Here is something you may have missed amidst all the other news in the Church at present. As the website of the Philadelphia Archdiocese reports, several hundred religious institutes of women are likely to disappear in the next few decades. In more demotic terms, several hundred orders of nuns are about to become extinct.
This report deals with nuns in America alone, so the situation in Africa and Asia is no doubt different, but one hazards a guess that there would be very similar trends in Europe. Indeed, ask anyone of my age group (I was born in 1963) whether they know any active nuns, and they will usually scratch their heads. When I was young, there were nuns, who were middle aged; now I am middle aged, all the nuns seem to be in retirement homes, and there are no young ones at all, at least not that I have met in my own neck of the woods. When the history of this time comes to be written, this will surely be the key thing that will emerge: the almost complete disappearance of religious life in the Church, and with it, the people who once upon a time did all the work.
