(RNS3-FEB03) Sister Marybride Ryan sings with other Grand Rapids Dominican nuns during their Sunday service. The order had as many as 856 members in 1966; today, there are just 267. For use with RNS-NUNS-FUTURE, transmitted Feb. 3, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Adam Bird/Grand Rapids Press.
(RNS3-FEB03) Sister Marybride Ryan sings with other Grand Rapids Dominican nuns during their Sunday service. The order had as many as 856 members in 1966; today, there are just 267. For use with RNS-NUNS-FUTURE, transmitted Feb. 3, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Adam Bird/Grand Rapids Press.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Chalk dust smudges a blackboard facing paint-smeared tables. In Sister Lucia Zapata’s creatively messy classroom, 18 kindergartners studiously cut out red paper hearts.
“You’re doing an awesome job,” Zapata says, walking among the children and speaking in Spanish to some. “Watch those pencil lines. I love the way you’re listening and you’re watching.”
This is her sixth class of the day at Stocking Elementary School. She teaches art to nearly 500 children a week at three local public schools.
As a member of the Grand Rapids Dominicans, Zapata considers this her calling from God. “I think this is a good way to empower people,” says Zapata, 63. “It instills in them that, yes, they can do something.”
Her faith in these children is strong, as is her faith in the Dominican Sisters. But hers is a religious community much diminished from the one she entered in 1964.
Then, she was one of 55 women joining a congregation reaching its peak of 856 in 1966. Today, just 267 sisters remain, and only one joined last year. Their average age is about 75; the youngest is 45.
“I don’t panic,” Zapata says of the steady decline. “This is really in God’s hands.”
That accepting attitude prevails among the Grand Rapids Dominicans, a sturdy sisterhood of women who serve the needy and fight for justice even as their number dwindles.
Yet those declines are exactly what prompted the Vatican last week (Jan. 30) to launch an unprecedented survey of U.S. women’s communities that have seen their numbers dwindle as their retirement expenses skyrocket.
“It’s hard to imagine,” says Sister Mary Aquinas Weber, 85, retired chancellor of Aquinas College, which was founded by the Dominican sisters. “There will always be some (religious sisters), somewhere. Whether it’s us, I’m not sure.”
The same could be said of other orders: Religious sisters nationwide have declined by 67 percent since 1965, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University.
Some more traditional orders, however, find young women eager to wear the habit and veil long since discarded by most Grand Rapids Dominicans. At the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, Mich., nearly 83 women have joined since its founding in 1997. Their average age is 26.
Still, the Grand Rapids Dominicans seek new ways to invite women to a way of life they find fulfilling but seemingly at odds with a career- and sex-oriented culture.
About 45 female Aquinas students live in the former nursing wing of Marywood, the sisters’ 34-acre headquarters. Some have prayed and studied with the sisters in a new program called Benincasa, or “house of welcome.”
“There aren’t so many sisters in high schools and colleges (anymore), so it’s an effort to offer opportunities for young women to get to know sisters,” said Sister Kathi Sleziak, vocation minister.
Gone are the days when every Catholic school kid worked under a nun’s watchful eye. Today, the Dominican sisters counsel homeless people in Grand Rapids, help run rural parishes and deliver babies in Peru. They read to the blind, work with refugees and host spiritual retreats and yoga classes at an interfaith center.
The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) encouraged the sisters to return to the spirit of their founder, St. Dominic, and study of Scripture, says Sister Mary Navarre, a member of the congregation’s leadership team. That led the Order of Preachers, as Dominicans are called, to new ways of proclaiming God’s word, she says.
“A lot of sisters said, `We’ve done what we could as far as Catholic schools go. Let’s go where we’re needed even more,”‘ says Sister Navarre, 65.
She says the change has been healthy, prompting sisters to meet contemporary needs. “We hold the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.”
After Vatican II, some sisters chose to return to secular life and fewer joined religious orders. The number of sisters nationally dropped by 25 percent from 1965 to 1975, according to CARA.
Sister Mary Aquinas Weber remembers talking to many doubting sisters when she was prioress from 1966 to 1972. Many wanted to marry or disliked the strict structure, and leaving religious life was no longer considered a disgrace, she says.
But Sister Nathalie Meyer, the current prioress, says Dominican values have much to offer today’s women whether they take vows or not.
“Maybe our role now is just mentoring people into something beyond us,” said Meyer, a Dominican for more than 50 years.
Either way, Zapata said she knows a woman must feel called to religious life, and that only God does the calling.
“I believe in the order, and I’m going to continue until the day I die,”Zapata said after her last class of the day. “If it’s going a different course, so be it.
“But I think God is going to take care of his church, one way or another. He’s going to have workers.”
(Charles Honey writes for The Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids, Mich.)
