Where Have We Gone Wrong?

Joe Mannath SDB Published in Religious Life Review (Ireland). Copyright by the author. Reproduction in any form, in whole or in part, requires the prior written permission of the author. A smart and committed religious brother is doing a Ph. D. dissertation under my guidance on members of religious orders in India. It is a psycho-social study, in line with the trend in our university department to do interdisciplinary research. One thing that has struck me from this beginning is also something that disappoints and shakes both of us. When peopleboth religious and those who work with themhear of this research, they tell the research student their views and feelings about religious life today, as they see it, or live it. How do most people, including most religious, see it? Most comments we hear are negative. We religious are doing lots of work, certainly. Many of our institutions (schools, colleges, boardings, hostels, hospitals) are sought after by the public. This makes us local VIPs, treated with deference by many people, both inside and outside the church. We have influence with public figuresgovernment officials, business people, the police. Parents of our pupils treat us with extra attention, often willing or even eager to do us favours. This sort of public weight should not blind us to a sad and thought-provoking fact: Most people do not have high regard for us as persons. They want the services we offer, yes, whether it be a well-maintained hospital or an efficiently run school. But many are disappointed with us as persons and put off by the way we treat people. A nurse who works in a hospital run by sisters explains to me why she does not like nuns. She is by no means a bitter individual or a gossip. What she says is: Sisters seem to lack compassion for people who suffer. I do not see them showing patients and their families the kind of understanding that many lay persons have. My research student asks a girl studying in a well-known Catholic school in Chennai: What do you like to be when you grow up? I want to be teacher, the girl replies. She adds: I want to be a teacher like the lay teachers in my school, not like the sisters. Why? They are more understanding when we have a problem. What happened, then, to the claim we religious make that we dedicate ourselves to share Christs love with others, especially the poor and the suffering? A young priest tells me: What keeps us going is not religious life, but the work we do. When I am put in charge of something, I want to run it well and make it succeed. This is what motivates me and my age group, not religious ideals. We notice cynicism in a number of religious speaking to us about religious life. In an initial consultation on how religious themselves and their close collaborators see religious life today, we asked each one to rate most religious they know today on the following traits.
(a) Happy? (b) Finding life meaningful? (c) Committed? (d) Mature, compared to lay persons? (e) Aware of the needs of people? (f) Inspiring models for others? (g) Warm and friendly in our dealings? (h) Aware of our mission? (i) Committed to Kingdom (justice, truth)?

(J) God-centred (values & priorities)? (k) Doing what really needs to be done? (l) Living in loving, joyful communities?

Want to see the answers we got? On a scale going from zero to ten, where 10 represents the highest possible score and 5 means an average degree of assent, here are the averages we found: (a) Happy? (5.20); (b) finding life meaningful? (5.50) ; (c). Committed? (5.20); (d). Mature, compared to lay persons? (4.90); (e). Aware of the needs of people? (5.80) (f). Inspiring models for others? (3.80); (g). Warm and friendly in our dealings? (5.40) (h). Aware of our mission? (5.70); (i). Committed to Kingdom (justice, truth)? (4.60) (j). Godcentered (values & priorities)? (4.90); (k). Doing what really needs to be done? (4.50) (l). Living in loving, joyful communities? (4.60). Most of the respondents were religious. Note that there is no high score on any point. Most questions get an average answer (around 5 out of 10). On some points, e.g., whether religious are inspiring models for others, the response is quite negative. One can, of course, raise legitimate questions about such feedback. E.g., how many married couples would rave about their marriage? How many human beings in any walk of life are really happy and contented? Have we grounds for expecting vowed celibates to be any different? When I addressed the major superiors of religious (the triennial national assembly of the Conference of Religious of India) three years ago, I mentioned a number of issues we are facing at the moment. A lay woman whose opinion I have found to be reliablea professor in a college run by nunswent through the paper before I presented it, and told me: You will probably be attacked for saying these things, but someone has to say them. After the talk, a number of major superiors told me: The actual situation is worse than what you described. They were referring to what goes on under the name of vocation promotion and similar games religious play. (This talk was published as a two-part article: The Cost of Discipleship: The Challenges Facing Religious in India Today, Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection, 64, 7 (July 2000), 494-507; 64, 8 (August 2000), 583-591.) Since I have been teaching in both India and the West, let me say a word comparing the two settings. The situation in India is very different from what it is in the West. There, religious congregations hardly get any candidates. (The average age of nuns in the US, for instance, is 70 years!) They are faced with grave difficulties arising out of enormous social changes. This kind of dramatic change has not yet hit us in India. We are still consoling ourselves with nice rhetoric (God is blessing us with many vocations and expressions of that sort) that covers up a lot that is not sound. We need to look at ourselves more honestly and more boldly. At times I wish I had the money to help unhappy religious who are out of place to leave, find a job and settle down in marriage. Like others who deal with priests, seminarians and religious, I am convinced that a number of us would leave, on two conditions: (1) if we had the financial security outside (money, job); (2) if people who matter, like our families or villagers, accept us. I am not saying that this is true of all of us. There certainly are very genuine, very committed and very inspiring religiouspersons whose loving and God-centred lives inspire others and bring hope to the poor and the marginalized. It would be totally unfair to tar every priest and religious in India with the same brush. There is no doubt that India has a number of highly committed, capable and happy religious and clergy, who not only do outstanding work in India, but also help out in a number of other countries. But small numbers of saintly and dedicated men and women there are in all walks of life. The question here is: Are most of us persons of that caliber? The reality seems to scream: No! (Since this article is being got

ready for re-printing in Ireland, I want to add: I am under no illusion that the earlier periods of packed novitiates and large ordination batches that Western Europe and North America enjoyed were full of men and women driven solely or mostly by the noblest of motives. Human nature being what is, religious and clergy were always a mixture of highly committed, average and power-hungry or emotionally immature individuals, who made choices possible to them within the confines of their social setting and their psychological freedom. For an examination of motives and social factors, see, for instance, the studies of Patricia Wittberg.) In trying to take an honest, clich-free look at the Indian situation, I am not trying to say this is true only of India or of all Indian religious. Coming to the reasons for mediocrity: May be not so many are called to celibacy. May be we should be slow to recruit boys and girls when they hardly know what they are doing. May be we should make it easier for people to leave and find their real vocation, if they are not happy in religious life. May be we will be a better church with fewer priests and religious, working generously and happily with committed lay persons in ministry. May be we should provide our lay collaborators and those in our care opportunities to give us honest feedback without being penalized. Whatever the huge numbers of religious in India may mean to those who like to go by numbers, our situation is not healthy. It needs honest examination. In a culture where it is more difficult for a woman than for a man to leave the security of religious life and start again if she feels out of place even by age thirty or twenty-five, we should be slow to take in so many girls, unless we give them realistic chances for a real choice. Otherwise, we will be burdened with many who are officially religious, but really unhappy and frustrated women/men or unwilling celibates who really would not have chosen this way of life, if they had reasonable opportunities to find a job and a marriage partner. These are hard things to say, and very different from the sweet rhetoric we religious normally surround ourselves with. Feel free to challenge me, if you think I am unfair in my assessment. What I often find is: Many religious say this (or worse) in private, but think we should say only edifying things about ourselves when we talk in public. We still seem to think the laity are ignorant or childish. They know the real score as well as we do. Fr. Joe Mannath SDB, a Salesian priest, is a professor of Christian Studies at the state University of Madras, and a visiting professor at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. This article is taken from a regular column he writes for The New Leader [India]. He can be contacted at: jmannath@vsnl.com For more information, including sample writings, see: www.joemannath.org