The crisis of vocations in the last fifty years
This article begins with a stunning statistic. In the Netherlands - the Netherlands, mind you - there are some 700 monasteries - buildings built specifically for the use of religious orders. 700! This, mind you, in a country that is not only small in area and population, and in which the Catholics have never been a majority, but where the Catholic Church was frequently illegal and often persecuted until well into the nineteenth century. Seven hundred monasteries! In the Netherlands! When we are told that only 150 of these are still being used for the purpose for which they were built, I don't think we find it surprising; to our ear, it must sound more like what we would expect, what seems natural, in a nation that size.
This immediately places under a different light many questions on which there has been much talk over several decades, not, alas, always to the advantage of public understanding. Ever since the sixties and seventies of the last century, there has been much talk of a crisis of vocations, and of a retreat of the Church and of faith in general. But surely, if the Netherlands case is anything to go by, it is the opposite that is the case? An enormous apparatus, built up in an amazingly short time - the Netherlands Catholic Church has only been fully legal for a couple of centuries - has run smack into a recruitment crisis. That is not unique or even unusual.
What is, in fact, unusual and worth considering, is the immensity of the apparatus as it reached that fateful year 1960. From the fifteen to the eighteen hundreds, church property across Europe and America had been consistently pruned, repossessed, taken over with or without form of law, with or without episcopal and papal consent. The Protestant revolt, the Enlightenment, the French revolution, the nineteenth-century conflicts of church and state, had been nothing but stages in one long and immense story of plunder and looting, sometimes for the good of the state, often for less deserving causes. And yet the Church had come into the twentieth century not only stronger, but possibly richer than she had ever been. In countries like Britain and the Netherlands, where it had been barely tolerated and almost invisible in 1800, in 1900 - let alone 1960 - it was a power. In Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, the state had taken over her properties again and again; and yet every episode of looting was followed by a new wave of foundations, endowments, building. Already in 1840, Macaulay was drawing attention to the essential failure of all attempts to break the Church; not with any pleasure, because he disliked it. But even by then, it was clear that the long plunder of the Church had been a total political failure.
The power of the Church not just to survive but to conquer had come from below. It had been the result of millions of parish communities, as often as not made up of poor and ignorant immigrants, to build and endow their own churches, their own schools, their hospitals and missions. While the Italian state was busy confiscating the estates built up by saints three or ten centuries before - at the same time, barely noticed by the authorities, living saints such as St.John Bosco and Mother Cabrini and Bishop Scalabrini and my own ancestor Clelia Barbieri were establishing new communities, new ministries, and, inevitably, new endowments.
The Church, in fact, was riding the tremendous wave of Western growth that changed the face of the world between 1800 and 1950, spreading the European race across the face of two continents and multiplying its numbers from six to tenfold even in Europe. The first thing we think of, of course, in terms of growth, was the famous Victorian family - father, mother and ten or twenty children. But the importance of those families lies not just in sheer numbers, but in the fact that, from the end of the Napoleonic wars on, health and life duration were constantly growing. Europeans had long had large families; but until 1820 or even later, it was in the expectation that many of the children, even in the most rich and comfortable families, would die young. From the 1820s on, that began to be less and less the case.
Without an equally enormous set of opportunities, of course, this growth would have resulted in nothing but what Malthus had forecast - a growing competition for scarce resources, resulting in mass death. But as it happens, the nineteenth century was a period of unbelievably increasing opportunities. Several continents were suddenly opened to exploitation and settlement, while at home the swift advance of technology produced a stream of new economic opportunities, from workers in the new plants to journalists in the suddely popular press to nurses in the new hospitals. A family could have any amount of children without any great fear that any of them would risk starving; if nothing else, any child who did not find an opportunity at home could be sent to try his luck in America or Australia.
In this world of multiplying opportunities and enormous unleashed energies, the Church too had a nearly infinite array of jobs to be done. Far from merely restoring the holes left by various waves of state and private plunder, it had immense new fields of activity to deal with. Both at home and in the colonies there were all sorts of new ministries - hospitals, the vast Catholic press, the new phenomenon of Catholic universities, schools in general, political parties, banks, cooperative societies, even trades unions. The Church was undergoing a parallel process to the multiplication of trades and professions in the modern world. And then there were the growing base structures. Every new village in the colonies, and every native community formed around a missionary, required a new parish church, a school, and elementary social support. So, for that matter, did the growing industrial cities of the old world. "The harvest was great, and the reapers few." And so, every family one of whose children showed any kind of piety or interest in sacred matters had every reason to encourage him or her to follow a vocation; the vast growth that surrounded them on every side was itself enough to impress on everyone the prestige and merit of a Church career.
