Catholic Nuns Becoming "None" and Priests Joining them

[lpetrich]

Catholic nuns and monks decline

The Vatican has reported a further dramatic fall in the number of Roman Catholic monks and nuns worldwide.

Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006.

During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, the number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by a quarter.

That was 1978-2005, almost 27 years; this implies an average drop of 1% per year.

There is an exception to the trend: Polish priests fill European gaps (2006)

While much of Europe is suffering from a shortage of priests, Poland is the only country in the continent where the number of aspirants is rising.

About a quarter of all young men training to become Roman Catholic priests in Europe are Polish.

And Polish priests are increasingly in demand to plug the gaps in the rest of the continent.

And from 2004, Pope warns of US priest shortage

Pope John Paul II has warned that the increasing difficulty of recruiting men to join the Catholic priesthood in the US represents a "stark challenge".

The Pontiff said the problem must be urgently addressed and suggested one day each year should be dedicated to praying for vocations.

Praying for men to want to become priests? Good luck with that, with all the priest sex scandals; nothing fails like prayer.

In a report earlier this year, the Vatican said the total number of priests had fallen sharply in North America and Europe between 1961 and 2001.

In North America, the number dropped from 71,725 to 57,988 at a time when the population was growing.

I've even found an article about some priests trying to prove that they are ordinary men: Calendar aims to recruit priests

Twelve Catholic priests have swapped their pulpits for favourite pastimes in a calendar designed to try to recruit young men to the priesthood.

The priests, from the Diocese of Leeds, are pictured in an array of activities, including reading celebrity magazines, watching baseball and DIY.

But will they also demonstrate an interest in women? :devil2:

I was once provoked to research this question upon learning that a certain female relative of mine had gotten a teaching job at a Catholic school. She cited as Catholic "credentials" that her father was raised a Catholic, and that her father had a cousin who had been a bishop. However, she is nonreligious and mostly ignorant of Catholicism, and another relative has tried to help her out by sending her a copy of an article on Catholicism.

This made me wonder why that school's administrators seemed so desperate -- where are all the nuns that Catholic schools have long been known for? I found many articles about this question online, though most are about American nuns. I did find a short blurb about Italian nuns going into decline ("The combination of declining numbers, aging membership and growing ethnic diversity is old news for Italian congregations of women religious."), so the same thing may also be happening in much of Europe.

In particular, the February 21, 1994 LA times article Number of Nuns on Brink of Precipitous Drop describes:

... The Times found that only 3% were 40 or younger; 37% were older than 70 and 12% were more than 80. The median age for nuns in the survey was 65.

"American Catholics have no idea how very soon there will be no nuns," said Sister Patricia Wittberg ...

Sister Eleace King ... concurred, "It tells me that the majority of religious congregations of women in this country will not survive. Most are dying," ...

In 1993--the latest year for which statistics are available--there were 94,022 nuns in the United States, compared to a peak of 181,421 in 1966. In 1988 there were 106,912. ...

As their numbers have decreased, the work falls on older women, the poll found. More than two of five nuns (43%) in their 70s were not yet fully retired. And although 88% of nuns in their 80s say they are mostly retired, 13% were still involved in some form of community service.

Asked their occupations, a 29% plurality of women religious reported that they are retired, and one in four named education as their primary assignment. Eighteen percent were administrators, 13% were in community service and 11% in health care.

I estimate this age breakdown:
< 40: 3%
40 - 60: 34%
60 - 70: 26%
70 - 80: 25%
> 80: 12%
This means that the nun population will drop by a factor of 2 by 2013, and by a factor of 6 in 2033, with the remaining nuns mostly being retired.

Experts differ on why young women are not joining religious orders. The Rev. Andrew W. Greeley, a Catholic sociologist, speculated about several possibilities in his book, "The Catholic Myth." They include a sense of oppression in the communities, or the "emancipation" of the orders that led to a removal of the rigid life that appealed to some members.

