Who's gonna outlive who(m)?

Samples from the websites of two different orders of Dominican sisters: the Dominican Sisters of Peace, an amalgamation of several greying and dying post-Vatican II sisters

The still from their video is above. Here's a snippet of the musical background, from folksinger Pat Humpries:

We are living 'neath the great Big Dipper
We are washed by the very same rain
We are swimming in the stream together
Some in power and some in pain
We can worship this ground we walk on
Cherishing the beings that we live beside
Loving spirits will live forever
We're all swimming to the other side

and the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, a traditional Catholic teaching order, founded fifteen years ago, with an average age in their 20's and in the process of building a convent that can hold 100...

Their video shows women in habits, talking about giving themselves to God for life, without reserve, in the service of Christ and the Faith.


One thing that Boomer groups of all kinds seem to have is an inability to reproduce. Why had the exuberant modernizing reforms produced half-empty churches? When the archbishop of Chicago delivered a controversial speech several years ago, asserting that "liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project", he pointed out the inability of the renewed Church to pass on its faith to the next generation.  It seems that the only groups really able to bring in younger people are more traditional.

Over 90% American Catholic sisters are older than 60. This means that they got their initiation under the Old Regime. They rejected that regime and its beliefs, with so many of them morphing into post-Christian social-justice eco-feminists, but its effects stuck with them. That's why they stayed, I think. It seems to me that the particular shape of the Boomer generation is founded on that very particular dynamic: having experienced the traditional forms and then rejecting them in hope of making a reformed version of them that bypassed the rejected version. My suspicion was, back even when I was in religion myself, that only the traditional form could make the identity take shape and last. The Boomers actually lived off an experience that they had later come to consciously reject. And their attempts to create a new regime for themselves meant that they had to deny to newcomers that very formative experience which made the oldsters who they were. A cultural form of artificial contraception.

What the traditional and newly-founded traditional groups instinctively know is that what draws young people to religious life, monasticism or the priesthood is not that it is cool and modern, but that it is challenging and identity-shaping in a way that both sets people apart from the larger world and at the same time inserts them strongly in an ancient tradition.

I mean, if you want to give your life to God and become His bride, there's really only one way to do it. Dealing with climate change, immigration and the UN Millennium Goals....not so much.

To me, basic religious psychology.