Is there still a need for religious vocations?

By Joseph Falkiner OP

While coordinating a team promoting vocations for ten male religious orders and congregations in KwaZulu-Natal, I heard it said that the Church needs diocesan priests rather than those of male religious congregations. This raises the question: is there still a need for men and women religious?

Again, while visiting parish youth groups to propose that members consider entering religious life, we learned from many young people that this is the first time they had heard such a proposal. The vocation to become a priest has indeed been mentioned, but not the vocation to religious life.

Every Catholic needs to know what religious life is, including those who have no vocation to this—parents, youth, elderly people—because it is part of the Church’s teaching. What I write about is not why this or that person may be called to live a religious life, but why the world as a whole needs such people today.

Religious have a mission to the world at large on behalf of the Church.
I write now in the hope that catechists will include something of religious life in their confirmation classes, and that leaders of youth clubs may consider inviting a speaker to address them on the topic.

I see religious vocations as being valid for the world for two main reasons which coalesce today into one dominant reason: It has a witnessing value, challenging society to change to a way of life proposed by Jesus not only for his disciples but for all the people of the world.

This means a departure from things that most people consider important. Three or four examples stand out.

Society as a whole is extremely interested in making money and becoming rich. It shows great interest in sexual behaviour. It teaches people to take charge of their lives, and it promotes individualism. We call these things worldly values, when they are in contrast to what Jesus taught, namely Gospel values.

None of those examples was promoted by Jesus when he said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. He was clearly uninterested in becoming rich, but rather encouraged us to share with the poor.

He had no apparent interest in sex. He placed himself totally in the hands of his Father in heaven, saying that he came to do not his own will but the will of his Father, and he spoke often of community values rather than individual values.

All Christians are called to live out the Gospel values rather than the worldly values promoted by most societies and cultures. Some people make a special attempt to highlight the special values that Jesus taught, by making a public commitment of vows or promises to do so.

Making these vows is called religious profession. From that moment, religious try to live poorly, chastely, in obedience to God, and to share everything in community living.

The earliest religious life in the first few centuries of Christianity was a witness against the worldly culture of the Roman empire. Men and women went into the desert to live an alternative lifestyle in monasteries, in line with the Gospel.

That changed in the Middle Ages, when new forms of religious life found religious not withdrawing from their own people, but rather trying to influence them by preaching and example. They were disturbed by what they saw going on around them in Europe.

The orders founded in the Middle Ages all had this vocation to some extent: Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Servites, and others. They spoke of themselves as imitators of the apostles, who went out from Jerusalem to spread the faith of Jesus Christ.

This continues today. By living out our vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, we challenge the values of society. We are not challenging society to take religious vows, but to restrict all this money-making, sexual, doing-my-own-individual-thing culture.

Gospel values are not just for religious people but for all the world. Those in religious life remind everyone of that.

This then brings us to the missionary aspect of religious life. Religious had always done some missionary work in cultures and societies that didn’t know the Church. The Benedictines were the original missionaries to Northern Europe in the early Middle Ages.

At the end of that time, new forms of religious life with a specific missionary calling to people of other continents sprang up, and thousands upon thousands of men and women religious spread out all over the world, to establish the Church where it was not known. This began with the Jesuits, and they were followed by a whole host of new missionary congregations, such as those we encounter all over Africa.

This vocation was clearly different from that of the diocesan priest, who remains in the diocese of his birth and upbringing, caring for the people at home. But it also meant establishing the local Church in those far away places, and promoting vocations to the diocesan clergy to staff the new dioceses and parishes.

In the mid-20th century this form of missionary work in the sense of travelling to other countries began to die out, to be replaced by a new form of missionary work that I think is extremely valid today.

We live in a modern world that is crying out once more for salvation, salvation from wars, from exploitation and economic crises caused by greed, from sexual abuse of women and children,  and so on.

Members of religious congregations, both men and women, can be found working among the poor in shantytowns, among the sick in hospitals and Aids hospices, among marginalised street kids in the cities, among inmates in prisons, and among migrants in refugee camps. We do not restrict our work to Catholics only, but reach out to all. Such work cannot be done by the average busy parish priest.

We also provide chaplains for organisations of laypeople carrying out similar apostolates, giving them spiritual direction, as well as chaplains to schools and universities.

Religious believe that the teachings of Jesus and his example of love have much to offer to the world. Once again we are missionaries—missionaries perhaps to our own people—offering them an example of living with the alternative values of the Gospel. We believe that a new world is possible, and we witness to that.

People may think us crazy or foolish for committing ourselves to a reduced standard of living in order to share what we have with others less fortunate than ourselves, to a life without sexual activity, to being obedient to God’s command to love all his people, even our enemies. But we live in hope and faith.

We believe that we can set the world a challenge to pay attention to the Gospel. Consequently there is space for a genuine Religious Life. For men it is not just a possible step to the priesthood. It is something valid in itself. Both men and women can answer to this call. We need this to be appreciated by the whole Church.
n Fr Falkiner is a Dominican priest based in Pietermaritzburg. He can be contacted at