NEWS STORY: Dwindling Numbers Force Nuns to Sell Monastery

c. 2003 Religion News Service NEWARK, N.J. _ For 121 years, nuns have prayed for the troubled world outside the stone walls of the Monastery of St. Dominic here, living almost unknown to their neighbors. Although more than 100 nuns have spent their years in cloistered contemplation at the monastery since 1882, it has been […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

NEWARK, N.J. _ For 121 years, nuns have prayed for the troubled world outside the stone walls of the Monastery of St. Dominic here, living almost unknown to their neighbors.

Although more than 100 nuns have spent their years in cloistered contemplation at the monastery since 1882, it has been 12 years since a new member has been taken in, and only 13 nuns remain.


Now the nuns, who wear white habits and black veils, have decided they can no longer maintain their facility and must sell it.

“It’s very hard. Most of us thought we’d simply die here,” said Sister Christine Ford, the monastery’s Mother Superior and a resident for 39 years. “To be uprooted after being here for so many years, it’s a death. A lot of these women will never see each other again in their lives.”

The nuns, the youngest of whom are in their 50s, have grown close over their decades in seclusion, she said.

They have supported themselves largely by donations and selling communion wafers to parishes for use at Mass. For years, they baked the wafers themselves; in recent years, they have bought them wholesale and resold them.

The nuns are negotiating selling the monastery to another religious order, which Sister Christine declined to name because the sale is not complete.

Lenore Buhrig, among the monastery’s frequent visitors, called the Monastery of St. Dominic “an oasis of solitude” she has visited since the 1940s.

“They’ve been there to help during the hard parts of life,” Buhrig said. “They’re so close to God, and so committed to their holy work, that I found it inspiring.”


“The fact that these women and other religious community men and women have prayed for us who have been out in the world … has always been a strength in the church,” said James Goodness, spokesman for the Newark Archdiocese.

Monasteries have been places of intense prayer and intellectual life since the early centuries of Christianity. St. Dominic founded the first Dominican monastery in 1206 in Prouille, France, to provide a place exclusively for contemplative prayer.

There are “active” religious orders such as the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity and Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, in which nuns take roles in their communities, and there are “contemplative” orders, like the St. Dominic nuns in Newark, where the religious live secluded lives of prayer and meditation.

The nuns in Newark, called Nuns of the Order of Preachers, leave the facility only for medical and family visits. Each nun has her own room _ called a cell _ furnished with a bed, desk, chair, crucifix and bookshelf.

The monastery’s chapel is split into two sides, one side for the nuns and the other side for members of the public. About 175 people can fit into the public chapel. Outsiders also can meet with nuns in a parlor at the front of the monastery for counsel or to submit petitions for prayer. The nuns also take requests from the public on the telephone.

Sister Christine joined the monastery at age 19, in 1964. “There was a peace I found when I made this decision,” she said.


She said she understands why fewer women have joined monastic life since its the high-water days in the 1960s. Though she has found the life rewarding, women have a wider range of opportunities these days, she said.

Still, she said she wished more women today considered the option.

“I’m not going to say they’d be better off … but a lot of women are too quick to dismiss the idea. Religious life has a lot today to give the world, more than they think it has to offer.”

Last year there were 74,177 Catholic nuns in the United States, down from 179,954 in 1965, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

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The number of Catholic nuns in the United States is projected to decrease drastically in the coming decade, perhaps to as few as 11,000 by 2012, said Kathleen Cummings, associate director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.

Each day, nuns at the Monastery of St. Dominic awake at 5 a.m. Six times a day they gather in the monastery’s chapel to pray. They also observe a mid-afternoon hour of silence.

“We pray for international things, the city here, the diocese, things in the news, the war that was going on,” Sister Christine said. “People call in asking for personal prayers. I’ve always felt it’s our responsibility to pray for people who call in or write.


“We have a bulletin board (where) we put prayer intentions on near chapel, so sisters know who called in we should pray for _ someone’s daughter with cancer, or a marriage that is breaking up. … Some people say that’s such a small thing to pray for, but it’s meaningful to the people, so we have to lift that intention up to God,” she said.

When they’re not praying, the nuns read, study, write and talk.

“We talk and talk and talk,” Sister Christine said. “We do a lot of laughing.”

They receive most of their news through U.S. News and World Report and occasional newspaper clippings sent to them, she said. They do not have Internet access, nor do they watch television or listen to the radio.

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Sister Mary Margaret Perry, 81, said she is sorry to leave.

“I’ve been very very happy here,” she said.

She predicted a successful relocation for herself to a monastery in Farmington Hills, Mich., where five of the 13 nuns have decided to move.

“The life,” she said, “is what I’m interested in. Not the buildings or surroundings.”

DEA END DIAMANT

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