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Photographs by Whitney Curtis
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Sr. Sarah Heger emailed me four photos of herself: one with a young student (Heger was sent from St. Louis to teach in a public school in Ripley, Miss.); one with alpacas at an ecological center; one all hot and sweaty after hiking Machu Picchu; and one in a red polka-dot dress, signing her vow profession. “Too bad you can’t see my little white sandals,” she joked; I’d teasingly asked if she wore “nun shoes,” those lace-ups with rubber soles that are often a layperson’s only clue. “That is so how I can tell a nun,” she bubbled. “I have more tennis shoes than anything else. Although I do have a pair of black sling-backs with an inch heel.”
Now 27, Heger was 22 when she entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, which has its national headquarters here in St. Louis, and she can’t imagine wearing the habit. Back in France in 1650, her order’s first members wore widow’s weeds, not habits, and called themselves “sisters,” not “nuns,” so they would be free to leave the convent’s cloister and work in the streets with the poor. The habit came later—and after Vatican II, most members shed it with alacrity. Still feisty and feminist, the CSJs talk about staying “in dialogue” with the official church hierarchy. Many live on their own or with one other sister, in apartments close to the people they serve.
Heger is the youngest woman in the St. Louis province. The second-youngest is in her forties. The median age is 75.
When Sr. Marysia Krystosek received the habit of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George last August, she was most definitely not wearing polka dots. “When you enter, you bring white cotton underwear, black shoes, black sweater and coat, no cash,” the vocation director, Sr. M. Consolata Crews, informs me.
The 125 Sisters of St. Francis wear a simple, long-sleeved habit with a waist-length black veil. Krystosek, 21, lives at the order’s U.S. provincial house in Alton. Her congregation, or order, focuses on the traditional ministries of teaching and healthcare, does day care, keeps house for bishops and cares for retired priests—all in faithful, unquestioning obedience to the Church.
Compared to the CSJs, they have an abundance of young entrants: four postulants (first-year entrants) and six novices (second- and third-year). The median age in the U.S. is 41.
St. Louis was called “little Rome” for good reason. One after another, orders of religious sisters sailed from Europe and established themselves here (more than 50 orders remain, nine of which use St. Louis as their national headquarters). They nursed Civil War soldiers (Union and Confederate); taught black, Indian and immigrant children, especially girls; started colleges; built national health systems (SSM, Ascension). With gentle wiles, they pressured CEOs and politicians into reform, bolstered the confidence of battered women and spent years caring for murderers, addicts and prostitutes—people so far out on the margins, it wasn’t socially acceptable even to know them. Sisters were environmentalists before it was trendy, did hospice work before anyone else, stabilized the inner city with their schools.
But until their numbers dropped, no one really noticed.
“I have to smile when people rave about Oprah’s school for girls in Africa—our schools in Africa are 50 years old,” says Sr. Madeleine Lane, a School Sister of Notre Dame who runs The Family Center in Webster Groves. Her order’s St. Louis province has 500 members—but at this writing, only two novices. The CSJs have none. The Sisters of Loretto have none (although four middle-aged American women and four Pakistani women recently professed vows). The Adorers of the Blood of Christ have none …
Desperate, many provinces and even orders are merging, hoping to save money and strengthen their work. Older sisters are wrenched from the motherhouses where they lived for six decades and told they are now “in community” with a group of women they’ve never met. Younger sisters are suggesting opening the doors to laypeople—college students, perhaps—who want to live in temporary community with them.
But some orders, like the ASCJs (Congregation of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who started Cor Jesu Academy), are feeling hopeful again. After an eight-year period in which no one professed vows, the ASCJs are seeing “a large increase in the number of women who are considering entering,” says vocation director Sr. Virginia Herbers, “and we currently have three postulants, two novices and four women who have said temporary vows.”
The ASCJs wear the habit.
The number of women entering Roman Catholic religious orders started to drop right after Vatican II, just as the old strictures loosened. Now the number is growing again—ever so slightly, and with a surprising twist. Some entrants are middle-aged: the post–Vatican II generation for whom religious life held no appeal when they were 20. But an increasing number are in their twenties, and they want to wear the habit. They also want to live and pray together, not alone or with a roommate, as many sisters began to do when their work grew more varied. And some—although not all—want to align themselves more completely with official church teachings.
