Young Believers Are Fueling a Renaissance of Catholic Culture

The American Spectator ^ | July 31, 2024 | Mary Frances Myler

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Young Believers Are Fueling a Renaissance of Catholic Culture

The Sisters of Charity of New York announced last year that it will not accept any new members. The announcement was more of a formality than anything else, as no one has joined the order in more than twenty years. Founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in 1817 and recognized as the Sisters of Charity of New York in 1846, the order had more than 1,300 sisters in the 1960s. Today, only 154 sisters remain, and their median age is eighty-five years old. 

The Sisters of Charity of New York isn’t the only Catholic religious order with an aging population and no new vocations. As of 2022, four out of five orders had no new vocations, according to a study conducted by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Amid this decline, it’s easy to spot the orders that continue to receive new vocations, in part because they’re still wearing habits. 

In an attempt to “modernize” Catholicism following Vatican II, many religious orders abandoned their traditional garb — the Sisters of Charity of New York among them. Nuns traded in their habits for modest blouses and skirts or slacks. But it appears that young people don’t want 1970s–style Catholicism. Ninety-three percent of women who entered religious life in 2022 chose an order that wears the habit, as did 65 percent of men. What’s more, eight in ten new entrants to religious life were “very much” influenced by their religious order’s practice of wearing a habit.

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When surveying young adults who had been raised Catholic, sociologists Nicolette Manglos-Weber and Christian Smith found that the young adults who identified as Catholic and still practiced their faith were generally “more likely to have grown up with parents who were committed, vocal, and reasonably well educated about Catholicism.”

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Ping

What young, devout Catholic women would want to join a bunch of lesbian nuns on a bus?

[nwrep]

Why the excerpt?

[Az Joe]

Watch that mouth of yours

[hinckley buzzard]

Well down in the body of the article is identified a major obstacle to faith, which is the pseudo religion of modernity and scientism. Even the majority of believing Catholics endorse the idea that religion and science are incompatible.

This is a specious proposition vigorously advanced by the cultural left, which more educated adults can easily discount. However it is convincing to ill-educated youth who have no idea what is behind it and why they are being actively influenced in this direction.

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Copyright laws.

[NorthMountain]

uddenly, after thousands of years of continuity, Catholics walked away from their distinctive culture. Today, many Catholics are reclaiming it.

The Faith and the culture are inseparable. The Faith informs and molds the culture, the culture reinforces and promulgates the Faith. Throw away the culture, as the 1970s radicals did, and the Faith in large measure goes with it. The radicals knew what they were doing.