The secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and
Societies of Apostolic Life said in an October 29 address that over
3,000 men and women religious leave the consecrated life each year.In the address – a portion of which was reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano – Archbishop Jose Rodriguez Carballo said that statistics from his Congregation, as well as the Congregation for the Clergy, indicate that over the past five years, 2,624 religious have left the religious life annually.
When one takes into account additional cases handled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the number tops 3,000.
The prelate, who led the Order of Friars Minor from 2003 until his April 2013 curial appointment, said that the majority of cases occur at a “relatively young age.”
The causes, he said, include “absence of spiritual life,” “loss of a sense of community,” and a “loss of sense of belonging to the Church” – a loss manifest in dissent from Catholic teaching on “women priests and sexual morality.”
Other causes include “affective problems,” including heterosexual relationships that continue into marriage and homosexual relationships, which are “most obvious in men, but also present, more often than you think, between women.”
The world, the prelate continued, is undergoing profound changes from modernity to postmodernity – from fixed reference points to uncertainty, doubt, and insecurity.
In a market-oriented world, “everything is measured and evaluated according to the utility and profitability, even people.”
It is “a world where everything is soft,” where “there is no place for sacrifice, nor for renunciation.”