The Drudge Report is highlighting this BBC article on the decline of religious life in the Catholic Church. Here’s the basic gist:

Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006.

During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, the number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by a quarter.

The downward trend accelerated despite a steady increase in the membership of the Catholic Church to more than 1.1bn.

However, correspondents say even this failed to keep pace with the overall increase in world population.

I’ve often wondered what the decline in religious life has meant for the average Catholic. Personally, I can count the number of religious sisters and brothers that I know on one hand–and this includes people I met growing up in Baltimore, attending college and then working in Princeton, and now living and working in Manhattan. If I include diocesan priests (technically “secular”), the number jumps up, but even then it’s fair to say that I don’t really “know” most of the priests who have administered the sacraments to me. If push came to shove, there would probably be a couple priests from college and New York who, in a time of trouble, I’d feel comfortable going to see. My parents experienced something different. They, of course, went to Catholic schools all their life, were taught by religious brothers and sisters, and still have vivid memories of the relationships that were forged–relationships that secured them in the faith. One wonders what the loss of religious witness and a ministry of presence has meant to the Church simply on a person-to-person level.

Of course times change. Renewal movements in the Church have opened new possibilities for Christian vocation and holiness in ordinary life. People who might have joined religious communities in times past now find themselves involved with groups like Communion and Liberation, Opus Dei, Regnum Christi, Focolare, and the Neo-Catechumenal Way–all providing lay people with models, organizational supports, and what certainly seem to some like lay vocations. The members of these groups say that a rising tide lifts all ships and a general increase in holiness in the Church will–and, according to their experience, already has–led to priestly and religious vocations. If they’re right, and they likely are, one shudders to think how much more drastic the decline in religious life would be if the renewal movements didn’t exist.

Some will argue that the Church doesn’t need robust religious communities, especially not the ones in monasteries and convents. It’s no longer the Middle Ages, and the Catholic Church doesn’t need to sustain Western culture behind the walls of the Carmel. So much for contemplative life–and the prayers that sustain the Church. The active religious communities? Well, they’re fine and good, but can’t we leave this social work to professional social workers? And in light of the feminist movement, can’t women aspire to something more than soothing bed sores in Calcutta? Somehow the personal witness of a life radically devoted to Christ in loving service to others seems radically discounted.

Yet the institutional loss has been no less severe. And here my mind immediately jumps to some of the most pressing needs daunting contemporary society: decent education for those who can’t afford it; food, drink, shelter and assistance to independence for the homeless; health care for those whose salaries can just meet their bare necessities like rent, heating and electricity, and groceries. One wonders if the state will ever be able to meet these needs–let alone the need for personal care and human love. Maybe the charitable activities of the Church alone will suffice. What would happen to our inner cities if Catholic schools, hospitals, soup kitchens and shelters shut down? But the sad reality is that many of them depend on governmental moneys. When the Church had a ready supply of celibate religious–without the need to earn a wage to provide for a family, with the freedom to give themselves completely to their ministry, and expecting (even vowing) a life of poverty–staffing Catholic schools and Catholic hospitals was much easier.

The situation isn’t entirely bleak. One is forced to think about communities like the Nashville Dominican sisters, or the Sisters of Life, or the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal–youthful, vibrate, orthodox, flourishing communities. Maybe they’re the future of religious life.

I’m just thinking out loud, and I’m rambling, so I’ll stop here. But maybe this Lent a prayer intention should be for an increase in vocations to religious life.

Last week I wrote about what I perceived as the constant barrage of press against universities and colleges with large endowments: “These are rumors of war—of people building for an attack on private institutions with lots of money. I expect the drumbeat will grow louder.”

Yesterday in the New York Times, the drumbeat did. This time it was in the form of an article with the basic gist that “some schools have a lot more money than others, and it’s not fair.” And no, that is not too glib a summary:

The result is that America’s already stratified system of higher education is becoming ever more so, and the chasm is creating all sorts of tensions as the less wealthy colleges try to compete. Even state universities are going into fund-raising overdrive and trying to increase endowments to catch up.

The wealthiest colleges can tap their endowments to give substantial financial aid to families earning $180,000 or more. They can lure star professors with high salaries and hard-to-get apartments. They are starting sophisticated new research laboratories, expanding their campuses and putting up architecturally notable buildings.

