Statistics leave no doubt that the number of women religious has dropped sharply over the last 50 years, but there is an ongoing debate over the reasons for the decline.Continue for the rest and see what you think.
The question surfaced recently when L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, asked one priest to review another priest's book about the phenomenon.
Italian Claretian Father Angelo Pardilla, author of "Religious Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," said the principal cause for the decline was that many religious misunderstood the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and lost a sense of their identity.
He cited as proof the fact that the number of vowed religious -- both men and women -- has dropped sharply since Vatican II, except in the contemplative orders that still wear habits and live with a regimented community life.
But Father Giancarlo Rocca, a scholar of the history of religious orders, questioned Father Pardilla's thesis in the review he wrote for the Vatican newspaper.
Father Rocca agreed with Father Pardilla that factors contributing to the decline include materialism, secularism, the anti-authority movement of the late 1960s and declining family size.
But he said a misreading of the Second Vatican Council could not be the prime culprit, because in many places the numbers began to drop in the 1930s, long before the council opened in 1962.
For Father Rocca, the key is the emancipation of women.
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The growing number of vowed religious women in Africa seems to undermine Father Giancarlo Rocca's claim that the decline of their numbers here in the older parts of Christendom is due to "emancipation of women." Have women in Africa been growing more or less emancipated in the past 40 or 50 years? More, I would think.
Also, the brief article at the link provided did not draw a distinction between a decline in the number of women taking vows and the departure of vowed religious women who were excused from their vows. Emancipation of women seems to me to be a better explanation of the former than the latter. Had the distinction been drawn, the article might have better illustrated what happened in the period beginning in the 1930s that Fr. Rocca points to and what happened in the 1960s and 70s.
Nor does Fr. Rocca's speculation address the crash in the number of women in teaching orders in the U.S.A. At the parochial school I attended as a child, the school went from fully and exclusively staffed by nuns to all lay teachers in just a few years -- the changeover was that swift.
I doubt that there's one circumstance alone that can explain the drop in the number of vowed women religious in the U.S.A. over the past century. Blaming the politics of Women's Lib is not new and Vatican II cannot be so easily excused from blame.
If you look at orthodoxy vs. vocation the correlation is striking.
Those communities of nuns who wear the habit and are Jesus-focused, with much contemplative prayer and adoration are thriving, with an average age in the mid 30's. Those nuns who don't wear the habit and are "social justice" focused are dying out with the average age in the 60's and not a young girl to be found.
The same holds true of diosesan priestly vocations and orthodox vs. heterodox dioceses.
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