Sisters who embraced Vatican II’s changes are … bemused. They can see why vocations dropped: First, the hard-won freedoms of the ’60s gave young women more scope for independence, education and ambition. And then communities like the Catholic Worker Movement and Jesuit Volunteer Corps grew, offering countless ways to live an intensely committed, radically simple, thoroughly adventurous life for a year or two without giving up future chances for sex, babies and a bank account.
Some orders also chasten themselves for failing in recruitment: They just weren’t very good at PR, dreading any sort of immodest self-congratulation or assertive evangelism. And some slid a little too comfortably into middle-class comfort, maybe got a little too career-centered and individualistic, until the line between lay and religious was so blurred, it was hard to explain the point of entering.
But permanent, lifelong vows of poverty, chastity and obedience still hold deep meaning to sisters who wear street clothes and live in apartments. They have thrown their lot in together; they are at home all over the world, available to anyone who needs them and free to go wherever they are needed at the drop of a hat. No debt, no spouses or children, no obligations save their promises to God and each other. They love the way their lives as sisters have evolved, the maturity its freedoms require. And they’ve gotten past the shock, the frustration, the panicked bustle as their numbers continued to plummet. “Yes, we may be the last of our kind,” they say serenely, wondering aloud what new forms will replace them.
This, though. This, they never expected.
At Vatican II, Pope John XXIII told the church to throw open the windows—and the winds of change blew hard. Many sisters shed heavy woolen habits and rote devotions and traded tightly regulated convent life to live in smaller, less formal groups. Some left altogether, feeling betrayed when years of disciplined sacrifice were dismissed as unnecessary. Those who stayed became lawyers, lobbyists, artists, therapists, environmentalists; they lived in more flexible arrangements and redefined community; and were it not for their tiny crosses and those inevitably sensible shoes, they could have been mistaken for the laypeople they served.
To them, a return to the habit feels like a step backward, a return to a time when everything was clearly defined; roles were roles and rules were rules, and a straight line of chalk ran between right and wrong. But young women like Krystosek have no painful memories of gritting their teeth as they bowed in silent subservience to a mother superior or pastor. They don’t remember the way the heavy, perspiration-soaked wool chafed and bound, or how mindless the endless recitations of devotion could feel.
“Many didn’t grow up in a heavily Catholic environment, rich in symbol and ritual. They want that Catholic identity,” points out Sr. Mary Charlotte Chandler, director of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Religious Life and a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, headquartered in the Central West End. She sees young people eager to trade their plugged-in, constantly connected lifestyle for contemplative prayer, and replace all those complicated choices—that saturation of sex and stuff—with simple, enthusiastic obedience.
“It’s said we’re the John Paul II generation,” Krystosek remarks. “We’re on fire! We’re hopeful.” Losing the habit, she believes, “was an extremely sad miscommunication of Vatican II. We need to pray for them and have mercy on them for that misinterpretation.”
Because young women tend to start a vocation search online—Googling “nun,” perhaps—the National Religious Vocation Conference now has its own version of eHarmony: VocationMatch.com, which asks about values and priorities, then suggests orders that might be a good fit. Drawing data from 4,000 inquirers—more than half under 30—the conference reports increased interest in “wearing a habit” and “living a life of faithfulness to the church and its teachings.”
In 2008, the conference averaged reports from various religious orders and came up with a 30 percent increase in the number of entrants. Even the most liberal orders are going to have to acknowledge young people’s desires and change to meet them, predicts executive director Brother Paul Bednarczyk, CSC. “If they don’t, they may not necessarily have a congregation in the future.”
“American Catholics in their late teens and twenties are more amenable to joining a religious congregation than either the Baby Boomer or Generation X cohorts of Catholics have been,” according to a scholarly roundtable at the Center for the Study of Religious Life, “yet the type of religious congregation that seems to attract them is one that many congregational leaders, and their membership, would reject.” The scholars warned that religious life “must be religious, and clearly so. In other words, it must be characterized by a visible rhythm that shows itself as oriented toward God and God’s business in the world.”