Perhaps, Greeley added, younger women no longer saw anything in the vocations of nuns that could not be achieved in lay ministries (even though women religious are technically part of the laity).

There are other possible reasons, like how women have many more career opportunities nowadays -- many career options other than being schoolteachers and nurses, the main occupations of nuns. I am reminded of an antifeminist who once charged that feminism has meant that the smartest women no longer become schoolteachers, to the great detriment of children's education.

There is also the factor of how it's much more socially acceptable nowadays for a woman to be single and living alone.

This decline is further documented in this April 14, 2005 MSNBC article, How can nuns survive in America?. It states

A 2004 survey by Our Sunday Visitor’s Catholic Almanac showed there were approximately 71,486 nuns in the United States, down 50 percent from the 1960s.

More alarmingly, from the church's point of view, is that the average age of nuns is 70 years old.

The figures here indicate a decline of 24% from 1993, approximately in accord with the prediction I had made above.

The article went on to blame nuns' lack of visibility in society (people often seeing none of them), like their disappearance from many hospitals and schools, for the lack of interest in becoming a nun that many young women have. And like Andrew Greeley in the earlier article, some sources for this article blamed some of Vatican II's reforms, which allowed laywomen to have greater participation in the Church's activities.

"I think the costs and rewards shifted," says (Dr. Helen Rose) Ebaugh. "And the cost of giving up a family and marriage and children was too much."

Not to mention the "cost" of forgoing other careers, which are nowadays much more available to women than in the past.

“Some orders of nuns are so traumatized and so tired that they are basically doing nothing,” said Sister Patricia Wittberg. “They have resigned themselves to dying out.”

And thus becoming "none".

According to this article, some convents have had to sell land and building to finance the burying of their dead, because they don't have very many young nuns to help out. And I've even come across an article on Importing Nuns to Save American Monasteries, because of a shortage of American ones.

Also, as mentioned in this review of [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312325967/ref=nosim/ranra-20 Catholic Nuns and the Making of America[/url], the book's author speculates in a "somewhat rambling" chapter that the decline of the nuns was caused by Vatican II's encouraging greater participation by laywomen, thus depriving nuns of their elite status in the Church.

In Little Sisters of the Nikkei, we find:

French nuns facing dwindling recruitment have taken the heretical leap and plunged into the stock market to provide for their old age. ...

Faced with an ageing population and a dramatic decline in applications from would-be novices, dozens of France's impoverished religious orders have been forced to hire private carers for their elderly and infirm members: there are simply not enough young ones to do the job. And to pay the wages of professional nurses, the holy sisters have started playing the stock market.

"There was a time when we could rely on the good Lord to look after us when we got older, but now we realise we have to help him along a little," says Sister Hélène of the Little Sisters of the Assumption. "It's alarming at times, to be sure, but these days we have no alternative but to put some of our faith in shares."

The nuns' orders are in dire financial straits. Almost all run at a loss, and where most could once expect to get 40 or 50 vocation applications a year in the postwar years, they are now down to one or two. Sister Michèle's order (the LSA), for example, has only 500 nuns in France, 300 of whom are now living in retirement homes. The nuns' special state pension amounts to just £2,200 a year, nowhere near enough to pay for professional carers.

And according to an article about foreign nuns in Italy,

There are about 700 foreign nuns who work on a permanent basis in Italy. To this figure must be added the close to 8,000 nuns who have come from abroad to receive their religious formation or complete their studies in Italy. The total of foreign nuns is greater than that of Italian nuns working abroad. (These total 8,030.)

... Because of the scarcity of Italian vocations, the needs of congregations often call for the insertion of new foreign personnel. ...

It must a humiliation for Catholic leaders to watch their Church go downhill in these long-time strongholds.

