RELIGIOUS life, as we have come to know it in the western world, "has had its day", according to the editor of the Redemptorist publication, Reality.
Writing in the current edition, Father Gerard Moloney said "it [religious life] is dying and we can already hear its death rattle".
Last year, just 18 young men entered Maynooth, the lowest figure this century, he said, and the Dublin seminary at Clonliffe also had its lowest intake ever. Just one man joined the Christian Brothers.
Much of the responsibility, he said, could be laid at the church's own door. "It can appear cold and uncompassionate in its teachings and in its practices," he said, giving the impression of "a church which says `no' a lot, which appears hung up on laws and regulations, which is run by men in funny hats who seem distant from the lives of ordinary people with ordinary problems. It's a church which seems more passionate about control and about structures than about the Gospel of Jesus Christ".
Young people see it as "just another part of the establishment," he said. "They point to the perceived lifestyle of clergy, to the property the church holds, to the middle-class concerns it seems to have." To change this the church must stand "firmly on the side of the poor in Irish society" and be "a voice for those who have no voice".
He attributed the fall-off also to increased prosperity and secularisation, the "bad press" recently, with "story after story" of child sex abuse involving clergy, and the church's "apparent inability or unwillingness" to tackle the problem.
There was also the celibacy issue, the unwillingness of parents to encourage vocations as before, and "the difficulty people have today in making life commitments". It would, however, be wrong, he said, to blame the crisis on a hedonistic society, the media, or unwilling parents.
Reform of religious orders must be "nothing short of radical", he said. "They and the institutional church as a whole must abandon the idea that they have all the answers, and that young or lay people have no wisdom of their own," Father Moloney concluded.
