COMMENTARY: Vatican needs to look outside convent walls, too

(UNDATED) Catholic women are not flocking to convents and monasteries the way they did 60 or so years ago, when Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman showed in “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” what it meant to be a priest or nun. Now, with new studies completed or underway, church leaders are learning why. The short […]

(UNDATED) Catholic women are not flocking to convents and monasteries the way they did 60 or so years ago, when Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman showed in “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” what it meant to be a priest or nun.

Now, with new studies completed or underway, church leaders are learning why. The short answer is not on the grid: it’s a new world.

Three separate studies investigating the phenomenon — one from Georgetown University and two from the Vatican — look at different facets of the question, from different points of view.


Recently, the Catholic researchers at Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate surveyed 4,000 new members of religious orders and institutes. Their findings are not so surprising: more young people are joining groups with clearly defined goals and common life, who regularly pray together and wear religious garb. People who wanted old-style religious life, at least in the past 15 years, found it. The National Religious Vocation Conference, recruiters to religious life, contracted the study.

Meanwhile, surprising just about everyone, earlier this year the Vatican mandated a study of women’s apostolic religious institutes — the non-cloistered women known as “sisters.” Since mid-winter, heads of women’s institutes have met with or written to Mother Mary Clare Millea, an American who has a doctorate in canon law and is superior general of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Next, the leaders of women’s religious communities must answer a detailed questionnaire. Finally, Mother Millea hopes to visit selected motherhouses throughout 2010. Her confidential report will go directly to Rome.

Separately, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is investigating the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, whose 1,500 members represent about 95 percent of the sisters in the U.S. Why? Three issues are on the agenda: agreement with Catholic teaching on 1) women priests 2) the centrality of Christ and the church 3) homosexuality.

What’s up with women and the church? CARA’s results are not surprising. Traditional young people are attracted to traditional religious institutes with defined boundaries.

But what is the Vatican looking for? Are forces in Rome gathering to push the nuns back into the cloister? Are they worried U.S. sisters — all 59,000 of them — are about to get on Facebook and Twitter to declare war on doctrine?


The fact is that over 90 percent of U.S. sisters are over the age of 60. Most belong to what are called “active” or apostolic institutes. They work on the margins of society in schools, hospitals and social service agencies. They are not getting many new members. The more traditional groups are attracting more, younger people.

The Vatican surely intuits what the CARA folks have learned: some people are attracted to old-style religious life. That’s fine. There are plenty of fish to be caught in St. Peter’s net.

But, the Vatican does not seem to know that many young people are outside the convent walls and monastery gates wondering how they can bring themselves to accept a two-tiered system that won’t even return to the tradition of ordaining women deacons, if not priests. Beyond the crucial question of professional ministerial credentials, members of this silent majority ask how they can dedicate themselves in a system — particularly in the U.S. — that protected the vilest sexual and fiscal irregularities.

It is a new world. Many women, particularly American women, see Catholicism as a patronizing patriarchy. They will not let their lives be circumscribed by the church as they see it. The short-term result is fewer nuns. The long term result could be the rebirth of a wider, healthier American Catholicism.

Some people might like to re-run “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” Young people seem to see a different church. It is a new reformation. The question: who is reforming whom?

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic studies.)


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