Add those worries to the even more material concern about buildings and properties in need of constant maintenance and even the well-established orders with healthy endowments feel a pinch. Some orders will not survive their straitened circumstances. Indeed, one order, the Poor Clares of the Reparation, folded in January when its last member died. I think we can confidently expect a great deal of the communities that exist in the church at large to disappear because most of them are in their final stage of organic decline. Smith's own order gets 30 to 80 applications annually.
Pilgrimages draw record numbers.
I don't think the question really is how will the communities survive. Most of them won't. Anderson agrees that many orders existing today may not make it through another generation. Twenty-one of the 23 traditional orders in the Episcopal Church belong to it. Examples of rebirth and reform come from many places.