Young Women Refusing to Commit (to Nun Life)

An interesting piece at VICE about the rapid dwindling of the American nun population begins with scenes from the Wartburg, a Westchester nursing home that’s become an unofficial magnet for sisters lost in a peculiar diaspora. Unofficially nicknamed the Deathburg, the nursing home is overwhelmed by this new religious population, but “with convents closing in New York, as they are all over the country, and the existing population of nuns aging rapidly without younger women to replace them, where are [the nuns] supposed to go?”

The nuns in this story have sold off the contents of their convents and hope to use the profits to keep each other afloat in retirement. Nuns, as it turns out, have no institutional support to rely on at all.

You may wonder whether the global church the sisters belong to is interested in keeping the convents open. It sure seems like it isn’t. By 2005, the Catholic Church had spent $1 billion on legal fees and settlements stemming from priests sexually abusing children. Yet church leaders have allocated no funds to take care of elderly sisters, and while priests’ retirement funds are covered by the church, the sisters have no such safety net. When their orders run out of money, that’s it.

“Why would you want to be a nun if the archdiocese is going to treat you like they do?” Ann Frey at the Wartburg said. “Their whole lives they’ve been obedient and done what they were asked to do, and now nobody is helping them?”

The demographic shift has been rapid and dramatic. “It used to be relatively commonplace for a Catholic high school to have maybe ten to 15 seniors graduate directly into an order,” writes Allie Conti, “but now a community is lucky to get one postulate every few years.” Also:

A 2008 study found that only 8 percent of Millenials had ever considered becoming a nun or religious sister, while 26 percent of the “Vatican II generation” (Catholics born between 1943 and 1960; Baby Boomers, basically) had given it some thought.

Has there been significant agitation within the female Catholic community to provide financial support for nuns in their old age? A lifetime of selflessness, and then even more.

[VICE]