Some cloisters renewal started long before the Vatican issued its decree. Most of the 51 cloistered communities in The Netherlands already have TV. One convent packs birth-control pills.

To the secular mind, the vision of monks and nuns living silently and praying ceaselessly behind cloister walls has always seemed, at best, a kind of regrettable eccentricity—harmless enough, but useless too. Yet the Roman Catholic Church, and such Protestant sympathizers as the Monks of Taizé in France, have…