Check out this article. It appeared today in, of all places, Huffington Post, as their lead article. It discusses the uptick in women religious vocations. I don't know if the numbers are statistically significant, but interesting anyway. It follows the story of several women contemplating that life, as well as several who have been nuns for many years. It is a longish article, and surprisingly sympathetic, given the usual slant of HuffPost on things Catholic. Worth a look.
Update: It's not the lead article any more, they moved on to the upcoming ICE raids this weekend (which follow the usual Trump custom of never taking the weekend off from doing/saying/Twittering things awful or outrageous.) But the nun article is still there if you follow the link.
Here's a NASA engineer becoming a nun.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/07/09/why-i-gave-my-job-nasa-become-nun
Thanks for sharing that link, Stanley. I especially liked the part when she was able to see her whole life as a mimistry, whether she was talking about God or not.
DeleteThanks for sharing, Katherine.
ReplyDeleteI cringe at the romantic language these girls use, though I know it is par for the course among some nuns/orders.
But it seems to me they are looking for substitutes for broken families, boyfriends who didn't work out, and relentless and empty consumerism. they want to simple things up. Does one need a nunnery for that?
Their quests also seem to emphasize personal happiness in a marriage between themselves and Jesus. They talk mostly about what THEY want, and I fear they don't get the kind of experiences the older nuns describe in the article.
Still, the sincerity of their religious feeling comes through, and one prays they find their way.
Side note: Will an order take an epileptic person? I thought you had to be free of disease, disability, and under 50 to be considered. Too bad for all of us who could see ourselves devoted to a religious community as widows.
Jean, yes, I noticed the part about the broken families and relationships, too. That was a contrast with the woman in Stanley's link who seemed to be approaching her vocation more from a place of joy. But I guess everyone has to start from where they are.
DeleteAs far as orders taking people with health or psychological problems, or who are older, I think there has always been some wiggle room. I am remembering one of Therese of Lisieux's sisters, Leonie, who had some problems, but ended up finding an order that accepted her after a couple of false starts. Nowadays we would probably say she was on the Asperger's spectrum, or something like that. Back then she was just painted as "difficult".
I know one nun who entered the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict after her husband died and her kids were grown. Hard to tell people's ages, but pretty sure she was 50 plus.
There is an order of nuns in France which accepts women with Down's Syndrome, The Little Sisters Disciples of the Lamb: https://www.ucatholic.com/blog/this-beautiful-religious-order-is-for-women-with-down-syndrome/
DeleteSome my girlfriends and I formed the Little Sisters of the Homeless Pets. Tongue in cheek, but we did do animal welfare things until we started dying off.
DeleteFriend of mine wants me to join some monks in Europe so I can send her excellent beer. I told her I'm too old to be accepted and I'd drink the profits if I were.
DeleteWhen the (mostly) boys (and some gals) came home after World War II there was a surge in vocations to religious life. Four years of chaos led to a desire for order, certainty, whatever, and the sociological explanation does not preclude -- or explain away -- the religious impulse, which war might have put in a sharper-than-usual perspective.
ReplyDeleteThose of us who were more settled and had already seen it all were not as affected by 9/11 followed by the collapse of neoliberal economics and all its works and all its empty promises. But for people looking for a job in those disrupted years, the experience had to be more like war and less like, say, the Beatles.
None of those women reminded me of Thomas Merton, but, as a friend of mine who recently re-read Seven Story Mountain said, there were not a whole lot of signs of Thomas Merton in the first 100 pages of that.
Tom, don't you have a daughter who is a Visitandine sister? Does she say anything about an uptick in vocations to her order?
DeleteThe Philadelphia Visitation nuns have had a couple of women try it out since Lise (Sister Elizabeth Ann) joined, but neither stuck. A Pennsylvania winter in their drafty mansion could be the problem. Or the young ones may just see so many old ones that they realize all the work will land on them. St. Elizabeth Ann is happy.
DeleteHow long has she been a member? I think it would be a happy life, if one had the vocation. Poverty and chastity I maybe could handle, I never did think I could do the obedience thing.
DeleteShe went in in 2014 and took final vows in 2016. She was a widow, without children, and a really late vocation, although she had been a Franciscan tertiary for years.
DeleteLast night we watched an old BBC Father Brown mystery in which authority and obedience in a cloistered order was critical to the plot.