I've also found this article on some Canadian Anglican nuns reported that

Meanwhile, the Australian province said that its challenge is how to remain a community when the sisters no longer live together. The sisters closed all three of their houses because they could not keep up the maintenance, nor could the sisters - aging and dwindling in numbers - sustain the ministries.

Some of the articles mention a stopgap strategy that the Church is employing: recruiting nuns from eastern Europe and the Third World. However, I think that that strategy has worked only because such places are very poor, meaning that being a nun could actually be a good career option in such places.

Originally from Catholic Nuns becoming "None": Dwindling and Aging, with some additional articles.

[Ray Moscow]

I suppose the decline became inevitable after Vatican II, when it was announced that laypeople could be just as "Godly" as the clergy. Up till then, most people assumed that the clergy were much closer to God than anybody else.

Nowadays many people, including some Catholics, look down on the clergy as a bunch of hypocrites and perverts.

[Lasting Damage]

over here in Ireland, the churches are pretty happy about all the polish immigrants, since they're filling the pews again.

[Benedictus]

Yes, the decline is unmistakable. When I was young, all the little girls in my neighborhood dreamed of becoming nuns. (What do little girls know about the hormones that are about to start coursing through their arteries?) And if you went past Saint Patrick's school at the right time of the day, it looked like the March of the Penguins.

The same is now true of priests. It doesn't have the prestige it once had in the Catholic community, as people realize that priests are not actually holy people, just ordinary sinners like everyone else. That's (to me) a virtue of Christianity, and the thing that puts it at a disadvantage relative to religions in which certain people are believed to have attained a higher spiritual state. My catechism told me I was supposed to venerate my bishop, since he was "Christ among us." It also told me that I was supposed to treat everyone I met as if he/she were Christ himself, thereby annulling the previous instruction. I imagine the traditional Catholic position has now become that of the US Army: Salute the office and the uniform, not the person wearing the uniform.

I have also noticed that Poland is the Bible Belt of the EU. I wonder how long this will continue.? Another generation, or just until Poland sufficiently shares the general prosperity of the EU?

[I_pity_the_fool]

I have also noticed that Poland is the Bible Belt of the EU. I wonder how long this will continue.? Another generation, or just until Poland sufficiently shares the general prosperity of the EU?

My guess is that Poland is religious because the Catholic church was part of their struggle against Communism and foreign domination. Now that that's gone, I suppose it might wither away.

[magdlyn]

My guess is that Poland is religious because the Catholic church was part of their struggle against Communism and foreign domination. Now that that's gone, I suppose it might wither away.

And now that the Polish pope is dead.

Buh bye nuns, monks and priests! Dont let the door hitcha in the ass.


Christianity is only growing in poor countries who are being bombarded with Bibles and bullshit by missionaries, who give them food if they convert. I hate missionaries.

[Lucretius II]

Twelve Catholic priests have swapped their pulpits for favourite pastimes in a calendar designed to try to recruit young men to the priesthood.

The priests, from the Diocese of Leeds, are pictured in an array of activities, including reading celebrity magazines, watching baseball and DIY.

This is Leeds West Yorkshire home of Yorkshire Cricket & Headingley cricket ground and they are watching baseball ???
I still suffer from "nunophobia "even though I am no longer a Catholic, so the fact the numbers have declined is very good news for me
The nuns I remember from my youth were evil, sadistic, sexually frustrated old bats (and that was "the nice ones " )

[magdlyn]

I still suffer from "nunophobia "even though I am no longer a Catholic, so the fact the numbers have declined is very good news for me
The nuns I remember from my youth were evil, sadistic, sexually frustrated old bats (and that was "the nice ones " )

I have the luck of not being raised Catholic, but have heard about sadistic nuns all my life. And then I watched the Magdalene Sisters! Yikes!

http://imdb.com/title/tt0318411/

[shitshou]

I was raised Catholic. I also remember nuns as bitter vindictive hags that instilled terror in all the kids. Fucking crones.

Now that I'm all growed up I feel really sorry for them.

