RADICAL YOUTH?

Sister of Charity in India

In France, one of this week’s events is a new film by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, director of Les Héritiers (the Inheritors), a wonderful movie about a high-school class and their project on teenagers in the Holocaust. The new film concerns what we now call the “radicalization” of teenage girls, who often in a short space of time become what they think are strict Muslims and set off for Syria. Listening to an interview with the admirable director, who has lived with these girls and their families for three years, I was struck with a dolorous thought of great force: WHERE IS THE CHURCH?

            From what Mention-Schaar said, it was clear that many if not most of these girls, not at all from a Muslim or even immigrant background, were responding to on the one hand a barrage of indoctrination on the vile immorality of Western capitalist society, and on the other hand a burning desire for a life that is pure, upright, dedicated to both a divine plan and human betterment.

            Uh, huh. There was a time – and my wife remembers it well from her own childhood – when such girls burned to be missionaries or teaching nuns or religious working with the poorest of the poor. Mother Teresa was an example of those, probably a minority, but still, who went through with it.

            But even before this connection came up, when last year was proclaimed a Year of the Religious, and a number of people were lamenting the decline in vocations, I was astonished by the lack of recruiting, advertising or even public relations the Roman Catholic Church (and the Anglicans are no better) is doing on the subject. Supposedly, they want the young or the relatively young: many orders take no one over 45. But are they lifting a finger to get them? No. For a time I was a member of an Internet group of Carthusian enthusiasts called the International Friends of St Bruno. In the 2 or 3 years I spent with them I don’t think I ever saw a posting from someone under 40.

            It is, and probably always has been, a feature of the teenage years to want to be an arrow on a divine bow: straight, sharp, noble, and aimed and shot at a deserving target. Nowadays, it does not occur to many to turn to a religious order to be arrowed; but the social networks turn a startling number of them to an Islamist jihad. Were we to see a tenth of that recruiting activity, both in quantity and in quality, on the social networks for the Carmelites, the Carthusians, the Benedictines, the Cistercians or the Franciscans, the number of novices would shoot up; and even if only a minority stay the course, fewer monasteries and convents would be inhabited only by the agèd and fewer would close. And for those who want activity, who burn to help the downtrodden, the Sisters of Charity are still in Calcutta and elsewhere. Pure you can be; dedicated you have to be; needed you will be. Of course you won’t have the thrill of the Kalashnikov; but on the other hand you won’t have the sweat and the bad breath of the freedom fighter on top of you whose slave you have been declared. And nowadays, your parents might even – oh joy! -- disapprove.

young Carmelites

Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal