Vocations Sunday 2022: Domina Pastor Est

Women in the church often take on the role of shepherds — they are among the people, tending to their needs, in a position that takes courage, kindness, presence, vision, and leadership. Each year on the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, which is also Good Shepherd Sunday, we hear Jesus refer to himself as a shepherd. In the culture in which Jesus was immersed, shepherds were often young women. Women were, and are, shepherds. Women today can be, and are, priests. Domina pastor est (She is a pastor/She is a shepherd).

On May 8th, the Women’s Ordination Conference joined local DC supporters (and WHIMM) for a Vocations Sunday + Mother’s Day mass and witness, in solidarity with gatherings around the US and online.

Led by three women priests, the community gathered outdoors for an inclusive, spirit-filled service, affirming: Domina Pastor Est! We lifted up the many ways women and non-binary people often take on the symbolic role of shepherds as those who are closest to the people, tending and ministering to their needs, and guiding the church with courage, kindness, and leadership.

Following the service, we marched our way to the Vatican embassy where we read the Vocations Sunday prayer together and sang out a litany of women saints and leaders.

Our witnesses on May 8 served as an important reminder that women, and people of all genders, willingly answer the call to priesthood to care for God’s people in all the messiness and meaning it entails.

Tweet for ordination justice:

In the Ancient Near East, shepherds were, in many cases, the girls in the family, since men did not do such “menial” work. There are prominent Biblical examples of this – both Zipporah (Moses’ wife) and Rachel (Jacob’s wife) are named as shepherds, and they meet their husbands at the wells where they water their flocks. Girls, who began this work at the age of eight or ten, would take the flocks into the field each day and bring them back home at night. When Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd, he would have known that his listeners would not simply have thought of middle-aged or older men when he used the title – they would have imagined the young girls they had seen in fields, tending the animals diligently and in practical, messy ways.

More about female shepherds in the Ancient Near East:

The Way of a Shepherd by Beulah Wood: “Possibly half the shepherds in Jesus’ day were women, and probably half the shepherds of the world today, too, are women. I am one of them.”

Women From the Book: Life as a Shepherdess: “Tending the family herd was reserved primarily for girls, and they continued this work until married at age fifteen or sixteen.”

Shepherds in the Field: “In reality in the Middle East, almost all the shepherding is done by very young children, most of them girls. In the Middle Eastern culture, the men do very little of the menial work.”

Dave Adamson: “On a trip to the Holy Land, I had the chance to meet a shepherd herding her sheep. Yes, I said “her”, because in the Middle East, shepherds are culturally most often the young girls of the family—unless there are no daughters, in which case it falls to the youngest son (like David). As I approached the flock—and especially the lamb in this image—the smell was overpowering, even from a distance. In the first century, this smell marked a shepherd as an outcast.”

Women, and people of all genders, willingly answer the call to priesthood to care for God’s people in all the messiness and meaning it entails. Let’s continue pray for vocations to a renewed priesthood for all genders on Vocations Sunday and every day.