The Church of 1960, the enormous apparatus spread over five continents and dominant even in countries where it had been illegal almost within living memory, was the result of this long wave. But the long wave had exhausted itself; and at the same time it had began to show all the flaws that are inevitable even in the holiest enterprise this side of the veil. Church enterprises had been quietly dominated, over 150 years, by a practical and building spirit. While great figures such as Newman and Chesterton and Elgar and their continental and American likes drew public attention to the Church's intellectual heritage and unexhausted creativity, away from the limelight, the umpteenth parish church, private hospital or local bank was being set up.
But by 1960 this spirit had lost itself, giving way to a silent unhappiness, a sense of being behind the world at large, of being provincial and secondary. Consciously or not, the Church in its growth had adopted the attitudes and to some extent the goals of the world, and of course had not managed to beat the world on its own ground. The Church had grown, but not grown far enough to outrace its enemy the world. The Church could build a great and impressive university at Notre Dame, but it would never be as great and impressive as Harvard; the Church could build magnificent hospitals, but the state or state-directed national health services could build many, many more, just as good.
Beneath the cassock and the habit, religious felt, more and more, the cultural and ethical draw of the world. The colossal endeavour put forth in the last two centuries to survive the greedy attentions of the world at large had turned into an increasing insertion in that same world - but in a perceivedly backward and provincial position. In a sense, it was worse than in the days of Pius VII and Pius IX, when the powers of the state and the people were openly turned against the Church, the Church had something to fight, to endure, to work towards; now the world had more or less accepted it on its own terms, as a minor figure in its landscape, even a bit of a sentimental indulgence. The history of modern culture was taught - and never mind how many major figures, from Chesterton to Bernanos, from Stravinsky to Johnny Cash, were Christians - as though Christianity did not exist, and I have met many children of the sixties who literally have no notion whatever what the Church is, teaches or does. No wonder that every lie about her, from Hochhuth to Dan Brown, sells so well.
The explosion of self-indulgence in the sixties, from which the collapse of the religious orders and the crisis in vocations are often said to proceed, comes from this underlying crisis, which is a crisis of vocation in a much deeper way. The Church has survived, triumphantly survived, one of the most severe series of attacks ever witnessed. Though her position is still here and there - most notably in China - under threat, the issue is no longer in doubt. But in surviving, it has adopted too much of the world's way of looking at things. Too many churchmen felt not like successful priests or nuns, but like second-rate schoolteachers, office managers, or journalists. And the crisis was inevitably most intense in the religious orders, because they had been, much more than the secular priesthood, the carriers of the professional and practical spirit of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of them were the Church equivalent of professions: to enter the Salesians meant to become an educator, to enter the Dominicans, an academic, the Piarists, a medical worker, and so on. Secular priests were in less danger of forgetting the centrality of Mass and Gospel.
Another reason for the crisis is that the dynamic resource of population growth that had powered the growth in the number of Church and Church-related institutions was also clearly running out. The Victorian family of ten or twenty children was no longer the norm and never would be again. And here we have to deal with one of the great lies of our time. Women do not have children because they don't know how to avoid it; they don't have children out of ignorance. Women, or rather families - with the mother, of course, as a driving force - have children because they see it as a practical thing to do. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, they had children because many of them would die, and they wanted at least a few to live; in the nineteenth, increasingly, because many children could get gainful employment and enrich the family, including looking after the older generation. IN the twentieth century, these reasons progressively ceased to matter. Unprecedented understanding of hygiene made sure that nearly every child survived to become an adult; unexploited resources diminished in number and importance, so that the threat of unemployment became increasingly a feature of the landscape even of the richest countries. In this situation, women would have been certain to have less children, whether or not contraception and abortion had been available. Far from being so pathetically ignorant as to find themselves pregnant without knowing why or how to stop it, women at all times have had their ways to control the issue. In Greek myth, no less, fear of female refusal to comply with the demand for babies is frequently found under the symbolic disguise of tales about women toasting the seed grain before it was sowed, thus making the land infertile.
