"Vanishing Nuns"

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Yes, I don’t know anything about this particular order one way or the other, but many of the more traditional orders are doing quite well as far as vocations.
 
Well, I remember talking with my mother about the need for priests, and she said, “Well, who do you know that wants to become a priest?” The same thing goes with nuns.

If we all were to understand the benefits we get from religious, we’d be going into orders like crazy and building monasteries everywhere!
 
Given the recent contribution to the American Church by the organisations of nuns representing the major orders, perhaps their decline is part of God’s will. Judge any order by its fruit and you can always see a correlation to their vocational intake.
 
Is one of the vanishing orders “The Sisters. Of David Copperfield”?🤷
 
CNormal said:
News story about the closing of a convent in New Jersey… Fox News link below.

I think this story misses the rise of Catholic sisters and nuns in other places. This, of course, is not surprising considering it is the secular press reporting this.

foxnews.com/us/2013/12/01/vanishing-nuns-100-year-tradition-ends-with-convents-closing/
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The Dominican order Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist based in Ann Arbor MI, has a waiting list. Not sure what happen here but as orders go back to being faithful to the Catholic church, wearing habits etc, they do grow. Sisters of Mary started out with only 4 sisters commited to prayer.
 
This is really quite sad. These were good sisters…the Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary were faithful sisters.

The problem is not that God is not calling…the problem is that we are not answering.
 
What kind of woman would want to be part of a religious order where they are basically living as a single secular woman without a husband at a low paying job? We already have the answer: very few people.

Reinvigorate the spirituality, the mysticism, the community, and yes, the habits, and nunneries will regain the charisma that they once had. Women will be attracted to them and they will experience challenging and richly rewarding lives of charity in service to God. At some point a lot of people bought into the notion that becoming a sister or a brother was an act of masochism. That to be miserable was to be holy. Although because of the world, such as it is, is marred, there are holy people that may fall into painful times, however God doesn’t operate on misery in principle. He is a God of beauty and light. Sisterly orders ought to be attractive by their nature.
 
The nuns in question are a contemplative order. They are not “single secular women without a husband.” :rolleyes: We as a society do not value religious orders. Too many are put off by sisters who don’t wear habits, or who arent ‘useful’ to us as teachers or parish workers.
 
The struggle that Cloistered Sisters face is that they are CLOISTERED…they live a hidden life…they are not on the speaking circuit or in the schools or hospitals or television. That is not a slight to any of the active communities, it simply is reality. Additionally, Cloistered communities are almost always smaller in number than apostolic communities, in part because of the nature of their specific vocation. (St Teresa of Avila suggested the number be something like 12 or 15, and when the monastery grew past that, that they open a new foundation.) The vocation to apostolic life is the more common vocation among those who are called to religious life by the Lord.

The cloistered sisters need voices in the world – lay people who will help to make them known. For some, it is an apostolate they have to help small, little-known religious communities or men and women alike. We personally promote another Dominican Monastery (Dominican Monastery of St Jude) in Marbury, Alabama. Beautiful sisters who pray the Perpetual Rosary also. Perhaps if someone is a “techie” and has such a community nearby, they could donate their time and talent to helping the sisters create a website…honestly, do sisters who are older know how to create a website? (If you speak to a young girl in discernment or who has recently entered religious life, she will often tell you that the internet helped her find the community she entered.) These sisters are so incredibly humble, they do not know how to promote themselves. And perhaps another who is not a “techie” could make known the community to good priests and seminarians whom they know. You would be surprised at how many have no clue that there are cloistered sisters in their area…even the “good” priests.

Please do not assume that because these sisters are being dispersed into other communities it necessarily means they were not faithful. Because of their “hiddenness”, because of the uniqueness of their call, because of the tremendous demands of the life, fewer know of and respond to a call to the cloistered contemplative life. Reading the history of religious orders, communities, congregations and societies, one will find that the Holy Spirit does bring communities into existence for a specific reason and for a specific time. Some have missions that are short lived. Others endure for centuries or more. Others are one the brink of extinction before God brings forth a tremendous revival within them. And in other times, their near extinction served as a sort of punishment upon the people of God.

For me, this closure is devastating. As a dear priest friend said to me once, the world could more surely survive without sunlight than it could survive without the prayers of the cloistered nuns.
 
