---
title: "What does the 'universal call to holiness' mean?"
url: "https://seekabove.com/answers/what-is-the-call-to-holiness"
description: "The “universal call to holiness” is the Church’s teaching that every baptized person — not just clergy or vowed religious — is invited to the fullness of the Christian life, which is the perfection o…"
published: "2026-06-05"
updated: "2026-06-05"
category: "Virtue and Holiness"
scripture: ["Matthew 5:48", "1 Thessalonians 4:7", "Romans 8:29", "John 15:5", "Colossians 3:14"]
catechism: "CCC 2013–2014"
---

# What does the 'universal call to holiness' mean?

## Short answer

The "universal call to holiness" is the Church's teaching that every baptized
person — not just clergy or vowed religious — is invited to the fullness of the
Christian life, which is the perfection of love. It is one shared destination,
holiness, reached along as many different paths as there are people.

## Full explanation

The phrase has two key words, and both carry weight. **Universal** means it
leaves no one out: this call goes to everyone in the Church, whatever their
state of life, work, or background. **Holiness** means becoming perfect in
charity — letting love of God and neighbour grow until it shapes the whole
person. Put together, the teaching says that the highest goal of the Christian
life is meant for absolutely everybody.

This idea received fresh emphasis at the Second Vatican Council, especially in
its document *Lumen Gentium*. For centuries many people had quietly assumed a
two-tier system: a higher, "really holy" track for monks and nuns and priests,
and a lower, ordinary track for everyone else. The Council insisted that this is
a misreading. There is one calling, and it is addressed to the married and the
single, the labourer and the professor, the young and the old alike. Picture a
single invitation to one destination, but with many routes leading there —
mountain trails, coastal roads, city streets. The destination is identical for
all; the road each person travels is their own life, with its particular duties
and loves.

So holiness is not measured by how "religious" your circumstances look, but by
how completely love takes over the circumstances you actually have. The point is
not to copy a monk's schedule if you are a parent, or a parent's life if you are
a monk, but to let charity perfect *your* vocation. A useful image is an
apprentice in a master craftsman's workshop. The apprentice doesn't become
skilled by reading about the trade or by leaving the workshop, but by working at
the bench day after day, hands guided by the master, until the master's skill
becomes the apprentice's own. Holiness grows the same way: by staying close to
Christ through prayer, the sacraments, and daily faithful love, until his way of
loving slowly becomes ours.

It is worth stressing that this is not a heroic demand we meet by sheer effort.
The same teaching makes clear that holiness is the fruit of grace — God's life
in us — to which we respond and cooperate. We cannot do it on our own, and we
are never asked to. Cut off from Christ, the tradition says, we can produce
nothing of lasting worth; joined to him, ordinary people in ordinary lives become
saints. The universal call to holiness, then, is both a high calling and a deeply
hopeful one: the goal is the greatest thing imaginable, and the power to reach it
is given, not demanded of our own resources.

## Why this matters

This teaching reshapes how a person sees their own life. It means your job, your
family, your daily routine are not obstacles to holiness or a lesser substitute
for it — they are the very arena where you are meant to become a saint. It rules
out both pride (as if some vocations were spiritually superior) and resignation
(as if holiness were beyond ordinary people). Everyone is aimed at the summit,
and everyone's own path leads there.

## Common misunderstanding

Some hear "universal call to holiness" and think it flattens all vocations into
sameness, as if the Council were saying everyone should live more or less the
same way. It says the opposite. The *call* is universal, but the *paths* are
gloriously varied — marriage, single life, religious life, priesthood, each with
its own shape. Unity of destination does not mean uniformity of route; the whole
point is that holiness is reached through the distinctive life each person has
actually been given.

## Scripture connections

- **Matthew 5:48** — Jesus addresses the call to be "perfect" to all his
  hearers, not a select few.
- **1 Thessalonians 4:7** — God calls us "not to impurity but to holiness,"
  naming holiness as the purpose of the Christian calling.
- **Romans 8:29** — God's plan is to conform believers "to the image of his
  Son," describing the goal of holiness.
- **John 15:5** — "apart from me you can do nothing," grounding holiness in
  staying united to Christ rather than self-effort.
- **Colossians 3:14** — over every other virtue, "put on love," which "binds
  everything together," echoing holiness as the perfection of charity.

## Church teaching references

- CCC 2013, 2014
- The Second Vatican Council's *Lumen Gentium* (ch. 5) is the touchstone text: it
  teaches that all the faithful, whatever their condition, are called to the
  fullness of Christian life and the perfection of charity.

## Reflection question

What would it change about your week if you truly believed that the road to
sainthood runs straight through your present vocation rather than around it?