Curial official says it will, as it always has, start with the religious orders:

Archbishop Rode said he’s already seeing signs that the church is responding to the challenge with fresh energy and new forms of religious life.

He said he met in January with the pope to present a list of 25 requests for pontifical approval from new religious congregations and secular institutes. They shared some key characteristics, including the wearing of a religious habit as a visible sign of identity, significant time reserved for daily prayer, and an emphasis on fraternal and community life.

"Far from the kind of dispersion that was widespread after the council, they are taking great care to promote cohesion of the religious community," he said. "The pendulum is swinging from, shall we say, a secularist euphoria back toward a certain severity. But note that this is not an imposed severity — these young people want it and demand it."

An interview well worth your time – it’s rather wide-ranging, as the Archbishop, we’re grateful to see, brings lay movements into the discussion as well.

Of course, the point of irony is that these dying religious orders thought that they were on the road their predecessors had been. The knew the importance of religious orders in past periods of renewal, and, in embracing, as the Archbishop says repeatedly, a "secularlization" model, they believed they were being consistent with their traditions.

Take a look, for example, at Sr. Joan Chittister’s memoir The Way We Were: A Story of Conversion and Renewal, which is a sad exercise in self-delusion. One can’t deny that the formation and life in community of many women religious before Vatican II had deep flaws. It was, in many ways, a system destined to fail once the context and environment changed, once the reins were loosened even a little bit. There was a lot of unhealthiness in those places.

But Sister Joan’s stance towards the present situation is just odd. She writes of how healthy her community is now – why? Not because it’s, you know, growing, but because the individuals within that community are free, creative and led by the Spirit where ever. It’s one of those examples of how making your definitions clear is so important. Most of us would define a healthy community as one which gives life to others, and, to put it bluntly, reproduces. She defines it differently – a health is defined by the individuals’ sense of themselves.

It’s startling to think, really, that in this country at least, orders like the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity and many others…will barely exist.