The Priesthood and Men’s Religious Orders have declined drastically since Vatican Council II, but their reductions are eclipsed by the sheer magnitude of the numerical decline among Women Religious. It’s been a disastrous collapse—for them and for the Church.
In 1965, there were over 180,000 Catholic religious women in the United States. By 2006, there were 67,000 left, 2,000 fewer than the previous year.
The decline among Women Religious is a grave blow—to church-related institutions and programs, especially schools and hospitals; to the Catholic faithful, now denied the ministrations of dedicated Religious Women such as those who served American Catholics in the past; and to those who entered religious life with high hopes five or six decades ago only to see their hopes dashed as their Orders and communities changed beyond all recognition.
The situation of elderly Women Religious is especially poignant. These aged and infirm Sisters, whose retirement needs were badly underfunded for years, believed that there would always be enough newcomers to support the older Sisters.
(I might add parenthetically here that for decades Women Religious were paid meager, almost slave-like salaries, for their work in parochial schools. Parochial schools were affordable because the Sisters worked for so little. When these Women Religious left their teaching positions, Catholic parochial schools became instantly expensive and began to close at alarming rates. The truth is parochial schools have never been affordable and that truth is finally catching up with the Bishops and Pastors who dishonestly peddled such nonsense to the faithful.)
Many Sisters now find themselves in religious communities that seem headed for extinction, with few or nonexistent newcomers and a median age in the 70s.
What happened?
In my opinion: radical feminism.
Set aside as unnecessary or undesirable were living and praying in community, engaging in corporate apostolates such as staffing Catholic schools and hospitals, obeying superiors, and wearing the religious habit.
In their place came individual living arrangements, praying on one’s own schedule in one’s own manner, and lay garb.
In fact, thousands of Sisters adopted essentially secular lifestyles and jobs: bereavement counselors in hospice, school nurses, distance-learning advisers to the state, directors of tutoring centers, political activists, travel agents, canon lawyers and managers.
For many Women Religious, their communities were composed of freelancers who sought to engage in good works congenial to them, in the manner of committed lay people.
Most Orders of Religious Women fashioned a new definition of religious life more descriptive of a secular institute than a religious institute: freelancers who do secular jobs that happen to suit their personal tastes are not acting as members of a religious community in any recognizable sense.
Simply put, the change-oriented leaders of most Women’s Orders misinterpreted Vatican II and, in doing so, plunged their institutes into a downward spiral from which many may not recover.
Sisters did not always get accurate information about Church teaching on religious life. . . . Some sisters who were eager for change and determined to discard an authoritarian lifestyle gave an overly broad interpretation to the documents of Vatican II, resulting in deviations from the renewal set forth in Church directives.
The Vatican tried repeatedly to get renewal of the sisters back on track, but too many sisters in positions of authority were determined to define renewal of religious life in their own terms.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the national umbrella group of Women Religious Superiors distanced itself from the authority structures of the Church while taking up causes that were more socio-political than religious.
Dissatisfaction with LCWR among tradition-minded nuns led to the creation, under Vatican auspices, of an "alternate" superiors’ organization called the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious
The Sisters who have suffered most from polarization among and within Communities have been the elderly members of change-oriented orders. These Sisters did not approve of the style of renewal that their institutes took, and they have struggled to live their vows in congregations that are not supportive of Church teachings about religious life—or about other areas of life as well.
What Women Religious in leadership positions are reluctant to admit and accept is the fact that the validity and value of Religious Life, and its very survival, depend on its being a faithful expression of its own great tradition, intelligently adapted to the present day yet in living continuity with its origins.
Until the leaders of Women Religious Orders do admit this truth, the dramatic decline of Women’s Religious in the United States will continue to be an institutional disaster and a human tragedy.
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