By Michael Motes

The decline in the number of men and women being attracted to a religious vocation ranks high on Father Daniel Lyons list of problems facing the Catholic Church in this country today.

The widely read Jesuit columnist, who serves as editor-at-large of TWIN CIRCLE and the NATIONAL REGISTER, discussed a wide variety of topics during a recent BULLETIN interview.

The vocation crisis, according to Father Lyons, is two-fold. First bishops must meet their obligation to see that the seminaries are run in such a way that priests have confidence in them.

A second factor is that one-third of the Catholic schools in the country have closed, eliminating the attraction of youngsters to religious vocations during their more formative years.

Concerning vocations for women, Father Lyons said, “The orders of nuns who have given up wearing some kind of identifiable habit have a very poor future. They are not going to attract girls as the other orders are.

“The Church has got to find modern ways to reach people if we are to attract them to vocations,” he said. “We’ve got to show them that the Peace Corps is very inferior to becoming a priest or nun. We’ve got to find modern ways of advertising!”

Father Lyons, who studied theology in Dublin and still returns to Ireland at least once a year, also had some comments on the situation in Northern Ireland and the recent British elections.

He explained that unfair housing laws, gerrymandering the Catholic vote and discrimination in employment have long been the three main issues of dispute in the strife-ridden country.

Housing and gerrymandering have been more or less resolved, he said, but the issue of employment discrimination remains.

“This is still going on at an enormous level and we can not expect the violence to stop entirely until pressure is put on the government and on industry to do away with this discrimination,” said Father Lyons.

On the recent elections he commented, “The Labor government is not beholden to the Members of Parliament in Northern Ireland because they tend to be conservative. Unfortunately, the balance of power in London is so close that neither party is able to discipline Northern Ireland or try to be firm.

“They are so inclined to play up the MPs in the North, nine out of 12 of whom are Protestant, because they need the votes.”

“In many ways the situation with the Catholic minority is very similar to the situation with the blacks in this country 30 years ago.”

Another timely topic on which Father Lyons expressed an opinion was the recent end to the Farah boycott. While he agrees with the general idea of a boycott to achieve a certain goal, he feels that “the picketing of every big store in the country and forcing an employer into a real economic hardship in order to force him to sign a contract before even having an election is very unfair.”

“Picketing amounts to harassing and leads to a certain amount of violence. Whether a union condones this or not it still leads to it,” he said.

He also feels that the involvement of the clergy in the Farah dispute amounted to “over-involvement.”

“I think the Church should deal on the level of principles,” she said. “Where I disagree with Bishop Metzger of El Paso (who strongly supported the boycott) is with his statement that collective bargaining is the only way to have social justice.

“Nearly 80 per cent of the workers in America are not under collective bargaining and I would say that 90 percent of the people working for the Catholic Church are not under collective bargaining and that 100 per cent of the people working for Bishop Metzger are not under collective bargaining. So I think this is a strange statement!”

Father Lyons has equally strong opinions on the lettuce and grape boycotts and Cesar Chavez.

“NC News has been quite slanted in its coverage of the Chavez situation,” he says. “Therefore Catholic newspapers cannot be any more objective that the news service on which they rely.

“I think that Chavez has a certain amount of charisma about him and that he has played up the race angle unduly. The fact of the matter is that only a small percentage of the workers are even Mexican. Approximately 90 per cent are permanent residents of California and not migrant workers.”

Father Lyons feels that the question of the impeachment of President Nixon is a “party squabble.” He explains his reasoning by saying:

“First the Democrats wanted to show that Nixon had committed a crime. Now the whole propaganda drive of the Democratic Party is that the president does not have to commit a crime to be impeached. Nixon is being scalped for political reasons to bring his party down.

“I’m inclined to think that the chances are slim that impeachment would pass the Senate. But you can almost guess by the number of Democrats involved how the voting would go.”

Asked whether he as seen “The Exorcist,” Father Lyons laughingly replied, “No, but only because the lines have been too long.”

This brought about the question of why so many people today respond to passing fads and current whims, whether it be interest in exorcism, the recent series of UFO reports or the current streaking craze.

“Young people today have almost been deprived of religion” was Father Lyon’s explanation for such interests.

“The pentecostal movement is due in part to the undisciplined age in which we live. A pentecostal group is able to reach people that we priests can’t. This should teach us that we have not been selling Christ as a human person and that we should as far as young people are concerned.

“The time has long passed when we can tell kids to memorize this or that and think they will come out good Catholics. They’ve got to get the spirit and humanity of Christ.”

Father Lyons, who was in Atlanta for several radio and TV appearances and to address a writing class at Georgia State University, will travel to Norway this month for an interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Future plans also call for a return of his daily five-minute radio program of news analysis.

In the past few years he has authored or co-authored “Vietnam Crisis,” “Left of Liberal,” “Voice of Peking,” “The USSR vs. the USA” and other books as well as numerous magazine articles.