But if “visibility” means wearing the habit and watching people fall silent when they enter a room, jokes cut off midstream, candor clamped by self-consciousness … some sisters would rather their orders die than go back.
In the invariably crude secular world, the puzzle isn’t clothing so much as celibacy: Why give up sex, now that society no longer treats a woman as a man’s property or a broodmare? Heger admits to a certain wistfulness: “Part of it’s just biological; women are made to have babies, and part of me will always be a little bit envious of those who have done so.” And physical desire? “It goes in waves. There’s a lot of curiosity in me, things I’ve never done, and of course my body has these feelings and hormones. I do a lot of running, a lot of exercise. And I have a lot of good friends. We took a class on intimacy skills and talked about 12 ways of being intimate—11 of which I can participate in!” She falls into a rare silence, then says, “To live this life and give everything I am—it keeps me focused. Free from attachments. Free to love anybody at any time.”
For Krystosek, “It was hard at first, thinking I’m never going to have children—but we have a day care near the convent, and you really exhaust your motherhood! We listen to tapes about chastity, and we have conferences with our superior once a week; she says it’s definitely a thing to be brought up. We’re all still human. Recognizing it and looking at it calmly is important.” So, in Krystosek’s opinion, is the habit, as expression of her absolute devotion to something larger than her own needs or wants.
Bednarczyk says, “When the habit was so restricting, there was a freedom in [discarding] it. Today it means ‘I stand for something.’ In a society where the common values are sex, money and power, to vow chastity, poverty and obedience is a radical choice—and they want people to know they have made it.”
But to Lane, that’s just not necessary. “How I make goodness visible in the world has nothing to do with what I have on,” she remarks. “It takes people about two seconds to pick up on something different about me. Most say it’s a different kind of peace.”
Sr. Francine Costello, CSJ, doesn’t miss the habit’s imposed uniformity, either: “I like shoes that go with my clothes,” she says mischievously. Then she turns serious. “I’m treated like any other person now, and I appreciate that. I’ll say, ‘I’m a Catholic sister,’ and someone will say, ‘That’s it! I knew there was something different about you!’” Once she asked how, and the person thought a minute and said, “It’s the way you talk to me. The way you pay attention.”
Paying attention’s pretty subtle, though, compared to the clarity of the habit. “Even in our students at Nerinx, I can see a longing for a little more structure,” Roche says, “for not having to make so many choices.”
Sr. Jean Abbott, CSJ, dresses “simply enough that I’m not spending lots of time and money; what I wear fits the work and doesn’t draw attention to itself.” Of course, a habit would require even less fuss—but a habit, she says, “sets you apart. A habit asks for respect because of the habit. People gave me their seats, held the door. According to my values, I should be holding the door; I should be giving somebody my seat.”
What she remembers, vividly, is the way kids in the St. Louis projects wrapped their arms around her neck, teasing her in ways they never dared when she wore a long black dress and veil.
But what Krystosek recalls is the little boy who saw two habited sisters in the grocery store and cried out, “Look, Mommy, it’s the Church!”
Forget the scatterbrained, exuberant young postulant. The docile sister who whispers answers and fingers her rosary. The sharp-tongued mother superior who runs a multinational corporation without pausing for breath. Women religious are not the caricatures Hollywood has made them. Theirs have been some of the strongest voices in the world, calling steadily for justice and compassion.
And their numbers are shrinking.
According to the National Religious Retirement Office, the number of religious sisters in the United States dropped 54 percent from 1945 (when there were 122,159) to 2000 (79,876). In 2000, there were
761 Catholics for every sister, compared to 180 in 1945.
Laypeople hate this. We love nuns (we call all sisters “nuns” regardless). We miss their crisp rules, their high expectations, the comfort of their presence. We miss the iconography, too—we laugh at Nunsense and buy nun stuff on eBay, and it works because there was such a difference and a distance.
What most of us forget, though, is that the flocks of sisters who founded and ran many of the country’s schools and hospitals for the first half of the 20th century were the anomaly. “The numbers were only large for a very short time,” Chandler points out. “They peaked in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Before that, the numbers were really quite small. But I think we all got used to having a large body of religious as a labor force—and that, we are not going to see again.”
