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Savoring Religious Life
By Sister Julie | July 9, 2007
Here’s a great article on young women in religious life (note: I added hyperlinks). Would love to hear your comments.
Sisters savor a shared religious life
By Rich Barlow | July 7, 2007Dressed casually for summer, name tags dangling from their necks, the conferees at Emmanuel College last weekend were all women who identified themselves as members of Catholic orders. Almost 100 strong, they spent four days contemplating their future
As with any professional gathering, networking was very much on the agenda of the conference, organized by Giving Voice, a Massachusetts- based group that publishes a newsletter and promotes communication among women’s religious orders.
The nuns, most of them under 50, gathered to share takes on questions framed in an interview by Sister Annette McDermott of Springfield: “Who are we today as women religious, and where do we want to go?”
For younger nuns, reared in the post-Second Vatican Council church, that question cannot be answered with soft-focus images of Ingrid Bergman in habit from “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”
Catholics at last weekend’s Mass heard Luke’s Gospel story of Jesus inviting people to follow him, even if it meant leaving family without goodbyes or abandoning the task of burying a dead father.
While modern religious life doesn’t require quite those sacrifices, the 30- and 40-something nuns said that heeding the call is very different for them than it was for earlier generations. The declining number of women entering religious orders means that novitiates are more solitary enterprises than a half-century ago.
“Before, there were groups of 20 or 30 coming in, classes, you know, of novices,” said Sister Maria-Carolina Pardo, a 37-year-old human rights activist who works in Colombia.
Today, by contrast, “most of us have entered singly, alone,” she said. “We don’t have peers.”
Gatherings like the one at Emmanuel provide an opportunity they don’t have otherwise, “to relate with one another and have [each other] as classmates, as friends, as people to bounce things off, to resonate with, to discuss.”
Sister Marianne Comfort, 45, who took her initial vows last year, said that baby boomers like herself entered the religious life because of the opportunity to live in community with other spiritually minded women.
Women from older Catholic generations, however, became nuns often because they had seen religiouis sisters as role models, in jobs such as teacher or nurse.
“I’ve heard a lot of my older sisters talk about [how], when they entered, the choice was religious life or be a wife,” Comfort said.
For all the debates roiling Catholicism, the conference didn’t tarry over issues that laypeople might expect to have come up.
The nun shortage, for example, has closed convents and inspired some innovative marketing around the country. National Public Radio recently profiled a Detroit convent that recruits online.
Yet nuns at Emmanuel said they didn’t discuss the shortage, in part because they have been able to pursue their ministries by teaming with lay Catholics instead of other nuns.
“Women religious are partnering more effectively with the people of God,” explained Patricia Shea, 41, who is preparing to take her vows this fall and will be a pastoral associate at a Lynn parish.
“I think it’s helpful if we take the long view,” Shea said. “Certainly during the ’50s and ’60s, we saw huge numbers of women religious.”
But that was an anomaly she argued. For many centuries after Christianity’s founding, those taking up the religious life were few. “So maybe now, we’re returning to the longer pattern,” Shea said.
If fretting about too few nuns wasn’t on the agenda, neither was discussion of the church’s withholding ordination and leadership roles from women.
“Those issues are important, and other meetings address those issues,” said McDermott, who is studying for a doctorate in political science at Boston College. “But here I feel we were concentrating on what we can do.”
What these women felt they could accomplish was more internal, bolstering each other’s spirits and commitment by sharing their own.
“My passion for life and for spirituality and connectedness and relationship . . . roots me in my call toward religious life,” said Sister Katy LaFond, a Milwaukee elementary school principal who is, at 27, the youngest American nun in her order, the School Sisters of St. Francis. “And being with other women who have that same passion — it ignites. That’s at the core of who I am.”
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© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
Topics: news on the nunfront, vocations |
7. First Vows
July 9th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
We are gathered at our provincial home and were just discussing this phenomenon of the huge novitiate groups of the past. One of our sisters reported that the large novitiate groups only appeared after World War I and continued to the 1960’s. What we have now, of only one or a few women entering communities a year, was the norm before that boom time.
We are presently in the midst of reconfiguring our eight (8!) North American provinces, and one of the first things we did was to establish a centralilzed Novitiate. That way, God willing, there will be peer groups (”classes”) of novices. We presently have one second year and three first year novices with another one joining them soon. Praise God!
July 9th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Great article! I enjoyed reading it. They sound very thoughtful and passionate in their commitment. They are right in their comments about the historic context. And while women entered convents as alternatives to marrying, they brought with them a baseline faith that was stronger and more predominant in society at that time. Another parallel is in medieval times when a estate owner had 3 sons, son 1 became the professional heir, son 2 went to the military, and son went to clergy. While that sounds like pigeon holing a profession, the baseline piety at that time was so strong that a vocation could be “assigned” like that. So these great women nowadays face an overall lowering of societal piety overall, plus being fewer in numbers and companionship. That is indeed as Patricia Shea comments very much like the earliest times of the Church. Often one entered a town being the only Christian, in order to evangelize. The Christian evangelist would then seek out lay people. The pairing of sisters with laity is a great strength. The more they do the more they contribute to getting the word out about vocations in a local living example kind of way. The Church is fortunate and blessed to attract these fine women religious!
July 9th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
The point the “other” Sister Julie makes is essential to our considerations of religious life today. People, religious included, often lament the absence of the novitiate classes of the 50s and 60s without contextualizing that in fact religious life was not as populated in the early 20th century as it was in the middle. In someways, I think religious life today is the penduluum swinging back to the middle, to balance, and it is our challenge, professed religious and covenanted lay alike, to find its full expression.
July 10th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Well, huge classes where not the norm back then, but neither were orders having to close, merge, sell their property or close down their schools like they are now. I think balance is need. I dont think classes of 100 people ( like the sisters of charity used to have) are comming back or even should come back. I think with smalller classes ( no more than 20 or so) it is alll around better. More time is spent on idividual formation of the sisters, and it is not a huge shock to the community ( suddenly having that many new members ).
Just my two cents.
July 13th, 2007 at 6:55 am
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