Transitus: The Discontinuity and Death of Religious Communities in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In religious community life, the question of one’s own finitude in the perspective of the infinite is always at play, but communities are now really having to let go of organizational and spiritual patterns on the one hand and develop new ones on the other. Probably clearer than anywhere else in the world, the decades-long exodus of organized religious life can be seen and felt in the Netherlands and Belgium, where centuries-old congregations are now being dissolved and their monasteries repurposed. In this article, I will study the phenomenon of religious discontinuity and death from five analytical perspectives: historical, sociological, organizational, psychological, and theological. An overall perspective is that of “transitus spirituality”, of individual ways (as well as inabilities) to experience a form of completion and find closure when dealing with the discomforting fact of collective discontinuity and corporate death, of the (imminent) end of one’s own community. I will conclude with a reflection on the future of organized religious life.