Here is why so few men and women
are becoming members of religious orders today. They have lost the world
required for their survival. They are like fish whose pond has been drained.
As a child I lived in a Catholic
world in Decatur, Illinois. My parish was my world. It was made sacred by
priests and sisters and a cycle of religious rituals centered on the church. It
was easy for me to see myself growing up to become a leader in that world. I
recall calculating that being a priest would require hearing confessions on
Saturday afternoon, which would rule out listening to Notre Dame football
games, but that was a sacrifice that would have to be made. It would be worth
it.
I was never a great fan of
football, but listening to Notre Dame games was part of my Catholic world.
Notre Dame was our fortress against the secular intellectual world.
We were reinforced in our world by
constant reminders of the important people who were Catholic: Bing Crosby,
Bishop Sheen, Danny Thomas. The outside world recognized our world.
In Decatur, we were a minority. In
contrast to Springfield, where my parents grew up and where we regularly
visited relatives, Decatur was hostile territory for Catholics. None of the
important people in Decatur were Catholic. The only time we Catholics were
featured in the newspaper was when our school, St. James, outsold the entire
rest of the city in World War II war bonds.
My father remarked once that he did
not take his faith seriously until he and my mother moved to Decatur. In his
eyes, no Catholic in Decatur could be taken seriously as a leader. We were set
apart.
Admittedly, that was my perception.
In actual fact, there probably were Catholics in important roles in the town.
But in my mind, we were the victims of segregation and prejudice, and those
things reinforced our identity.
Fast forward to present-day Quincy,
Illinois. We have here in Quincy a parish, St. Rose, that is officially a
"Latin" parish--all the liturgies are conducted in Latin, Latin as it
was used before the Second Vatican Council. There are students at Quincy
University who practice a spirituality appropriate to that Latin environment:
Benediction, recitation of the rosary before Mass, women wearing a head scarf
during Mass. At least some of the younger priests that I see in our diocese
seem to be cooperating in re-creating that world. I respect and admire such
people. But I think they are fighting a losing battle. Their problem is that
the world that they are trying to re-create is no longer a viable world for
most Catholics.
The boundaries are too porous.
"How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?"
was a song made popular after World War I. You can hold children in a segregated
world through grade school, and maybe even through high school, but when they
hit college, off they go. The world opens up--the world in the sense of new
possibilities. As someone who has spent his life teaching in a Catholic
college, I see the situation. Over the years Quincy University has sent young
men and women out into society to become genuine leaders, both secular and
religious, but they are not the kind of leaders that the world of my childhood
would have prepared. To be a leader in the worlds most people live in today,
you cannot limit yourself to the world of segregated Catholicism.
Ecumenism did us in, as did success
in politics (John Kennedy) and economics.
So what do we do? We need leaders
in the Church, both men and women. Leaders have to live in the world that the
rest of the community lives in. We have to create a world that will allow all
of us to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the midst of unlimited information,
profitable ways of making money, dreams of happy marriages and families, and
philosophical and theological challenges. Within that world, we must be able to
motivate some of us to become leaders.
We need priests, but not
clericalism. Priests are people who lead us in knowing God and worshipping God.
Clerics are people who survive by being a special caste supported by
religiously devoted people.
We need women religious leaders,
not the kind of "nuns" that used to enliven our communities. Women
leaders today cannot be assumed to be subservient to men. They must have the
freedom to initiate things. They must be seen as equal to men in finding ways
to share faith effectively with others.
Above all, we need to create a
world where religious leaders can flourish, but a world that is not set in
opposition to the rest of the world. As followers of Jesus, we will need to
challenge the rest of the world at times, but we cannot build our identities on
challenge.
Our "vocation
recruitment" efforts have been too limited to seeking out individuals to
join us. We need to create cultures of faith and worship where the need for
leadership will be obvious and rewarded. Only then will our "vocation
problem" approach a solution. We may never have enough leaders. The
harvest will always be abundant and the laborers few. But we can do better than
we are doing right now.
