Since the sixties and seventies, the Catholic Church in Ireland has gone through a dramatic revolution. Vocations numbers have dropped, orders have shrunk, the average age of clerics and religious has advanced and many institutions have sold off their property. As the primary educators - nuns, priests and brothers - were responsible for educating the vast majority of the children. They ran hospitals and hospices, looked after the old and sent missionaries to all parts of the world. Then everything changed and the religious life lost popularity as a career choice.

Many convents and monasteries are surviving with a declining population of sisters and clerics; many of those who lived in large communities of religious have moved out into the neighbourhoods they serve, living in ordinary houses in estates. However their less visible presence has not meant that they are no longer doing the good work they always did. It's just under a somewhat different job description than heretofore.

Whilst nuns and priests were easily visible with their habits distinguishing them, one order from another, they are less easily identifiable now. Often wearing secular clothes, the only characteristic of a cleric or religious may be their ring or a discreet crucifix on the lapel.

However their seeming ability to blend in to the world had done nothing to diminish the good work which they still do.

In many ways they are the unsung gospel carriers working with the forgotten of our society. (A young women told me the other day that she was in the her local Garda Station getting a form for her driving licence and there was someone in front of her concerned that a homeless man she knew had not been seen for several days. It was only when she gave her address that my friend realised it was a nun who lived in her vicinity. ) The religious life still appeals to a special sort of person . . .

those who feel they can and, more importantly, those who want to make a difference. It is for such altruistic aspirations that the religious attracts people who are willing to give up a lot on a personal level to help others. In a world where the Have's are often not inclined to share with Have-nots, such people are more important than ever.

The new breed of religious find themselves continuing the work of previous generations before them, looking after people's spiritual welfare, working with mentally and physically challenged; those with terminal illnesses and in need off respite care. They visit the old and those in hospital, providing pastoral care and counselling to others.

They still educate, tend the sick and look after the poor and needy and they still do missionary work abroad. However their job specification has widened to deal with asylum seekers, the abused, immigrants and those in shelters for the homeless: roles they would not have played when living in their previously cloistered monasteries and convents.

You'll find sisters working with prostitutes; clerics with young offenders, doing prison visits and running literacy schemes. They are also involved with prisoner's families and are there to help with loss and bereavement counselling.

It's true, in this 20th century, there may be fewer and priests and nuns, but their role is as spiritual and as vital as it always was. It has simply expanded to embrace a changing, much more cosmopolitan and secular world than ever before, and it's still an integral and essential part of the Catholic Church in Ireland of today.

Muriel Bolger