Now, those still young enough to work must support their aging sisters, who outnumber them by steadily increasing numbers. The NRRO projects that by 2023, the number of sisters 75 or older will be four times as high as the number under 75. Yet they are extraordinarily calm, even those whose orders’ savvy retirement investments just got halved. “You sort of figure we’re going to take care of each other one way or another,” Roche says, then grins. “At least we don’t have to pay a mortgage on the motherhouse!”
Sr. Mary Alan Wurth joined the Adorers of the Blood of Christ in 1956, earned a doctorate in physiology, and set up and ran a hospital nuclear imaging service. Then, when the ASCs started turning their hospitals over to lay boards, she tended a garden in Cairo, Ill., and brought the fresh vegetables, not to mention frozen chickens, to the very poor. “Oh, Chicken Day,” she remembers. “Man!”
OK, they were happy to see her, but wasn’t it hard turning over the hospitals? “At first, there was upset,” she admits, her voice low and calm. “But we as religious women—when there’s the need, we do the work, but once someone else is there to do it, it’s time for us to move on and do other things no one else wants to do.”
Wurth welcomes a return to a more stark simplicity; she thinks many sisters have gotten a little too middle-class. “I can do without the movies,” she says. “I remember when for birthdays we gave someone a spiritual bouquet [prayers offered for her intentions] or polished her shoes for her!”
Abbott agrees; after all, she says, “We became so strong in the late 1800s to mid-1900s, when women entered from working-class communities and their service folded back into those communities. I think religious life flourishes when it’s working with the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised. That’s where the vow of poverty comes in: Leave things so you can be with those people.”
As for her own order’s future, she says calmly, “I think we are not going to retire in the comfort we thought. Seventy is supposed to be our retirement age; I think it’ll get bumped up. Things will be a little tighter. And we’ll be fine. We’ll be absolutely fine.”
The shift away from running hospitals and schools might turn out to be perfectly timed. “People who are younger gravitate toward community—living together, sharing meals, sharing prayer,” says Heger. “Entering used to be for ministry, back when you could do things as a sister that you could not do as a single or married woman. But at this point, there’s not any job that being a sister really opens up for me that I couldn’t do in a different vocation. So the community piece is very strong.”
She used to see how many nuns she could pick out in the Muny free seats. Their shoes were tucked out of sight; the real clue was “just the way they are together, kind of comfortable just being together.”
That ease is forged by a life spent in common rhythms of prayers, meals, work and joy and silence—not semiannual, businesslike convocations and obligatory get-togethers. “Some sisters are doing incredible ministry and bringing in the finances that are supporting everyone else,” Chandler notes, “but they’re not home much. If you are going to be in positions where you can be home more, you have to notch down the lifestyle.”
Lane was drawn to the School Sisters of Notre Dame precisely because of its spirit of community: “They truly had fun with each other, and you could feel their love for each other.” In 38 years, she’s lived in 17 different configurations: with aged sisters, in the motherhouse, in apartments, in houses with 14 other sisters, and now, with one other sister. “Everybody calls our house the religious spa,” she says, smiling. “Children come in and calm down. I say, ‘Well, you can create this at home: Just unplug!’”
Lane needs a quiet refuge after days listening to people who are old and scared, who are 5 and angry, who are 45 and utterly hopeless. What she misses most about community life is not living in large groups but discerning, together, where the order’s members are needed. “Sisters have to look for ‘jobs’—that, to me, is our greatest loss,” she says. “Women religious are hardly even employable in the church anymore, in ministry or teaching. We are told, ‘We can’t afford you.’”
“The bright side of downsizing is that we’re collaborating more than we ever did,” says Roche. Freed from the obligations of being a labor force for hospitals and schools, sisters are networking to fight poverty, detangle immigration, heal in war zones, integrate faith with science. Keenly aware that the earth is not a dead, inert object for our use, but a living being in relationship with us, they’re putting land into conservation trusts, planting trees for carbon offsetting, teaching sustainability …
And they’re reinventing community all over again. Because the miraculous counterbalance to their falling numbers has been a surge in the number of laypeople eager to join in their work. “Associates,” “co-members,” “consociates,” “ohana,” “familia”—single and married people all over the world who want to share a particular order’s values and sense of purpose.
