A beautiful vocation story from Denver:
It was April 6, 2012—Good Friday—and 26-year-old Andrea Polito was doing what many Catholics do on that sacred day: She was praying at the foot of the cross. The pediatric oncology nurse told Denver Catholic that she had an experience in prayer she can only describe as a “profound moment of grace.” “I was looking at Mary Magdalene,” she recounted, “and I asked the Lord, ‘Why, of all the people that you healed in your ministry, is she the one who gets to be here?’” “And he just really simply said,” she recalled, “‘because she gave up everything and followed me.’ “And I just kind of instinctually said in that moment, ‘That’s where I want to live, that’s where I want to be.’ And he said, ‘Well, come and follow me.’” Polito said the prayer surprised her: “I was like, oh no, I think I just kind of told Jesus I was going to be a nun, and I kind of freaked out.” But as she prayed more over the next weeks and months, she realized that what God was asking of her wasn’t to leave the world as a religious vocation would require: “I didn’t feel called to leave the world. I felt really convicted of my work, I felt really convicted of a Catholic presence in the medical field, which is such a secular place…. I didn’t feel peace about going and leaving all of that.” Through conversations with a friend, Father John Nepil, who would later become her spiritual director, Polito began to consider the vocation of a lay consecrated virgin.
And today we celebrate...