Is the "Vocation Crisis" anything new?

ephremhiphop:

Jennifer Fulwiler on the National Catholic Register deals with this question from a historical perspective.

Certainly, there were more priests and consecrated religious per capita in, say, St. Frances of Rome’s time than in our own. But was that because there were more people back then who sought God’s will for their lives and discerned a call to a religious vocation? Or was it because there were more people who entered religious life for non-religious reasons? In other times and places, there were more worldly payoffs to becoming a priest or a religious brother or sister: A woman might go to a convent because her parents couldn’t afford a dowry; a boy might enter a monastery to avoid starvation; a man’s decision to become a priest might be driven by thoughts of the political connections that would come from moving up within the Church hierarchy…

I find the question interesting, because it gets to the heart of the supposed decline of faith in modern culture. The secular narrative says that you observe fewer Catholics strictly observing their faith these days because modern science has made religious faith irrelevant. The vocations crisis is often pointed to as Exhibit A in this case. In addition to the points refuting the silly “science disproves faith” position, I think the argument could be made that the percentage of baptized Catholics who make the Lord the center of their lives is not even much lower than it ever has been; rather, there’s simply no incentive for those who are lukewarm believers to go through the motions. Now that the Church is no longer entwined with the dominant culture, only the devout remain.

In our own Religious Order, the Augustinians, we have been down lower in numbers many other times in history.

Also, if you look at the history of Catholicism in America, the real “Vocation Crisis” was the vocation explosion between 1940 and 1970, rather then the vocation collapse after 1970. Everywhere around the country, religious orders and congregations put up massive institutional buildings, imploding a year after they completed construction.

There are no longer worldly incentives to religious life. It is refreshing, I have never found a place to be surrounded by so many genuine and wonderful human beings. Makes me happy to NOT be living the life of a regular aimless and reckless twentysomething.

I love being an Augustinian!