Pope urges religious orders to pray for new priests and nuns as their numbers continue to fall

Pope Francis meets a group of nuns during his weekly general audience in the Pope Paul VI hall at the Vatican, on Aug. 30, 2023. (Andrew Medichini / AP Photo, File)

Rome — Pope Francis urged religious orders on Monday to work and pray harder for new priests and nuns to join, as he acknowledged the congregations’ futures are at risk with the numbers of men and women entering Catholic religious life plummeting in parts of the world.

The Jesuit pope asked representatives of a half-dozen religious orders celebrating assemblies this summer in Rome how many people they each had training to be priests or nuns. Audience members responded saying eight, 12 and 17, with new members coming from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“The future is there, it’s true,” Francis told them. “We have to double these numbers!"

For over a decade, the overall number of Catholic priests and nuns from Europe and parts of the Americas has been in a free fall as new members fail to make up for deaths and desertions.

The new priests in the Global South have limited the overall global decline, with a total of 407,872 priests recorded in 2021 compared to 413,418 in 2011, according to Vatican statistics.

But the drop has been much more precipitous in female religious orders, which on a global scale have been shedding around 10,000 members per year to death and desertions for over a decade.

While there are exceptions with vibrant, growing communities, the number of religious sisters worldwide stood at 608,958 in 2021 compared to 713,206 a decade prior, according to the most recently available statistics. As with the men, Europe and the Americas have seen the greatest declines.

The downward trends have prompted some orders to collapse and others to to scale down and sell off properties so that aging members can be cared for in their final years. Some orders have stopped accepting new members since their futures aren’t assured.

Francis, who has urged religious superiors to not lower the bar to admission to mitigate lower numbers, encouraged the priests, brothers and nuns to be careful in training new recruits.

“You have to have successors who will continue your charism,” he said, referring to the underlying spirit that inspires a religious order. “Pray, pray.”