This concise work examines the case for a Catholic culture of vocational diversity dating not merely from the post-Vatican era of the 1960s, but as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From that more distant period, and in France in particular, Christopher Lane considers abundant evidence for Catholic ‘vocations’ understood not only as pertaining to priesthood and religious life, but as including a call for every baptised person, whether it was to marriage, or to some form of celibate life. Lane suggests that Max Weber was quite wrong in celebrating lay vocations as exclusively Protestant.

The author's sources include the Council of Trent (1545–63) and its insistence on an individual's vocational freedom of choice among three options (layperson, most likely married; priest; member of a religious order). Trent did not accept parental consent as necessary for any of these choices. Turning to the era after Trent, Lane's sources are mostly clergy and male members of religious orders, such as Bishop Jean-Pierre Camus (1584–1652), an extraordinarily prolific author of some 250 books, among them pious novels that might feature the courage of those who ‘left the world’ to enter religious life; the preaching and other works of Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704); the diocesan priest Charles Gobinet (1614–90), whose works were reprinted into the nineteenth century; and the writings of the Jesuit Etienne Binet (1569–1639), and several other members of the Society of Jesus. But some women are also prominent among Lane's sources, such as Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661), abbess of Port-Royal, a centre of Jansenist sympathies, and Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot de Chantal (1572–1641), who founded the Visitation order, with some help from Francis de Sales (1567–1622), who, though not French, was a Francophone bishop resident in neighbouring Savoy. De Sales dealt with vocational discernment in his writings, at some length in his Treatise on the love of God, and in his bestselling Introduction to the devout life, where he insisted on marriage as no less a ‘devout’ state of life than that of other vocations.

All of these voices insisted on the reality of a call, in God's providence, of every Catholic, to a particular state of life. And thus every young Catholic, male or female, was viewed as having an obligation to discern what that vocation was, and to act upon the fruit of a good discernment. Not only for Jansenists, but even for some Jesuits, such as Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704), there was an urgency that such discernment be made, and be made with much care, lest a mistaken, even disastrous choice be made. Due in large part to the founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), and his Spiritual Exercises, Jesuits were seen by many as masters of discernment, and as skilful spiritual directors, not because they would tell directees what choices to make, but because they sought to help them to pay attention to God's will, and to obey it, even if it meant contradicting parental (this usually meant patriarchal) efforts to make vocational choices for them. Such choices, when made for offspring, may have had little to do with God's will and much more to do with family strategies for financial and other advancement in this world. Lane points out the tension between canon law and civil law in France: canon (church) law insisted on the freedom of the individual to choose a vocation, while civil law required parental consent. For some writers of works on vocational discernment, disobedience to parents regarding a vocational choice could be not only allowable but even saintly.

A ‘good’ discernment was thought to be a prayerful one, one aided by a prudent spiritual director; it was a discernment free of worldly motivations such as a greedy desire for a large benefice that might be available to a priest, or ambition for the social advantages of marrying a certain person, or of entering a prestigious, upper-class convent. God's will was what mattered; Ignatius of Loyola had insisted on vocational discernment through a kind of humble ‘indifference’ to everything but God's call, whatever it might be. Those that did not engage in a ‘good’ discernment could make a vocational mistake, a mistake that could have dire consequences, especially for someone who became a priest without such a vocation. In an era when fear of hell was taken very seriously, the unhappy results of a bad discernment were thought to be potentially worse and longer lasting than misery merely in this world.

In his conclusion, Lane argues persuasively that the approach to vocations he has demonstrated shows a kind of modernity in the Catholic Church that was not belated or later than that found among Protestants or other groups. The Catholic individualism he has documented challenges simplistic narratives that see Catholicism as always behind the times, and as stronger on conformity to institutional norms than on any individual freedom. Lane's work could be even more significant if it were expanded to see if other Catholic countries in the early modern era were similar to France in their approaches to vocational choices.