Domenicans

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Will millennials decide to become nuns? NJ.com and RNS offer contrasting answers

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As nuns age, the huge question has been about who can be found to replace them. The future of Catholic religious orders in the United States is pretty dire at the moment. Two publications recently came out with stories on millennials and nuns, with very different conclusions.

One story is a splashy, detailed look at a handful of millennial women who entered Catholic religious orders in New Jersey and their reasons for doing so. Another is a Religion News Service story, datelined Grand Rapids, Mich., about older nuns who meet with agnostic/seeking millennial women and try to connect on a spiritual plane.

The New Jersey story, available on NJ.com (a group of news sources including the Newark Star-Ledger) follows three women who joined religious orders. There’s Anna, a Rutgers grad; Chiara, a one-time nursing student at Villanova; and Lauren, a former Australian actress now living with a contemplative religious order.

They’re millennial women who have chosen a path more popular for generations before them — one that involves kneeling before an altar, vowing to live in poverty, obeying God and abstaining from sex.

“I didn’t see a lightning bolt that fell out of the sky,” Sister Anna said. “I didn’t see an angel who told me what I was going to do in my life.”

In our hyper-connected, media-saturated age, it’s hard enough to get people to slow down and engage with the spiritual world, much less get them to consider a life lived in service to the church. Yet handfuls of millennial women across the state have taken that path. These women are serving as Catholic sisters or missionaries, many working through the process known as discernment to become “women religious,” commonly referred to as nuns. If the young sisters make it through the discernment process — which takes years and sometimes pulls them thousands of miles from family and friends — they are choosing something permanent, and forsaking the lures of marriage, kids, autonomy and material goods.

I know reporters may feel they have to dumb down religion stories for the masses, but the “kneeling before an altar”? Is that simple act so beyond the experience of most 20-somethings?


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Telegraph hits some sour notes in a simple story about a footballer becoming a priest

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In the decades that I have studied attempts by news media to cover religion events and trends, I have heard this question many times: Why don't they GET IT?

"It," of course, is religion. "They" are editors and reporters in mainstream newsrooms.

Of course, there are journalists -- some religious, some secular -- who totally get the role that religious faith plays in the lives of millions and millions of people. They see the ways that religious questions and beliefs are woven into the fabric of private lives, as well as public life. There are professionals who do a great job on this beat. We need editors to hire more of them.

Yet, I am reminded, from time to time, of that statement the liberal commentator Bill Moyers -- of CBS, PBS, etc. -- made years ago. He told me that far too many journalists are "tone deaf" to the "music of religion." It's more than an intellectual thing, more than a lack of knowledge. They know that something is going on in many news stories, but they don't hear the music. It's just a bunch of sounds to them. It isn't real.

I'm thinking about this today as I prepare to give another lecture at a conference for young journalists in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Most of the participants are from Eastern Europe. Reporting about religion, especially in conflict situations, is a major theme in the conference.

But let's look at a smaller example of these problems. Here is a nice, simple human interest story, in which a footballer from one of the world's most famous squads has been ordained as a Catholic priest. At the very least, the reporter and editors working on this story for the Telegraph need to understand a few simple things about the priesthood and how Catholics talk about it.

Prepare for some sour notes in this song.


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Dominican posts handy guide to Pope Francis press myths

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Every now and then a scribe at some other weblog (and we’re not just talking about once-and-always GetReligionistas such as M.Z. Hemingway) writes what amounts to a perfect GetReligion post. I mean, we may as well stick a guest byline on these things and put them right online here. This is not one of those cases — but it’s very close.

In case you haven’t noticed, the mainstream press has pretty much gone crazy in the past week or so noting the one-year anniversary of Pope Francis, the new patron saint of pull quotes. Some of the articles have been pretty interesting and others have been — Well, who are we to judge? — rather warped.

What I have noticed is that much of the commentary from conservative Catholics (conservative in terms of doctrine) has been shaped by one simple reality. While the mainstream press seems to think that many conservatives are terribly upset about the new pope, what I have noticed is that most of them are actually rather upset about how the pope has been quoted out of context.


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