However, the demand for legalized contraception and abortion has always been presented under this guise - as a battle against ignorance. Third World women, it was said, bring children into the world by the dozen and then watch them starve to death because there is not enough food to feed them. (Of course, all the great African famines are really the result of war, but let's not say that too loud - it might spoil the picture.) This racist assumption - the poor ignorant blacks need us enlightened whites to look after their own best interests - gained hold across the West, not only because of its flattering racism, but above all because it had a real correspondence with what was seen as direct, local experience. In the year of the Lord 1960 the whole West was peopled by a generation who had seen their parents in the case of Catholics, their grandparents in the case of agnostics and Protestants, bring up families of ten or twenty children, and who instinctively knew that they would never in their lives consider any such effort or sacrifice. They could not but regard their parents or grandparents with a kind of affectionate contempt; people who had lived in so much more restricted a world, a world of ignorance and poverty. Emotionally, it was very easy to connect the large families of the European near past and the African present with the ignorance and backwardness of the past. Ultimately, the racist assumption that a Kenyan woman with ten children was too stupid to know the difference depended on an unspoken assumption that one's own mother or grandmother - so backward, so set in her ways, so closely associated with a provincial past - was equally stupid and ignorant. To those who were 20 in 1960, it never occurred that their parents, in their own day and in their own way, had been just as much rational, far-sighted and up-to-date as they were - only that conditions were different and made different requirements.
It was on the spur of this propaganda that the world-wards drift of so many priests and laymen was brutally broken. No wonder that it took years of thought and agonized debate before the unhappy Paul VI could bring himself to lay down the gauntlet of Humanae Vitae - not on the matter of abortion, but on the far more insidious and less attractive one of contraception. It was all too clear to anyone that the world had changed. Nobody could seriously imagine a Church whose average family had a dozen children; if nothing else, the idea of further crowding an already choked Western Europe was enough to make anyone's head spin. Population growth was dreaded, not altogether without reason: everyone could see the natural and artistic heritage of the richest countries being squeezed and concreted over. Families were shrinking, and at the time that seemed an almost unmitigated good. The only issue (nobody then publicly imagined that the Church would have tolerated abortion) was whether the Church was disposed to slacken the ban on artificial means of contraception.
Well. We know what happened. Surrounded by every kind of suggestion and hidden menace, flattered and pushed in one direction and one only, the Pope nevertheless steeled himself to do his duty; and the earth shook, and the heavens opened. From one day to the next, Catholics who had been cradling themselves in the unbroken if tepid acceptance of the modern world found that world drawn up against them in a ferocious, unbroken phalanx, backed by mountains of dollars and the wrath of all the mass media. Most of them, especially the more "prominent" - those on whom the worldly media had poured more attention in the recent past - broke and went over to the enemy. To live by the values of the world, to accept its views and its reprehensions, had become such a second nature to them that when the time came to show to whom they were loyal - they showed it.
It is this generation that is now dying out, and it is the religious institutions that harboured them that are shrinking. That consummation was forecast, though for the wrong reasons, more than half a century ago; people have been talking about a crisis of vocations for two or three generations. What had to happen was a real reorientation of the Church and its institutions, in a more purely religious direction, away from purely worldly success. One sign is the rise of the "ways" - Opus Dei, Comunione e Liberazione, Focolarini, neocatecumenals, even the unhappy Legion: formalized brotherhoods which do not amount to religious orders and do not have a specific purpose other than seek the full sanctification of all their members, lay and consecrated. And while all across the Church old and prestigious religious orders seem on the verge of dying out for lack of recruits, all across the Church, there are religious orders whose numbers and influence are growing - and they are, without exception, reformed versions of the traditional forms of monastic life and charisma. There is even a swiftly-growing order of blue-dressed nuns!
We don't have to fear an end to the consecrated life. Monasticism must be reformed; but it will not die so long as there is a Catholic Church. It is connaturate to it. Think of the Trappist Fathers, the silent monks, so strangely and impressively brought to the public attention by the movie The Great silence. Can you conceive of anything that suggests more strongly the high Middle Ages, the "age of faith" as it is sometimes called? But while the other ultra-rigorist order, the Carthusians, is indeed a product of the twelfth century, the Trappists come from the Age of Reason, and, of all countries, from France, from the strange and heartfelt vocation of a French nobleman. That's right: when the whole of Christendom, and France in particular, had been falling in love with rationalism for its own sake, France, the cultural centre of Europe, produced an order that declined to argue; as France and the world were growing intoxicated with the most brilliant, if not necessarily most sound, style of talk ever devised, from the aristocratic heart of that culture came men who made an offer to the Church and to God, not of their talk, but of their silence. And unlike most other orders, the Trappists (and the Carthusians) have never lacked for novices.
