Sisters savor a shared religious life
Dressed 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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