Translate career as a good job that is enjoyable and provides advancement and financial opportunities. No one would dispute the desirability of liking one s job and reaping its fruits. The problem lies in making a job the highest thing. A job, a career, is encompassed by something much higher and greater a vocation. Though a career should be compatible with one s vocation, it can never rightly exceed it.
Vocation is a reality about which the secular world goes blank.
Yet everyone has a vocation, a calling to holiness that is unique to the person, a gift that God calls each person to fulfill. On the one hand, the career touted by secular education and, unfortunately, by some brands of Catholic education, promotes self-assertion, which requires a continual jockeying for position and title. Achievement in these terms equates with material success and human respect. Preparation for this kind of success by self-assertion begins in high school, or earlier, when parents vie to get their children into the best schools and teachers of advanced placement courses teach to the AP test rather than integrating their students into the truth of a particular academic discipline. On the contrary, the Christian vocation is a call to self-giving, in which a career or job is a means, not an end.