I was an English language teacher at a Catholic seminary in Dhaka on Asad Avenue called the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI). After class, I used to have regular conversations with the rector, Fr. Bejoy D' Cruz, a short, portly young man with intent eyes.
One afternoon, over a cup of coffee, he was telling me how difficult it had become to recruit young men to the priesthood. He said that young people in the west preferred to join NGOs.
This was a revelation.
We have seen that people in Bangladesh join or set up NGOs for rational reasons - money. However, westerners do the same for the old, extra-rational motives that once directed them to the pews and pulpits. The number of priests and nuns have been declining in the occident, the number of nuns especially so, the total of those not called offset by the increasing ranks from Asia and Africa. All over Europe and North America (albeit, as mentioned, not in Asia and Africa), the numbers of priests and parishioners will continue their remorseless decline, as observed by a newspaper. I started class with eight seminarians, and next year there were sixteen. God has emigrated.
In a conversation with an American priest, Br. Donald, he said it was much better to be here in Bangladesh, where people take religion seriously, than in America.
Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, discusses the issue of 'meaning' as addressed by a French thinker, Luc Ferry (p 677). The latter gives instances of young people who have achieved a strong sense of meaning in their lives through membership of Medecins Sans Frontieres, but 'horizontally', not 'vertically'. No doubt, similar observations can be made about membership of other NGOs, like Amnesty International or Article 19. Thus, people find meaning in their lives through something greater than themselves, without being other-worldly. But they, nevertheless, manifest a need for transcendence.
Again, the same writer observes the mobilisation of resources in the event of a distant calamity, such as a flood or earthquake. He attributes this outpouring of empathy not only to the media and methods of transportation and the fact of economic plenitude, but something less tangible, not unconnected to the Christian past. "The same media and means of transport don't awaken the same response everywhere; it is disproportionately strong in ex-Latin Christendom (p 371)."
Taylor observes that new forms arise in history in spiritual traditions which are carried forward and reshaped so that subsequent periods show the same spiritual inclinations in a revised, but mirrored form. "I have argued that this is true for exclusive humanism in relation to Christian faith, in the centrality of benevolence, for instance. I have even argued that exclusive humanism couldn't have arisen without this analogue to agape. (pp 679-680)" Indeed, religion is reconstituted.
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