Show your sisters some respect.

Never a week goes by that we, in our parish church, don't include prayers that young men will be inspired to serve in the priesthood. And our diocesan bishop has recently offered a formal prayer petitioning that men and boys will seek careers as priests.

As well he and we might. The specter of priestless parishes may well haunt the dreams of our bishops. In more than a few U.S. dioceses, parishes without a resident priest are already a reality, and in many places priests are doubling up, serving as pastor in two parishes.

While the need for more vocations to the priesthood is real enough and eminently worth praying to remedy, isn't there something missing in our petitions? Have we thrown in the towel when it comes to encouraging women to choose religious life?

One needs only to meditate on the history of the Catholic Church in the United States and wonder what that history would have been like without the contribution of consecrated religious women - the tritely but accurately called "good nuns."

In the first place, the U.S. Catholic school system, especially the parochial elementary schools, has been the backbone of Catholic strength in this country, and anyone who does not accept that fact as truth had better be prepared to explain the vitality of Catholic life here when compared to Catholic life in the rest of the world.

The almost incredible sacrifice of nuns teaching in parochial elementary schools over the years can be mind-boggling to observers. Forswearing almost everything but food, clothing, and shelter, these devout women brought to their classrooms a unique dedication to teaching - capable of overcoming whatever shortcomings of "higher education" they sometimes had.

But early in this century enlightened superiors began to demand that their religious sisters be educated in ways comparable to the education of priests and seminarians. Ironically they sometimes found it necessary to stand up to the presiding bishop who had a penchant for patting (figuratively, of course) the "good nuns" on the head.

To inject a personal note, I vividly recall in the 1940s a distinguished teaching sister, chairperson of he political science department in an outstanding Catholic college, telling me, through angry tears, that the priest assigned by the bishop to "monitor" the teaching sisters had forbidden her to read the Communist Manifesto! It would, apparently, give rise to impure political thoughts.

Mercifully, that know-nothingism is a thing of the past. Religious women are today educated at least as well as priests and the lay women and men who teach in Catholic schools. And there would seem to be no evidence that their greater erudition has occasioned any loss of dedication.

The number of religious women in the United States has, like their priestly counterparts, diminished substantially in recent decades. Even more alarming, perhaps, the cohort is aging, with few young candidates joining the religious orders.

Some simplistically attribute diminishing vocations to the fact that many sisters have left the classroom to engage in other apostolates. This argument is disproved by the fact that some orders of sisters continuing to be teachers exclusively have also experienced decreased vocations. A few even suggest that the sisters should not have abandoned their 15th-century habits. And the growing secularism of our entire society cannot be ruled out as a contributing factor.

Personally I believe that, to a large extent, the decline in vocations to the religious sisterhood is the result of declining appreciation and respect for these women on the part of the rest of us Catholics. (To a lesser extent this is also a cause for declining vocations to the priesthood.)

There was a time when a girl expressing a wish to become a nun would have brought joy to her family. How often (how seldom?) is that true today? How often do we go out of our way to show our respect for a sister's vocation even when a particular nun might not be someone we would like living next door to us? How often do we look at a nun and say to ourselves, "It's a tough job and I'm glad I don't have to do it"?

Is there a better way that we and the church in general could show our respect for the religious sisterhood than by carefully selecting a few and preparing them for ordination to the priesthood? Many sisters, in fact, are already eminently prepared educationally and spiritually, as demonstrated by a lifetime of devotion.

Sooner or later, God knows, this will happen. May "sooner" be part of our prayer for an increase in vocations to the religious sisterhood.