Edited and revised on Pentecost Day, 12 June 2011
This immediately places under a different light many questions on which there has been much talk over several decades, not, alas, always to the advantage of public understanding. Ever since the sixties and seventies of the last century, there has been much talk of a crisis of vocations, and of a retreat of the Church and of faith in general. But surely, if the Netherlands case is anything to go by, it is the opposite that is the case? An enormous apparatus, built up in an amazingly short time - the Netherlands Catholic Church has only been fully legal for a couple of centuries - has run smack into a recruitment crisis. That is not unique or even unusual.
What is, in fact, unusual and worth considering, is the immensity of the apparatus as it reached that fateful year 1960. From the fifteen to the eighteen hundreds, church property across Europe and America had been consistently pruned, repossessed, taken over with or without form of law, with or without episcopal and papal consent. The Protestant revolt, the Enlightenment, the French revolution, the nineteenth-century conflicts of church and state, had been nothing but stages in one long and immense story of plunder and looting, sometimes for the good of the state, often for less deserving causes. And yet the Church had come into the twentieth century not only stronger, but possibly richer than she had ever been. In countries like Britain and the Netherlands, where it had been barely tolerated and almost invisible in 1800, in 1900 - let alone 1960 - it was a power. In Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, the state had taken over her properties again and again; and yet every episode of looting was followed by a new wave of foundations, endowments, building. Already in 1840, Macaulay was drawing attention to the essential failure of all attempts to break the Church; not with any pleasure, because he disliked it. But even by then, it was clear that the long plunder of the Church had been a total political failure.
The power of the Church not just to survive but to conquer had come from below. It had been the result of millions of parish communities, as often as not made up of poor and ignorant immigrants, to build and endow their own churches, their own schools, their hospitals and missions. While the Italian state was busy confiscating the estates built up by saints three or ten centuries before - at the same time, barely noticed by the authorities, living saints such as St.John Bosco and Mother Cabrini and Bishop Scalabrini and my own ancestor Clelia Barbieri were establishing new communities, new ministries, and, inevitably, new endowments.
The Church, in fact, was riding the tremendous wave of Western growth that changed the face of the world between 1800 and 1950, spreading the European race across the face of two continents and multiplying its numbers from six to tenfold even in Europe. The first thing we think of, of course, in terms of growth, was the famous Victorian family - father, mother and ten or twenty children. But the importance of those families lies not just in sheer numbers, but in the fact that, from the end of the Napoleonic wars on, health and life duration were constantly growing. Europeans had long had large families; but until 1820 or even later, it was in the expectation that many of the children, even in the most rich and comfortable families, would die young. From the 1820s on, that began to be less and less the case.
Without an equally enormous set of opportunities, of course, this growth would have resulted in nothing but what Malthus had forecast - a growing competition for scarce resources, resulting in mass death. But as it happens, the nineteenth century was a period of unbelievably increasing opportunities. Several continents were suddenly opened to exploitation and settlement, while at home the swift advance of technology produced a stream of new economic opportunities, from workers in the new plants to journalists in the suddely popular press to nurses in the new hospitals. A family could have any amount of children without any great fear that any of them would risk starving; if nothing else, any child who did not find an opportunity at home could be sent to try his luck in America or Australia.
In this world of multiplying opportunities and enormous unleashed energies, the Church too had a nearly infinite array of jobs to be done. Far from merely restoring the holes left by various waves of state and private plunder, it had immense new fields of activity to deal with. Both at home and in the colonies there were all sorts of new ministries - hospitals, the vast Catholic press, the new phenomenon of Catholic universities, schools in general, political parties, banks, cooperative societies, even trades unions. The Church was undergoing a parallel process to the multiplication of trades and professions in the modern world. And then there were the growing base structures. Every new village in the colonies, and every native community formed around a missionary, required a new parish church, a school, and elementary social support. So, for that matter, did the growing industrial cities of the old world. "The harvest was great, and the reapers few." And so, every family one of whose children showed any kind of piety or interest in sacred matters had every reason to encourage him or her to follow a vocation; the vast growth that surrounded them on every side was itself enough to impress on everyone the prestige and merit of a Church career.
