Vatican cardinal sees crisis in defections from religious orders

The secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious has called attention to a crisis in vocations, noting that more than 2,000 male and female religious quit their orders in the past two years.

Archbishop José Rodriguez Carballo said that Pope Francis was worried about the “hemorrhage” of religious vocations. 

The phenomenon is particularly troubling, he said, because most of the religious who are leave have spent years in their congregations before determining that they “never felt a vocation.”