You have very good points here to consider. I am wondering if there was a lack of either exposure or promotion for communities like this. I would imagine that this is true of Carmelite orders. I think why people are assuming on this thread is that a number of orders which have dwindled and closed are those that are less faithful to the Church while those orders which are more faithful to the Church do experience growth. The fox article didn’t distinguish between a contemplative order like this and those orders that lets say taught in school or were more service oriented. fox just lumped them altogether. But if Catholic schools don’t bring their students to a cloistered order as a field trip to expose children to these types of things then how are people going to be aware of them. I live close to a Carmelite monestary and there is a Catholic school which my older boys went to. They never visited it as a class.
 
McCall1981 said:
Yes, I don’t know anything about this particular order one way or the other, but many of the more traditional orders are doing quite well as far as vocations.
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The rate of decreasing vocations related to the whole is slowing.

Hopefully, it will stabilize soon.
 
DaddyGirl said:
What would a Catholic newspaper, for example, say differently about the closing of this convent compared to what this non-religion-based publication reports?
The story is a straight news story about the convent closing.
Of the handful of people quoted, I think all are Catholic–and they are quoted as saying the number of nuns in their area is dwindling.
Are you thinking the publication is lying about the statistics they cite?
Or that the polls they are citing are incorrect?

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I’ll entertain this post, but I think you know what the OP is getting at.

Secular elites celebrate any dwindling Catholic influence, and those Catholics who put secularism ahead of the Church need to realize they cannot serve both God and mammon.
 
When I posted this article, I didn’t think it showed bias on the part of the news agencies since the article seemed relatively objective but, in my view, incomplete. It described the dissolution of one convent but did not mention the overflow of postulants at others. This is not a fatal error on the part of the reporters, only that it provided an incomplete picture from which they were drawing conclusions not justifiable by this limited sample.

I also found it curious that this was not a case of a decline of the secularized “faux-nuns” we have been subjected to in recent years but of true sisters who have a truly religious vocation. As has been pointed out by many, it is these true sisters have been experiencing an increase. Thank God!

My purpose was to find out if someone (particularly in that local area of NJ) might know of some particular reason why this convent was dissolved. Some have cited a possible, general reason, i.e., lack of self-promotion. I don’t know if that is the case here. Maybe so.
 
DaddyGirl said:
It doesn’t look to me like this article is “celebrating” the closing of the convent. In fact, it is describing the event being a very sad one for all in the area.

(I honestly don’t know what the OP is getting at. As a journalist myself, I see this as a very straight, unbiased news-human interest story.)

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I’m curious of what any one thinks of this Franciscan friar from Italy that seems to be taking the music industry by storm (Fr Alessandro). I’m only hoping that all the fame doesn’t ruin him like it has so many other people.
 
LegoGE1947 said:
I’m curious of what any one thinks of this Franciscan friar from Italy that seems to be taking the music industry by storm (Fr Alessandro). I’m only hoping that all the fame doesn’t ruin him like it has so many other people.
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He seemsto be very level-headed. We have a good friend who is a Franciscan living in Assisi who know Fr Alessandro and his “agent” and says that he is not looking to break away from his order and become some kind of pop star. 😛
 
Perhaps worth mentioning is that the decline in the number of Catholic sisters is primarily affecting the developed economies of the West. In Asia and in Africa, the increase in the number of Catholics outpaces population growth. And the increase in number of Catholic sisters outpaces the increasing Catholic population.
Territorial analysis of changes in this period, show an increase of 4.3% of Catholics in Africa, which instead saw a population increase of 2.3%. Asia also registered an increase in the number of Catholics that was higher than that of the population (2.0% versus 1.2%).
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{Worldwide,] a strong downward trend was observed in data for the professed [women] religious, with a decrease of 10% from 2001 to 2011. The total number of professed religious, that counted than 792 thousand units in 2001 is now at just over 713 thousand 10 years later. The decline particularly affects three continents (Europe, America and Oceania), with significant variations (-22% in Europe, -21% in Oceania and -17% in America). In Africa and Asia, however, there has been a sustained increase, more than 28% in the first continent and 18% in the second. Consequently, the fraction of professed religious in Africa and Asia out of the global total increased from 24.4% to about 33%
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asianews.it/news-en/Growth-in-number-of-Catholics-worldwide,-number-of-priests-and-seminarians-also-increase-27907.html
 
Coatimundi said:
Perhaps worth mentioning is that the decline in the number of Catholic sisters is primarily affecting the developed economies of the West. In Asia and in Africa, the increase in the number of Catholics outpaces population growth. And the increase in number of Catholic sisters outpaces the increasing Catholic population.

asianews.it/news-en/Growth-in-number-of-Catholics-worldwide,-number-of-priests-and-seminarians-also-increase-27907.html
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They will be sending missionaries to us one of these days!🤷
 
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