The Church of 1960, the enormous apparatus spread over five continents and dominant even in countries where it had been illegal almost within living memory, was the result of this long wave. But the long wave had exhausted itself; and at the same time it had began to show all the flaws that are inevitable even in the holiest enterprise this side of the veil. Church enterprises had been quietly dominated, over 150 years, by a practical and building spirit. While great figures such as Newman and Chesterton and Elgar and their continental and American likes drew public attention to the Church's intellectual heritage and unexhausted creativity, away from the limelight, the umpteenth parish church, private hospital or local bank was being set up.
But by 1960 this spirit had lost itself, giving way to a silent unhappiness, a sense of being behind the world at large, of being provincial and secondary. Consciously or not, the Church in its growth had adopted the attitudes and to some extent the goals of the world, and of course had not managed to beat the world on its own ground. The Church had grown, but not grown far enough to outrace its enemy the world. The Church could build a great and impressive university at Notre Dame, but it would never be as great and impressive as Harvard; the Church could build magnificent hospitals, but the state or state-directed national health services could build many, many more, just as good.
Beneath the cassock and the habit, religious felt, more and more, the cultural and ethical draw of the world. The colossal endeavour put forth in the last two centuries to survive the greedy attentions of the world at large had turned into an increasing insertion in that same world - but in a perceivedly backward and provincial position. In a sense, it was worse than in the days of Pius VII and Pius IX, when the powers of the state and the people were openly turned against the Church, the Church had something to fight, to endure, to work towards; now the world had more or less accepted it on its own terms, as a minor figure in its landscape, even a bit of a sentimental indulgence. The history of modern culture was taught - and never mind how many major figures, from Chesterton to Bernanos, from Stravinsky to Johnny Cash, were Christians - as though Christianity did not exist, and I have met many children of the sixties who literally have no notion whatever what the Church is, teaches or does. No wonder that every lie about her, from Hochhuth to Dan Brown, sells so well.
The explosion of self-indulgence in the sixties, from which the collapse of the religious orders and the crisis in vocations are often said to proceed, comes from this underlying crisis, which is a crisis of vocation in a much deeper way. The Church has survived, triumphantly survived, one of the most severe series of attacks ever witnessed. Though her position is still here and there - most notably in China - under threat, the issue is no longer in doubt. But in surviving, it has adopted too much of the world's way of looking at things. Too many churchmen felt not like successful priests or nuns, but like second-rate schoolteachers, office managers, or journalists. And the crisis was inevitably most intense in the religious orders, because they had been, much more than the secular priesthood, the carriers of the professional and practical spirit of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of them were the Church equivalent of professions: to enter the Salesians meant to become an educator, to enter the Dominicans, an academic, the Piarists, a medical worker, and so on. Secular priests were in less danger of forgetting the centrality of Mass and Gospel.
Another reason for the crisis is that the dynamic resource of population growth that had powered the growth in the number of Church and Church-related institutions was also clearly running out. The Victorian family of ten or twenty children was no longer the norm and never would be again. And here we have to deal with one of the great lies of our time. Women do not have children because they don't know how to avoid it; they don't have children out of ignorance. Women, or rather families - with the mother, of course, as a driving force - have children because they see it as a practical thing to do. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, they had children because many of them would die, and they wanted at least a few to live; in the nineteenth, increasingly, because many children could get gainful employment and enrich the family, including looking after the older generation. IN the twentieth century, these reasons progressively ceased to matter. Unprecedented understanding of hygiene made sure that nearly every child survived to become an adult; unexploited resources diminished in number and importance, so that the threat of unemployment became increasingly a feature of the landscape even of the richest countries. In this situation, women would have been certain to have less children, whether or not contraception and abortion had been available. Far from being so pathetically ignorant as to find themselves pregnant without knowing why or how to stop it, women at all times have had their ways to control the issue. In Greek myth, no less, fear of female refusal to comply with the demand for babies is frequently found under the symbolic disguise of tales about women toasting the seed grain before it was sowed, thus making the land infertile.
