This year, there are two small but heartening signs of encouragement for religious life
I received an e-mail during the week from a bishop on the continent. He had seen a photo online of a packed Dublin church and wanted to know what was happening.
“Aren’t the churches in Ireland supposed to be empty?” he asked.
The photo was taken in St Brigid’s Church, Killester, on Dublin’s north side during the recent Mass for the religious of the archdiocese.
This annual Mass is an interesting gathering: The age profile of the massive attendance is not old – it’s very old. And there’s often a frizzle of tension in the air over differing liturgical tastes and ecclesiology. While religious life in Ireland may be perched precariously on a demographic cliff, there’s always a great buzz of energy and camaraderie. It stems, I think, from a deep and sincere belief in the value and worth of religious life.
The Church needs religious life. And religious life needs the Church.
The Church needs the prophetic and missionary impulse provided by the authentic charisms of the religious institutes. And religious life needs the tradition and stability of the Church lest it drift off towards some esoteric and speculative theology.
Indeed, so entwined are the two, some observe that the spiritual health of the Church can be gauged by the state of religious life.
This year, there are two small but heartening signs of encouragement.
The first is ‘Rise of the Roses’ which you will have read about in these pages. This vocations project is modelled on “young people ministering to young people” and will offer women discerning a religious vocation some support and encouragement as they visit 10 convents later this year. Significantly, young lay people, eager to see a culture of discernment and a renewal of religious life, are at the heart of the initiative.
The second happy story is the Year of Consecrated Life video which has now clocked up 10,000 views on YouTube. The four minute clip features the testimonies of five Irish religious and has become one of the most-watched YouTube videos produced in the Catholic Church in Ireland. It’s fresh, upbeat and positive.
We’ve seen several vocations projects before but young people and digital technology give these two an edge.
No one is quite certain what shape religious life will take in the future, but we can be certain that the desire to follow Christ in a radical way will manifest itself again in the hearts of a critical mass of people. And, led by charismatic women and men, some new flowering will take place.
In the meantime, religious life is not on hold. It continues amid the difficulties, setbacks and frustrations of this age with a quiet joy and fidelity.
And that – I said in my reply to the bishop who e-mailed – is why the Dublin church he saw online was packed to the rafters earlier this month. Because this is something, in the words of the Kerry poet, that simply will not “acknowledge conclusion” or, indeed, ever “dream of ending”.
Diverse ministries
Religious are involved in a diverse range of ministries these days and sometimes they pop up in surprising places.
For instance, I was at a craft fair in Dublin and came across a brochure for a silk company. It turned out that the ‘Nano Nagle Tailoring Unit’ was involved in preparing the company’s products.
The tailoring unit, based in Theni, in the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India, trains women to sew and is run by the Presentation Sisters. It offers comfortable working conditions and good pay to the staff, allowing them, in turn, to support their families. The Presentation Sisters also run a hospice for AIDS patients in the same town.
Caring for the sick and supporting the family – Nano Nagle is still alive.
Respecting the veil
Some years ago I was addressing a group of lay people about the importance of promoting religious vocations. During the question and answer section, speaker after speaker bemoaned the disappearance of nuns from the hospitals and spoke nostalgically about the days of large convents and habits on the streets.
“I remember back in the eighties,” one woman recounted, “I’d often go into a hotel in Dublin with a nun for tea. And, my goodness, the respect you’d get. It was wonderful.”
And that probably explains why many sisters chose to get rid of it. What ought to have been a sign of evangelical witness had become a signal for social preferment. Of course, today, that has changed utterly.