I’d be happy to answer some of the questions posted on the blog–and I’m sure Br. Paul would be as well, . What do you propose would be the best way to do that?

Look forward to hearing from you.–Patrice

Another good question. We have a couple new sisters in our community who are converts. I wonder if they’ve had struggles with this.

I guess I’m curious about these trends because I’ve got sort of a quadruple whammy of age, ethnicity, geography, and religious background. I’m 20 yet called to a community that has mostly older sisters… I’m half Chinese yet called to a community where almost all the sisters are white… I’m originally from California yet this order doesn’t have any ministries west of St. Louis, and I’m a convert from the Anglican church a few years back whereas most the sisters met the order when they were students in its Catholic high schools. This doesn’t bother me and I love it all – God is beautiful and works in unpredictable ways. But I’d be curious to know how CARA found these sorts of factors to be working out for newer sisters.

Is greater diversity a factor across the board for religious orders with newer members, or is it linked to geography (orders in Southern California, Texas, New York, or something like that, etc). How are non-white candidates meeting their communities? Do minority candidates stay in religious life more/same/less than Caucasian candidates? I’m curious whether it would be tough for these newer diverse people to be young/minority sisters in old/white communities, and whether that makes a difference in whether they stay.

That’s an interesting question… it does seem like the media usually chooses bits and pieces. But in the end, I’m not sure it matters that much to the general public. I think people who care about these issues will read/scan the CARA document themselves after realizing it came out. I definitely went to the source document once I realized it was published because I was curious to know what it really said. But, to be quite honest, this sort of nun trend stuff probably doesn’t register on a lot of people’s radar since life is busy and they probably don’t know about the ins and outs of the biases in debates over religious life.

Any other questions?

In terms of meeting religious during education … are there a lot of sisters at Newman Centers, or are Catholic institutions still ‘best practices.’?

How much to religious orders pay to be part of Vocationmatch.com and all that kind of advertising? How much does it cost to run a website?

What might be NRVC’s follow up to the CARA study project (i.e. what might be NRVC’s response to the results?)

A lot of in depth work has gone into this study. How does NRVC plan to advertise the results of this study?

I know this is the most basic question, that has been asked again and again, but how does one know if they have a vocation to the religious life?

If someone has a call from God, how can the community say no you are too old? As far as I know Jesus never asked a person how old are you?

How can lay ministers in parishes help promote vocations?