Used to be, at least in our working class neighborhood, that the oldest boy was sent to seminary and the oldest girl to the convent. Didn't always take, of course, and the family would respond in different ways, from shame "oh, well, we tried."
ReplyDeleteThere was an elder Church Lady who seemed to think it would be a real feather in our caps if we "gave" our only child to the priesthood.
Possibly a reason for fewer vocations is because parents don't push them?
I think a big reason is that most people no longer see why someone can't be a priest and married. It's like saying you can't be an engineer unless you wear a flower pot on your head or wearing a flower pot on your head will make you a better engineer. Married and women priests aren't a panacea for the Church's problems but it would remove an unneccessary stumbling block.
Delete"...Possibly a reason for fewer vocations is because parents don't push them?" I always just prayed that our kids would be good people, and that they would be happy. I figured it was between them and God if he wanted them to be priests. We would have supported and encouraged them if that's what they chose, same as we have done with them as being married men. I wonder how much parents" wishes count, anyway, in kids' life choices. We once had the temerity to suggest a college major to our oldest. Which he indignantly rejected. But he has done okay. As they say, "the kids are alright."
DeleteWell, you and I and most of the laity see this as a no brainer solution, but Rome isn't there yet.
DeleteApropos of nothing, I can't think of any engineer I know, notably my nephew, who wouldn't approach designing flowerpot headgear with the kind of weird delight they show for any other build-it challenge.
Admit it, Stanley. You're thinking about it right now. :-)
Jean, I'll let you pick out the plant.
DeleteTwo-child families may be disinclined to send them off to the convent or seminary. In ten-child families two can go as bonuses!
ReplyDeleteBishop Perry, an auxiliary in Chicago, once told me that vocations to the priesthood came from large families. Maybe that is a backhanded way of blaming birth control although I daresay the list of reasons families are smaller is a lengthy one.
DeleteThe young man from our parish who was ordained a few weeks back came from a family of two kids. Never saw any sign that his parents were other than happy and supportive (that is if his mom baking 500 kolaches for the reception is any indication!)
DeleteI think kids are gonna do what they're gonna do when they grow up. Of course it helps if the family were active Catholics and set a good example.
High status conferred on the family if one of the kids made it to the priest- or sisterhood. There was also an idea that indulgences accrued to the entire family for the sacrifice.
ReplyDeleteYeah, kids now are horrified if you suggest anything about their callings. I sure was.
My dad always felt I could have made a killing writing for True Confession: "You got all that writing skill and wouldn't have to use your right name." Dad was always eager to help me monetize my skills.
My mother wanted me to be a concert violinist in a long white dress.
I fear I was quite a disappointment.
When I wish I were a concern violinist or cellist (or banjo player, if they had some) I start out thinking what a great life it would be. Then I think of travel arrangements in winter time, which the concern season, and I think maybe not.
DeleteWinter travel was the least of my worries. I hate the violin, I can't read music, I don't much like music, and white is not my color.
DeleteI don't think it was mentioned in the HuffPost article but one obstacle women who want to become nuns face is student debt. Pretty much across the board religious orders insist that they come in debt free. I think that would actually be more of a disqualifier (at least temporarily) than a health issue such as diabetes which was under control. There are some private charities which work to help pay off student debt of women who want to become nuns.
ReplyDeleteIt's a little different situation for seminarians. At least in our archdiocese seminary is covered. But I suppose if they had debt from undergraduate study prior to entering seminary that would be a problem.
Yes, debt would be a problem. In the Middle Ages, you had to pay a dowry to the convent, which is why many poor women opted for the beguines.
DeleteWhen I made a Spiritual Exercises retreat and also just had a Jesuit spiritual director, there was a big push to Jesus as one's romantic other ... the whole "Jesus is my boyfriend" thing, except sometimes for guys too. Here's a recent example from America magazine ... https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/06/26/our-relationship-christ-should-be-romance
ReplyDeleteThere was a study by Sister Sandra Schneiders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_M._Schneiders) about why women's vocations dropped off .... it was because they were beginning to have other financial options besides marriage or religious life.
Hi, Crystal!
DeleteThis sounds.like something out of the fundamentalist playbook: "Most of all the Gospel is a call to a personal relationship with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."
Possibly I suffer from a lack of imagination, but I don't get how you "romance" someone you can't see. Trying to live a life of service seems like about the best I can do.
