A book that’s being published this fall and has already found a bit of press is Double-Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns by Kenneth Briggs.

I reviewed it here back in May – I basically found the book’s "argument" flawed and deceptive. Oh, the first third, which reached further back into history, was okay, but the majority of the book, tracing the present dire straits of most women’s religious orders, that blamed the problems on…the bishops and patriarchy…didn’t exactly grab me:

The rest of it is …far too worshipful of the courageous band of Kane, Chittister and their many sisters. But, even as the book sort of stands in awe at their brilliance, constantly under siege from the Vatican, you know, it offers them a long, unintentional, backhanded insult.

For in essence, what Briggs does is to free the religious women themselves from even a speck of responsibility for the collapse of their own orders.

Which, I must insist, is ironic for a book that would like us to celebrate the brilliance and strength of women – to make them victims.

In a recent issue of NCR(egister), Judy Roberts uses the book to take a look at some orders that are growing – a phenomenon that Briggs mostly ignores in his book:

Sister Carole would not speculate on why more traditional communities seem to be attracting vocations. As a result of reform, she said, “We’ve gone from living on a very superficial level where holiness was measured by how deep your pleats and how shiny your shoes were to a place where we now understand and value that the spirituality of all the faithful is a much more real, everyday part of who we are.”

In Double Crossed, Briggs downplays the gains of communities such as the Nashville Dominicans by saying that concern with numbers is more akin to America’s obsession with sales figures and thus not apropos to religious life.

He also calls the growth of traditional communities “fleeting and illusory,” adding, “[They] might flourish, after a fashion, loyal to the directives of nostalgic bishops, but the membership of such communities would likely be skewed in the direction of Catholic conservatism rather than, as in days past, representative of a cross-section of the church.”

Joseph Varacalli, author of The Catholic Experience in America (Greenwood Press), takes another view of such communities, seeing them as part of a restorationist or “neo-orthodox” movement in the church. For restorationists, he writes, the causes of the shortage include “the lack of a fundamental commitment to recruitment, a constant disparagement of the importance of religious life, and the liberalization that has occurred within female religious orders that has made the call far less distinctive, challenging and well defined.”

Sister Carole of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious would disagree.

She does not equate declining numbers of religious women with the reforms that followed Vatican II and thinks that changes in the institutional cycle of the church combined with social trends may have as much to do with the decrease as anything.

“I entered religious life in 1960 when there were only three or four viable options for young women,” she said. “You either became a secretary, a nurse, a teacher or you married…. Most young women graduating from high school today have the whole world in front of them and have all sorts of options to choose from.”

Other factors in the drop in numbers of women religious, Sister Carole said, include Catholic parents having smaller families, making them less likely to encourage their children to pursue religious life, a culture in which heroes for young people are those who achieve celebrity or success, and the deterioration of permanent commitment in the culture.

Sister Carole is absolutely right. There is a sociological dimension to the drop in religious vocations (of both men and women) that is too often ignored. Pre-Vatican II formation of religious women was problematic in many ways, and the part of Briggs’ book that was helpful was his discussion of the movement in the 1930’s through the 50’s to reform the way that religious women received their higher education, when they did.  However, that does not address the point as to why the religious communities that are growing are those that are more "traditional" in their life than those that …aren’t.