Vocations talk

I was reading a wire article in the Gazette Sunday morning (this link is to a lengthier version of the story on another site) on how religious orders are trying to use Web tools like blogs, YouTube and Facebook to recruit vocations. Nice to see the New Evangelization in action. The Gazette version came with this text pulled out into a sidebar:

The Catholic Church is desperate to reverse a decades-long decline in religious vocations. According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, the number of Catholic nuns in the United States has plunged from 179,954 in 1965 to 67,773 in 2006. For priests, the figures are only slightly better: a decline from 58,632 to 41,794. During the same period, the number of men being ordained priests annually fell by half, from 994 to 431.

The reasons for the downturn are varied: more secular lifestyles; more career options, especially for women; and family pressure not to join a religious order.

Yes, there is a sense of desperation these days about vocations, but amid that there is some encouraging news. Of course, you never hear the good news (unless it comes from the Catholic press) because, in the secular media, no sane man or woman would consider giving his or her life to Christ as a priest or nun. That, of course, would mean celibacy (at least in the Roman Catholic Church) and you'd have to be crazy to give up sexual intimacy. Ahh, I digress. That's a theology of the body discussion for another time (or you can read this link). Remind me to mention two awesome TOB-related talks coming to the diocese later this year. Anyhow, that same CARA survey shows that the number of seminarians in the U.S. in 1995 at 3,172 and actually growing -- even if it is slightly -- to 3,306 in 2006. That was only two less seminarians than in 2005, so we may be seeing some stability in new vocation numbers. In the Diocese of Colorado Springs, the number of seminarians has slowly increased in recent years. One, Father Rafael Torres-Rico, was ordained this summer and two more -- Bob Newbury and Kirk Slattery -- are scheduled to be ordained priests over the next year.

On a related note, here's a very intersting CARA breakdown of seminarians in 2007.