Other campuses are fighting to retain faculty, and some, with less cachet, are charging tuition that rival Harvard’s and scrambling to explain why their financial aid cannot match the most prosperous of the Ivy League.

“It’s a huge difference,” said Sandy Baum, an economist at Skidmore College. “You don’t have to go very far down the food chain before you get to institutions that feel real constraints about how they spend money. Princeton can do what they want to do, but not many schools can.”

The article goes on to discuss public universities—Virginia Tech and Berkeley—that are trying to build an endowment so they rely less on their annual funding from their states. Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, and Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton, have weighed in on spending endowment funds during times of prosperity.

But the most striking words came from Rep. John Tierney, a Democrat from Massachusetts:

Even as colleges race to raise their endowments, high tuitions have caused a backlash among parents, graduates and members of Congress, criticizing them for sitting on wealth. Typically, colleges spend less than 5 percent a year from their endowments.

“These institutions continue to build up their kitties,” said Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They say it is the schools’ money. But it is not all the schools’ money. Some of it is. But when a donor gives them money, he is able to give more because he is not paying taxes. So some of what they have is federal money, every student’s money, every family’s money.”

“It may be time to change tax policy,” Mr. Tierney added.

As I suspected when I first began following this story, the fight over endowments is, at its heart, a fight over private property. It brings up questions whose answers should be obvious. Of course the money that the taxpayer has earned is his own. Of course private institutions have the right to reap the benefits of sound investing, even if they do so better than others. And of course Americans have the right to give their money to private institutions that they think will educate the country’s best and brightest.

This should all be common sense, but, of course, it is not. And so the drum beats on.

Oh for the days when legislators took their calling seriously! Yes, in 1897 pi came this close (my thumb and forefinger are a millimeter apart) to being formally declared 3.2 in the Indiana legislature. That is until some pointy head blurred the line between ivory tower and state.

Who will ascend the bully pulpit today and declare that $19.95 should be officially rounded off to twenty bucks? Where is the pol who will buck the special interests to say that 5 guzzinta 19 about 4 times?

Who will protect us from the exact? Who will ward off the depredations of specificity? Who will rescue us from the icy seas of precision? Which one of the candidates today will stand up for almost, sort of, and kinda?

Help us T.I. Record . . . you’re our only hope.

I knew about the Our Lady of Guadalupe votive candles beside the refried beans at the grocery store.

And there’s HappyMart in southern Virginia, with guns and milkshakes at the same counter.

But Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptu Mundi at Target.com?!

So Stallone is following up Rambo 4, which has cast some light on the brutal regime in Myanmar (the former Burma), with a personal commitment to agitate in the cause of anti-junta forces there, if necessary.

“With the release of ‘Rambo,’ anti-junta activists are using the film’s lines such as ‘Live for nothing, die for something’ as rallying points with hopes that the world will hear their cries and that it may spur a change of regime,” writes reporter Nathan Black.

Among other notable points made in this article:

• “A week after ‘Rambo’ made a nearly No. 1 box office debut . . .” “Nearly No. 1″ means No. 2 (and now No. 5).

• “People finally got the idea of how brutal these people are,” said Stallone, whose conversion to the Christian faith during the filming of ‘Rocky Balboa’ reportedly impacted the storyline to the latest Rambo entry.” As far as he has discussed his renewed spiritual life, Stallone has returned to the Catholic Church of his upbringing. He has not “converted” as the term is commonly understood.

• “Stallone said he will be making a fifth and final installment of ‘Rambo.’” In fact, he has come out and said just the opposite.

The brutality of the dictatorship in Myanmar is undisputed, as is the need for more attention to be brought to the Karen people and the horrors they have endured. Whether a film drenched in blood and shot like a first-person-shooter computer game is the best way to go about this is what’s doubtful. (It is interesting to note that Stallone has been talking recently of remaking Death Wish—the “classic” revenge film of the 1970s era of urban street crime nightmares. Rambo 4 plays out much like a revenge film, even if Stallone’s intentions were more high-minded.)

. . . there was Phil. Or whoever the deity was who required animal sacrifices to keep from getting his panties in a bunch. As Zeus was god of thunder, “Phil” was god of excess humidity, making him one of the least popular divinities, explaining his sudden disappearance.