Hi Crystal, yes, I do think that is part of the reason for the drop off. In times past if a woman didn't want to get married, the convent was a respectable option. Career options for women were few or non-existent, especially a hundred or so years ago.
DeleteI will read the America article; I had missed that one.
I read the America article, and I sort of get what he's saying. I think we are called to both a personal relationship with Jesus, and a relationship with others in which we see God in them. One thing I would add is that to an extent how we perceive the love of God is not under our control.
DeleteSt. John of the Cross wrote a poem, The Dark Night of the Soul, and a couple of book-length treatises on the imagery in the poem. (I have read the poem, but not the books). St. Augustine's writings also touch on the love of God in what sometimes almost evokes an erotic vibe.
I dunno. I accept the divinity of Christ, but Jesus is about as real to me as a character in a book.
DeleteI can't send Jesus a lock of my hair or a wildflower or all those things Fr. Klein uses as examples of romance. I think he's just playing with a cute idea without any practical idea of what he's talking about.
Jesus made it clear before the Ascension he was bugging out and leaving us with the Spirit. I think he expects me to pick up his mission in some way.
But I don't think he wants to be my boyfriend.
The link for The Dark Night of the Soul doesn't work. Try this: https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2009/09/saint-john-of-cross-dark-night-of-soul.html
DeleteThanks, Katherine. I was able to find that link from the URL by using my browser search function.
DeleteThat kind of intimacy is not how I experience Jesus, though I appreciate that other people do.
I have always liked this one by John Donne https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44106/holy-sonnets-batter-my-heart-three-persond-god
Donne longs for Christ's love, yearns to be taken over, but he is never able to overcome reason (skepticism?) enough to be "made new."
Hi Jean and Katherine. Yeah, Ignatian spirituality is really built upon a personal relationship with Jesus and the retreats, the Spiritual Exercises, spiritual directors are all meant to facillitate that relationship. The Jesuits are the Jesus freaks of the Catholic church :) One of my favorite books is by Jesuit William Barry - God and You: Prayer As a Personal Relationship
DeleteI don't think we should over-concretize this love thing. When I was a lad there was a grown man in our neighborhood who had an electric train set up in his basement, with mountains, rivers, towns, etc. Spent a lot of time down there. Spent so much time down there that his wife took the kids and left him because he loved the trains more than she. For this a man will give up...
DeleteThat's a kind of love. From the same era, we knew a guy who worked nights and, on the days when the Chicago Cubs were at home, he walked to Wrigley Field from Evanston to see every one of the Cubs 77 home games. He had a girlfriend who occasionally met him there, arriving by more conventional means. In fact, he missed one of the year's two rare triple plays while looking at her. One might say he loved baseball, without having to squeeze its hand and look deeply into its eyes.
What both of these lovers had in common was single-mindedness and willingness to give up what others might consider necessities. Not romance in the Trollope style.
Part of the problem is all the things we expect the word "love" to cover. It's odd that English is one of the wordier languages; it has a word for everything, that we've borrowed or stolen if need be from other languages. But just that one word, love, to cover what the Greeks had four to describe; agape, eros, philia, and storge. Mot to mention Tom's examples which amount to a kind of obsession.
Delete"Mot" should be "not"
DeleteSpeaking of Ignatian spirituality, check this out: https://cloistersontheplatte.com. It's a new retreat center specializing in Ignatian silent retreats. I have not been a great fan of Joe Ricketts, but I give him credit for doing this. Cost for the retreats is a free will donation. So far they have been booked solid. Haven't made one myself yet, perhaps I am too attached to my distractions!
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Are you thinking of going there because you live nearby? Most Jesuit colleges give retreats and of course the Jesuit retreat centers. The retreat centers can be expensive though. I just did the one they call the 19th annotation - a retreat in everyday life - it takes longer and you really need a spiritual director, but you can do it at home.
DeleteCrystal, yes, I live about 85 miles from there. Their fee is a free will donation, kind of like they do with Cursillo. I have gravitated more to Carmelite spirituality than Ignatian in the past, but that's probably because I've never really given it a try.
DeleteAbout 10 years ago, CARA at Georgetown did an exhaustive study of women religious orders, and the outlook for the future. That was at a time when there was a lot of stuff going around about how the new, very traditional orders were growing by leaps and bounds - the rules, the habits, all the old-fashioned stuff, was allegedly pulling in new recruits by the carloads. So it didn't matter that the liberal orders were dying out - they would be replaced by all these new young "authentically orthodox" sisters. Except it turns out to have been more than a bit of hype based on six orders. And even those orders had added very few members since their foundings.
