"Vad vi kallar kall" : En intervjustudie om kallelsen till prästämbetet

The aim of this essay is to present and analyse six calling narratives that has been collected from six different priests. Three of them belong to the Roman Catholic Church and three of them belong to the Church of Sweden. I have chosen to have priests from two different churches because I also want to investigate if their calling narratives can be connected to the church they belong to. To be ordained in any of these two churches one´s calling must be acknowledged by the Church involved. In the Church of Sweden, they look at the calling (or vocation) as something with two dimensions, the inner calling and the outer calling. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Church looks at the calling as one dimensional. The calling narratives has been collected by interviews with each priest. The interviews have been semi-structured, with the intention that the priests should have been able to talk freely about what they have found important. The main questions, that all the priests got, was “Why did you choose to become a priest?”, “How did you assure yourself that the calling was from God?” and lastly “What has the calling meant in your role as a priest?”. The essays questions are what the priests think has been crucial for their journeys to become priests, and also if there is possible to see any difference between how the priests from the Roman Catholic Church assured themselves that the calling was from God compared to how the priests from the Church of Sweden assured themselves that the calling was from God. The answer to the first question is that I noticed two different kinds of narratives, one where the calling narrative was described as a process and one where it was affected by one specific experience. The answer to the second question is that I saw a pattern where all the priests from the Church of Sweden described that confirmation from other people, about their adequacy for the priest role, had been crucial to them, while none of the priests from the Roman Catholic Church brought that up.