[Ray Moscow]

I've got a book by a former nun entitled The Jesus Hoax. I've only read bits of it, but it's on my "must read" list.

Freke & Gandy mention it in one of their books as an example of someone who did her religious research toward the end of her life instead of before committing to a religious life.

[DMB]

The church has a very strong grip in Poland and lots of political power. I think it will take a while for places like Poland and Slovakia to get "corrupted" by the rest of Europe.

[Benedictus]

So nuns are going the way of the Shakers. There were still three or four old Shaker women around twenty years ago. I imagine that religion is now completely defunct. I can't imagine it ever had much appeal for men, though one can see that for a nineteenth-century woman it had many advantages.

Mencken once gave a roll call of defunct gods: Zeus, Odin, Amon-Ra,.... None can now be found to pay them honor, but in their day they were great gods, worshipped and feared by multitudes.

[Lasting Damage]

I have also noticed that Poland is the Bible Belt of the EU. I wonder how long this will continue.? Another generation, or just until Poland sufficiently shares the general prosperity of the EU?

I'm not sure if there is anyone left in Poland. Most of them seem to be here in Dublin.

[TySixtus]

So, this engineer, this priest, and this lawyer are sharing a cabin on the Titanic.

The ship gets hit, and the three of them start discussing their exit strategy. The engineer, stand-up guy that he is, says with some finality: "Women and children first, we have to get the children on those boats! Let's go!"

The lawyer, however, isn't convinced. "You know what guys," he says "I'm worth a million dollars. I'm not dying on this boat. Fuck the children."

And the priest says "Do you think we have time?"

Ty

[StarrySkunk]

I used those four data points to do a fit on my TI-86 and got a good linear fit that hits zero in 2026. I guess there'll be a long tail stretching out for some time unless the RCC suddenly implodes.

When I was a churchgoer, the priests would often make reference to their declining numbers. My parents went to the local Catholic school for high school with nuns in habits as teachers. Now it a K-8 only school during the weekdays and a Sunday school on the weekend. My Sunday classes were there and I never saw anyone who clearly were or called themselves nuns.

[halii]

I've been hearing about this since I was younger. Most catholics think it will reach a point where they are just going to have to let priests have families and get married and then things will work itself out.

When I went to catholic school two of the nuns there were "new" nuns who had recenty been divorced and then decided nunship was the best way to go. I assume a lot of people get into it that way. I also visited Immaculata, a college for nuns, so you'd assume there'd be some young ones there, but nope. Most of those who were considering being a nun weren't very young.

I know someone who would definitely want to become a nun if nuns could marry. She is majoring in family planning or something like that for catholics so she can like be an advisor for married catholic people or something like that. Who knows. Her exboyfriend felt called to be a priest, but then decided he wasn't because he wanted to get married (i.e., have sex as far as I'm concerned) and then he decided he was "called" again when the priests he had spoken to called him back and told him he was just being tempted to go the wrong way.

Manipulative and pretty stupid. He's a nice kid and I hope he doesn't end up going through with it.

[Benedictus]

I've been hearing about this since I was younger. Most catholics think it will reach a point where they are just going to have to let priests have families and get married and then things will work itself out.

When I went to catholic school two of the nuns there were "new" nuns who had recenty been divorced and then decided nunship was the best way to go. I assume a lot of people get into it that way. I also visited Immaculata, a college for nuns, so you'd assume there'd be some young ones there, but nope. Most of those who were considering being a nun weren't very young.

I know someone who would definitely want to become a nun if nuns could marry. She is majoring in family planning or something like that for catholics so she can like be an advisor for married catholic people or something like that. Who knows. Her exboyfriend felt called to be a priest, but then decided he wasn't because he wanted to get married (i.e., have sex as far as I'm concerned) and then he decided he was "called" again when the priests he had spoken to called him back and told him he was just being tempted to go the wrong way.