ReplyDeleteFrom the CARA report - 2009 Study on Recent Vocations to Religious Life
One of the most striking findings regarding new entrants is that almost equal numbers of women have been attracted to institutes in both conferences [LCRW and CMSWR] in recent years.".....CARA’s analysis of the ....data identified six religious institutes of women that have doubled their membership between 1970 and 2013. .... However, all six institutes together have increased their net membership by only 267 members since 1970, too few to have an effect on the overall picture. Whatever these institutes have done or are doing is unlikely to offset losses in the tens of thousands elsewhere. It is simply not enough."
CARA will be completing a new study in 2020.
The reasons for the founding of many of the original orders of religious women are no longer serious factors - including the reality that women had few options in years (and centuries) past - marry, or choose among a finite number of possible professions open to women. In the earliest centuries, many young women joined the new religious orders to avoid an arranged marriage. There were no other choices - no paid employment available to women in that era.
The young women in this article sound as though they come from the same kind of "orthodox" Catholic homes that encourage their daughters to look at the neo-traditional orders all along. Ave Maria college is not known for its progressive Catholic outlook!
It seems much more likely that in the future, most orders of women religious will be small, but that they will continue to evolve their partnerships with other laity who do not take vows, but share the charism of the order. Third Orders are growing. Also, there have been several articles recently about "nuns and nones" - young adults spending time and working with Catholic women religious, sometimes even living with them. Not all are Catholic and some are agnostic or atheist. The Immaculate Heart Sisters did something like that back when they chose not to obey Cardinal McIntyre's (Los Angeles) order to resume wearning habits and do everything as he dictated. More than 2/3 left the order that was tied to Rome and subservient to bishops, forming a new "order" of laity that was independent. It is in Santa Barbara, CA
http://theconversation.com/how-a-group-of-california-nuns-challenged-the-catholic-church-83944
https://www.immaculateheartcommunity.org/
https://www.ncronline.org/preview/nuns-and-nones-six-month-pilot-program-millennials-move
Or maybe some kind of modern version of beguines (Jean is the expert here), also not under a bishop's thumb
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/travel/13journeys.html
Modern beguines incorporate whatever spiritual elements that speak to the community. Medieval beguines were beleaguered by bishops, local clergy, and sometimes burned up.
DeleteTom, if your daughter is a Visitation sister, you might be interested in the article below. BTW, their school, Georgetown Visitation is one of the most exclusive private schools in DC and borders Georgetown U. Are all of their schools for the daughters of the wealthy? Like Jesuit schools?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for-decades-nuns-lived-a-cloistered-life-in-bethesda-where-nih-is-now/2019/07/13/5a9e065e-a4f4-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html?utm_term=.becb08bea31e
Anne, Thanks for the link. That's a far cry from the Philadelphia Visitation convent. There are about 12 nuns there, and all but two or three are old enough for Social Security. They live in a mansion -- next door to the old archbisop's palace that the archdiocese had to sell to St. Joseph College to cover the costs of years spent overlooking things. Like complaints. Both buildings were originally donated. The nun's house has been divided, subdivided, grilled and ungrilled, ramped and unramped so many times it's really a drafty old dump. The congregation took in a bunch of Mexican sisters during the troubles down there, and the narthex to the chapel has an illustrated, hand-written copy of the Nican Mopohua on the wall, the first account, an an Aztec language, of the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There is also a large painting inside the sanctuary of the Sacred Heart and Mary Margaret Alocoque that doesn't seem to be a copy and which I find very meditation-encouraging. I doubt there is much else of value in the whole convent.
ReplyDeleteJust wondering, how does a cloistered order run a school? Seems like that would involve being in the world to an extent.
ReplyDeleteI am remembering that St. Jane Frances de Chantal, the founder of the Visitation Sisters, originally didn't want them to be cloistered. But her friend and spiritual advisor, St. Francis de Sales, caved to peer pressure from his fellow bishops in setting up the rule. Couldn't have those wild women gallivanting around!
Of course I realize that a vocation to the contemplative life is its own calling and is freely chosen now. Back then it seems like enclosure was pretty much the norm, one size fits all. That speaks to the degree of fear that the PTB must have had about women running amuck. We really have come quite a long way since the 17th century.