c. 2006 Religion News Service
CLEVELAND _ Lucille Moran felt as if she was part of a family at St. Joseph Academy in the 1930s. She would not only play sports in every season but help the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cleveland in their work from scrubbing floors to assisting boarding students.
She would spend so much time with the sisters, who ran the high school next to the motherhouse, that her mom told her, “You might just as well live there. You’re always there.” In 1938, after 18 months of college, she entered the congregation.
Sister Lucille, 87, would experience major changes in religious life, from the early days when silence was expected from early evening until after Mass the next morning to the new freedoms of the 1960s and ’70s, when many discarded their habits and chose social-justice work and other careers outside the teaching profession.
But Jan. 14 was different. Her community, which once had more than 400 nuns, had dwindled to 122, and now they were gathered in the chapel of the motherhouse to vote on whether to give up their independence and unite with six other shrinking congregations.
Yet what struck her was not a sense of loss, but a sense of the divine.
“The power of the Holy Spirit was there, and you felt lifted up,” said Sister Lucille.
The Sisters of St. Joseph of Cleveland, becoming part of a national trend finding strength in numbers amid rapidly declining and aging populations, voted 102-8 Saturday to join with six other congregations of St. Joseph from Louisiana to Illinois. The Cleveland community became the fifth congregation to approve the plan, joining the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Ind.; LaGrange, Ill.; Medaille in Baton Rouge, La.; and Nazareth, Mich.
On Sunday (Jan. 22), the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wheeling, W.Va., and Wichita, Kan., also voted in favor of the union.
Under the union, local leadership will continue in all seven communities for a transition period of more than a year. The new order, to be called the Congregation of St. Joseph with no geographic distinctions, will have its headquarters in LaGrange, just outside of Chicago, and is expected to have about 900 members.
“To nuns, that sounds wonderful to us to know there is this number you can dream with,” said Sister Patricia Kozak, president of the Cleveland order.
“I think the gift of the mission and the spirituality of the Sisters of St. Joseph is too large for God not to want us to continue,” she said. “Religious life is at a major transition time. It will not be as it used to be. It just won’t. What it will be is not clear.”
Mergers and plans of union are becoming more common as many religious orders experience sharp declines in membership, with fewer young nuns coming up to care for a rapidly aging population. Nationally, the number of nuns in the United States has fallen from 180,000 in 1965 to 73,000 in 2003. Only about 5 percent of nuns nationwide are under 50.
The Sisters of St. Joseph said they realized the union plan was the best thing for their future, but there still is a sense of loss, a letting go of their life as an independent congregation.
“The significance of this is as large as when we were first founded,” Sister Kozak said.
So there was no whooping and hollering after the vote was announced. Rather, Sister June Hansen said, “There was a touch of the Irish wake about it.”
MO/RB END RNS
(David Briggs writes for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)
Editors: To obtain several photos depicting the Sisters of Joseph, past and present, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