“I think people will come and live with us,” Lane says suddenly. “I think we’ll create new forms of community, little circles, with all types of membership, lay and vowed.”
“Yes, we have a sense that we might be the last of our species; it will take another form,” Costello says. “But that’s wonderful, because there will be another group that will carry on the mission.”
Some in that group will be laypeople, some vowed sisters. Some orders of vowed sisters will seek a distinct identity and communal life; others will blend in with laypeople and lead fluid, diverse lives.
“Nothing is holy in itself,” Abbott says softly. “Nothing. Not this freedom, not their structure. The holiness comes from how each is lived.”
Sr. Barbara Roche
For 23 years, Sr. Barbara Roche has been president of Nerinx Hall, a high school run by the Sisters of Loretto. She graduated from Nerinx in 1964 and entered the order immediately, as did nine classmates, eager for what, in the early ’60s, looked like a freedom they’d never find in the suburbs: travel, graduate work, huge responsibilities and a life crammed with meaning.
So off Roche went to the order’s Kentucky motherhouse—and off her superior general went, a few days later, to Rome. Sr. Mary Luke Tobin, SL, had been invited to be an observer at Vatican II—and the news she brought back changed everything.
The first American order, founded in 1812, the Lorettos had opened 225 schools in short order. Now, a century and a half later, they stunned parish priests by saying they might not be able to commit five or six sisters to the parish school every year. They set up an NGO at the United Nations, protested the Vietnam War, breathed tear gas at civil-rights marches and sweated alongside farmworkers. When Roche told her provincial she wanted to go to Washington, D.C., and work for a member of Congress, the older sister replied, “Well, what do you think you will need to get started, dear?”
Sr. Jean Abbott
Sr. Jean Abbott, founder and clinical director of The Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma, joined the CSJs in 1961. “Full-length habit, rosary hanging down from my waist, long veil, no hair showing at all,” she recalls wryly. “The bell would ring, bing-bing-bing, every hour—‘Sisters, let us remember the presence of God’—and we’d all say, ‘We adore His Divine Majesty.’ Well, divine majesty isn’t who God is for us anymore!
“After Vatican II,” she says, “the externals fell away. We had to learn how to pray all over again. I’d been caught in a very rigid way of meditating—rosary, litanies. Now I’ve come full circle to a deeper kind of meditation.
“These days, nobody’s going to check on you,” Abbott remarks. “You’re not praying because somebody sees you; it’s only you that’s making yourself not available to falling in love.” She lives alone, hungry for solitude after listening for hours to stories of torture by acid or fire, dead children, deadened souls. “When you are in a more structured community, obedience is a very strong value; it’s a grace,” she says, then pauses. “But I could never have started a center for trauma survivors if I were living the old way.”
Sr. Francine Costello
Sr. Francine Costello grew up in Hawaii and entered the CSJs in 1958, right out of high school. She didn’t see her family for eight years, but after taking final vows, she was sent back to Hawaii to teach.
“I was there one year,” she says, “and so very happy.” Then her superior came to visit and asked, “Would you go to Peru?” Costello stammered that she was very happy where she was. “But would you go to Peru?” Costello said she’d have to think about it. Two hours later, the superior asked again, and Costello sighed. “I didn’t enter to be where I wanted to be. If you really need me to go to Peru, I will go.”
She learned Spanish as fast as she could. In her first year in Peru, there was a military coup. In her second year, an earthquake shattered the village, and had a priest not waylaid her, she would have been crushed under cement eaves.
Costello stayed in Peru for 23 years, leaving only after the Shining Path terrorists slaughtered five people in her village and came looking for her by name. Now she’s on her order’s national leadership team in St. Louis, and she’s eager to tackle issues of “church relationship”—especially the definition of women’s role—and the future of religious life. “We have tremendous hope,” she says. “Years ago, we were thinking, ‘We’re dying.’ Now we are thinking, ‘How can we bring religious life to what it should be in the future?’ It’s going to be quite different, we think. It is already.”