Manipulative and pretty stupid. He's a nice kid and I hope he doesn't end up going through with it.

Me too. The shortage of priests was noted way back in the early 60s, as I recall, and there was talk of having general confession instead of confession inside the Telephone Booths.

Now the Church could easily cure this problem by allowing women to become priests. That way, they'd work both ends against the middle. A lot of the faithful would stop going to church, and they'd have more priests to serve the ones who were left. That's what happened to the Episcopalians. Why don't I think this will happen?

[Gagundathar Inexplicable]

Mencken once gave a roll call of defunct gods: Zeus, Odin, Amon-Ra,.... None can now be found to pay them honor, but in their day they were great gods, worshipped and feared by multitudes.

That is not entirely true. There are certainly growing numbers of neo-pagans some of whom (the Asatru) worship the old Norse deities.
Whether this means anything is yet to be seen.

But, unless the RCC accepts married priests, then the whole institution could become defunct quite quickly.

You know, there is no biblical injunction against married priests. As far as I remember, the practice of enforced celibacy came about after several Popes became virtual dynastic rulers with their eldest son becoming Pope after they croaked.

[Nialler]

Researching a piece for Nontheist Nexus I came across stats which showed that in the last few years, More Anglican priests were ordained in Ireland than Catholic priests.

[Benedictus]

Mencken once gave a roll call of defunct gods: Zeus, Odin, Amon-Ra,.... None can now be found to pay them honor, but in their day they were great gods, worshipped and feared by multitudes.

That is not entirely true. There are certainly growing numbers of neo-pagans some of whom (the Asatru) worship the old Norse deities.
Whether this means anything is yet to be seen.

But, unless the RCC accepts married priests, then the whole institution could become defunct quite quickly.

You know, there is no biblical injunction against married priests. As far as I remember, the practice of enforced celibacy came about after several Popes became virtual dynastic rulers with their eldest son becoming Pope after they croaked.

That is correct, but the real problem was lower in the hierarchy (or lowerarchy, to borrow an elegant coinage of CS Lewis). Priests were getting married and passing Church property on to their children. So, about 1100 years ago, the Church cracked down and insisted on unmarried priests. That is what celibacy means: avoiding legal marriage, involving heirs and transfer of property. (Hugh Hefner is celibate by that definition.) The Church didn't like losing control of wealth, so it made the priesthood a celibate vocation. In the Orthodox community, married priests are still the norm. And a married man who converts to the Roman Church can also become a priest. But if his wife dies, he can't remarry.

I believe the book of Timothy says, "A bishop shall be blameless, the husband of one wife." That makes it pretty clear, I would think. When the Vermont Episcopalians consecrated Mary Adelia McLeod as bishop 15 years ago, a woman representing the conservative wing quoted this passage to the assembled multitudes. My daughter thought this was an outrageous thing to do. I said nothing. I thought the protestor had courage to stand up in front of hundreds of the irredeemably PC crowd and say such a thing. So I liked her, even though my principles were against her. (Besides, she was a hot babe. )

[Thlayli]

OP

This is very distressing. Soon, all nun porn will be OMA nun porn.

Sad.

[StarrySkunk]

I wonder what will happen to all of those church buildings, artifacts and the bazillions of dollars the RCC had collected over ~1500 years once they vanish. Churches had been converted into apartments, so I imagine their holding of buildings shrinking to a final core of large historical ones like cathedrals and the Vatican. There'd be money gained from selling those buildings, increasing their final cache size unless they decide to pay priests more. I guess when they finally have nobody to elect a pope and the last pope goes, Italy would take over the Vatican and convert it into a vast museum. I hope scholars will get to see all of those secret Catholic documents.

If there is still a lot of Catholics in some places like Latin America, somebody there would want to make a New Vatican or become the majority at the Vatican, keeping it going for longer.

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, what the fuck are we going to do about this decline in priests?

Children aren't going to rape themselves, people. We need to get a plan together here.