IRELAND may be running out of priests and nuns, but if a young Mother Teresa tried to join the Catholic clergy she would be sent packing for being psychologically unsuitable. Nuns and priests from Ireland's dwindling religious orders have revealed that all recruits are now psychologically vetted.
The screening process is partly to prevent a repetition of the clerical abuse scandals that hit Irish Catholicism in the 1990s and dramatically reduced the church's political power.
Father Kenneth Brady of the Passionist order based in Mount Argus, Dublin, said psychological testing had exacerbated the decline in men being accepted into the priesthood.
"Four said they wanted to apply to join last year. When it came to the crunch, only two made a formal application. They met with the psychologist and were assessed. One was deferred and one was accepted.
"There is no point in people coming to us expecting a sheltered life; the walls have come down a long time ago. They are going to meet the same kind of humanity as everywhere else, and they have to be ready for it."
Even nuns belonging to the same order as the late Mother Teresa accept that their most famous member may not have stood up to the rigorous vetting.
Sister Kathleen Fitzgerald, of the Loreto order based in Dublin, conceded that if a teenage Mother Teresa were to turn up today and offer herself as she did in the 1920s she would not be accepted. "Teresa was only 18 years old and referred to the order by a priest who was impressed by her religious temperament. Today, psychological profiling would weed her out."
Malachi O'Doherty, whose book Empty Pulpits will be published this month, said leading members of religious orders in Ireland admitted they now preferred quality to quantity in the priesthood.
He said: "The Catholic Church seems to be acknowledging that no one in their right minds would want to be a priest these days. And that is actually a sign of maturity on the part of the religious orders. It has to be in part to do with the scandals from the 1990s but also because the religious life is such a painful and lonely life, so only someone with a rugged sense of self-esteem could survive it."
Father Paschal Scallon, a Vincentian father, talks in the book about "widespread low-level depression among priests".
He says: "I have come across circumstances where colleagues were told, under no circumstances are you to encourage my son to be a priest. People are afraid that if their son went forward to be a priest he would be lonely beyond endurance."
But Father Scallon wants the vetting to be even more rigorous, given that people are going through the years of training and ordination and then dropping out. "In the past boys were accepted for training in junior seminaries at 14. The junior seminary is a thing of the past. Even 18 is too young now.
"In our own community if people want to come and join us we would be looking for them to be in their early to mid-20s but no older than 35," he says.
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(Source: TA)