However, the demand for legalized contraception and abortion has always been presented under this guise - as a battle against ignorance. Third World women, it was said, bring children into the world by the dozen and then watch them starve to death because there is not enough food to feed them. (Of course, all the great African famines are really the result of war, but let's not say that too loud - it might spoil the picture.) This racist assumption - the poor ignorant blacks need us enlightened whites to look after their own best interests - gained hold across the West, not only because of its flattering racism, but above all because it had a real correspondence with what was seen as direct, local experience. In the year of the Lord 1960 the whole West was peopled by a generation who had seen their parents in the case of Catholics, their grandparents in the case of agnostics and Protestants, bring up families of ten or twenty children, and who instinctively knew that they would never in their lives consider any such effort or sacrifice. They could not but regard their parents or grandparents with a kind of affectionate contempt; people who had lived in so much more restricted a world, a world of ignorance and poverty. Emotionally, it was very easy to connect the large families of the European near past and the African present with the ignorance and backwardness of the past. Ultimately, the racist assumption that a Kenyan woman with ten children was too stupid to know the difference depended on an unspoken assumption that one's own mother or grandmother - so backward, so set in her ways, so closely associated with a provincial past - was equally stupid and ignorant. To those who were 20 in 1960, it never occurred that their parents, in their own day and in their own way, had been just as much rational, far-sighted and up-to-date as they were - only that conditions were different and made different requirements.
It was on the spur of this propaganda that the world-wards drift of so many priests and laymen was brutally broken. No wonder that it took years of thought and agonized debate before the unhappy Paul VI could bring himself to lay down the gauntlet of Humanae Vitae - not on the matter of abortion, but on the far more insidious and less attractive one of contraception. It was all too clear to anyone that the world had changed. Nobody could seriously imagine a Church whose average family had a dozen children; if nothing else, the idea of further crowding an already choked Western Europe was enough to make anyone's head spin. Population growth was dreaded, not altogether without reason: everyone could see the natural and artistic heritage of the richest countries being squeezed and concreted over. Families were shrinking, and at the time that seemed an almost unmitigated good. The only issue (nobody then publicly imagined that the Church would have tolerated abortion) was whether the Church was disposed to slacken the ban on artificial means of contraception.
Well. We know what happened. Surrounded by every kind of suggestion and hidden menace, flattered and pushed in one direction and one only, the Pope nevertheless steeled himself to do his duty; and the earth shook, and the heavens opened. From one day to the next, Catholics who had been cradling themselves in the unbroken if tepid acceptance of the modern world found that world drawn up against them in a ferocious, unbroken phalanx, backed by mountains of dollars and the wrath of all the mass media. Most of them, especially the more "prominent" - those on whom the worldly media had poured more attention in the recent past - broke and went over to the enemy. To live by the values of the world, to accept its views and its reprehensions, had become such a second nature to them that when the time came to show to whom they were loyal - they showed it.
It is this generation that is now dying out, and it is the religious institutions that harboured them that are shrinking. That consummation was forecast, though for the wrong reasons, more than half a century ago; people have been talking about a crisis of vocations for two or three generations. What had to happen was a real reorientation of the Church and its institutions, in a more purely religious direction, away from purely worldly success. One sign is the rise of the "ways" - Opus Dei, Comunione e Liberazione, Focolarini, neocatecumenals, even the unhappy Legion: formalized brotherhoods which do not amount to religious orders and do not have a specific purpose other than seek the full sanctification of all their members, lay and consecrated. And while all across the Church old and prestigious religious orders seem on the verge of dying out for lack of recruits, all across the Church, there are religious orders whose numbers and influence are growing - and they are, without exception, reformed versions of the traditional forms of monastic life and charisma. There is even a swiftly-growing order of blue-dressed nuns!
We don't have to fear an end to the consecrated life. Monasticism must be reformed; but it will not die so long as there is a Catholic Church. It is connaturate to it. Think of the Trappist Fathers, the silent monks, so strangely and impressively brought to the public attention by the movie The Great silence. Can you conceive of anything that suggests more strongly the high Middle Ages, the "age of faith" as it is sometimes called? But while the other ultra-rigorist order, the Carthusians, is indeed a product of the twelfth century, the Trappists come from the Age of Reason, and, of all countries, from France, from the strange and heartfelt vocation of a French nobleman. That's right: when the whole of Christendom, and France in particular, had been falling in love with rationalism for its own sake, France, the cultural centre of Europe, produced an order that declined to argue; as France and the world were growing intoxicated with the most brilliant, if not necessarily most sound, style of talk ever devised, from the aristocratic heart of that culture came men who made an offer to the Church and to God, not of their talk, but of their silence. And unlike most other orders, the Trappists (and the Carthusians) have never lacked for novices.
Edited and revised on Pentecost Day, 12 June 2011