in this choice, to participate in it, to have in it a right of direction and of supervision’.Footnote ⁵¹ Whether coercive parents forced a bad choice or indifferent parents neglected to prevent a bad choice, the temporal and spiritual consequences would be dire. Bourdaloue thus laid a heavy moral burden on both parents and children, and he was not confident that many bore their burdens well.

Jean Cordier's advice was similar but markedly more hopeful. Without denying children's liberty, he advocated the combined efforts of parents and children, because young persons tended to be driven by inclination and parents tended to be driven by reason:

If parents and children in seventeenth-century France typically co-operated in pursuing worldly ends in their choices of state, Cordier asked that they co-operate in pursuing God's purposes instead. The vision of Cordier, Bourdaloue, Gobinet and others was thus of devout families together seeking spiritual goods.

Such parental co-operation in children's vocational choices was not merely a vain hope; it was a practical necessity. Few young persons, even if they wished, could slip away to marry or to enter religion, much less successfully defy parental wishes in the long term. Without parental support, there were formidable legal and financial obstacles to committing to any state of life – married, religious or clerical. For this reason, these clerics still insisted on parents’ responsibility to provide for their children's placement. According to Cordier, this provision should occur after the child had discerned God's plan for a right choice of state:

This principle demanded that the age of engaging in a profession match the age of vocational discernment, and so Cordier proposed an education that would delay apprenticeships and other professional endeavours until age twelve to fifteen. After a boy made a choice of state and even of a worldly profession, parents would facilitate the finances and logistics.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, Cordier hoped to preserve a space for vocational discernment, while acknowledging the need for parents to provide for their children's future.

Diocesan catechisms likewise often emphasised parents’ duty to establish children professionally, but here we see less attempt to reconcile it with vocational liberty. Joly's catechism for Agen and the Besançon catechism both attended to vocational questions, and both left unclear how parents’ and children’s roles fitted together. Parents were to have their children take up a fitting trade or profession, but, surprisingly, that meant that parents were to engage in vocational discernment on their children's behalf: ‘Q. What should fathers and mothers do before engaging their children in a profession in life? A. They should pray and consult God, to know whether their children are called there and make known to them the obligations of their state.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Joly's advice to young people on vocational matters was here simply redirected to their parents. His catechism was similarly ambiguous on discerning a clerical calling. He first mandated that the candidate himself deliberate and consult with his confessor to see whether he is ‘called to the ecclesiastical state’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Then, on the next page, he instructed parents:

Although some of the children's liberties are here preserved, parents are the main actors who place, examine, pray, consult confessors, engage and present to the bishop.

There is a subtle persuasive method in leaving unresolved this tension between vocational liberty and parental involvement. Parents’ arrangement of financial and logistical matters for a vocation – whether marriage, religion or ordination – remained necessary in early modern France. If parents always dealt with the practical questions concerning entry into a state of life, Joly and others hoped that parents would simultaneously consider the spiritual questions of vocation, applying principles of right discernment together with their children. This was an attempt to integrate long-standing practice with more recently developed methods of discernment.

This literature advocating vocational liberty was ultimately a fruit of early modern Catholic reform. It was based largely on canon legal and theological principles of children's freedom to choose a state of life, and these principles were enlarged and modified in the rigorist milieu of mid-to late seventeenth-century France. In the eyes of these clerical writers, reform efforts must encompass all members of the Church, which they thought only possible if laity, clergy and religious alike had embraced the states to which God had called them. Thus, to understand fully this advocacy for children's liberté, it must be contextualised as part of a holistic and peculiarly Catholic vocational world view and indeed of a Catholic modernity.

Moreover, far from expressing disembodied ideals, pastoral literature on parental coercion developed from the concrete conditions of seventeenth-century France. In some ways, the legal and cultural forces arrayed against children's liberty pushed opponents of coercion towards a more vociferous opposition, not so much in law as in a battle of pastoral words. And yet these writers were men of their own place and time who expected and usually valued parents’ involvement in their children's vocational choices. So, while insisting on individuals’ free vocational choice, many writers also sought to bring parents into the process of right vocational discernment. Parents would be a help, rather than a hindrance if they cooperated in following right principles. It was for these reasons that vocational advice from Gobinet, Bourdaloue, Joly and Cordier addressed parents directly, rather than only addressing the young people themselves. And these texts were no dead letter. They were read by dévot elites at home, heard in many pulpits as model sermons were imitated, learned in catechism classes and used as the basis of spiritual direction and confessional practice.Footnote ⁵⁸

All that said, many parents would remain hostile or indifferent to this holistic vocational world view. And so Cordier, who was so keen on parent-child cooperation, could also advise this: ‘If the parents are neither of a humour nor of a degree of virtue to enjoy God's designs; if one knows that they will employ all their power to impede it, one can … refrain from giving them notice until after the thing is done. Such has been the practice of the saints.’Footnote ⁵⁹