Reclusive monks want fresh blood for thinned ranks

Crypt of the Skulls in the Capuchin Chapel in Rome. Photo / Supplied

The sober-looking advert fills a quarter of a page in Switzerland's premier "executive search" magazine, but the kind of vacancy it is trying to fill is no ordinary one.

Along with no pay, "freedom from the common couple relationship" is cited as an upside of a vocation for which new members are desperately sought.

The recruitment drive has been launched by Switzerland's normally reclusive Roman Catholic Capuchin monks. The religious order is in such perilous decline it has taken the unprecedented step of advertising for fresh blood in the country's main job-vacancy magazine, Alpha, which has a circulation of more than one million.

"We are chronically over-aged," Willi Anderau, the spokesman for the Swiss Capuchins, said. "There are hardly any people joining the order these days, we are suffering from what might be described as a personnel shortage - so a job-vacancy advert is quite logical."

The advertisement appeared in the "banking and insurance" section. It calls on young Catholic "bankers, journalists, teachers, theologians, tradesmen, lawyers and communication experts aged between 22 and 35" to consider joining the order.

Applicants should be "independent, yet capable of communal living, curious and show initiative".

But life in the order is about as far removed from an average banking or insurance executive's lifestyle as it is possible to get. The advert makes this clear: "We offer you no pay, but spirituality and prayer, contemplation, an egalitarian lifestyle, free of personal material riches and the common model of a couple relationship."

It takes three years of apprenticeship before novices can be fully ordained as monks. Monastery life is structured with prayer, community life and work.

"Anyone who thinks they can take it easy here has got it wrong," Anderau said.

The recruitment drive has been launched in a desperate attempt to stop Switzerland's Capuchins from simply dying out. The Franciscan order has halved in size during the past decade and now has only 200 members left in the country. Their average age is 70. Two monasteries have been forced to close and a third in the Appenzell region is due to shut down next year. The monks hope to attract between 10 and 20 new members through their recruitment drive.

But Switzerland's Capuchins are not alone; a dramatic decline in the number of Roman Catholic monks and nuns has occurred globally during the past three decades, their ranks dropping by a quarter.

Remarkably, the decline has coincided with a surge in "stressed executives" seeking temporary escape by going on weekends or weeks of spiritual contemplation now offered at several monasteries in Europe.

CAPUCHIN MONKS
A Franciscan order:
* 200 members left
* 70 average age
* 2 monasteries forced to close

- Independent