Recent statistics reveal that in the past five years, more than 3,000 religious per year have chosen to leave  the consecrated life.

Catholic Culture is reporting that Archbishop José Rodríguez Carballo, secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life said statistics from his Congregation, as well as the Congregation for the Clergy, said the majority of those choosing to leave their orders did so at a “relatively young age.”

He cited several causes for this disturbing trend, such as the absence of spiritual life, the loss of a sense of community, and a loss of a sense of belonging to the Church – a loss manifest in dissent from Catholic teaching on “women priests and sexual morality,” he said.

Carballo also cited “affective problems” as causing the defections, such as heterosexual relationships in which the religious leave to get married, and homosexual relationships, which are “most obvious in men, but also present, more often than you think, between women.”

He went on to say that we’re living in a market-oriented world where “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.”

What is the solution to this problem? A renewed attention to the centrality of the Triune God in religious life, which in turn “brings with it the gift of oneself to others,” he said. The emphasis must be on the “radical nature of the Gospel” rather than on the “number of members or the maintenance of works.”

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