“In a world of broken commitments, our Catholic sisters and nuns who celebrate 50 to 60 years of vowed communal life witness to a lifetime of holiness through prayer and ministry.”
Keeping the sisterhood from extinction: The struggle to save nuns in America
In 1965, there were 180,000 Catholic sisters in the United States. But according to the National Religious Retirement Office, in 2019, there were just 31,350 in 411 institutes. The trend, which is being echoed globally, is making it difficult to find enough nuns to serve in convents and Catholic schools, a problem exacerbated by the fact that most existing nuns are elderly.
"At least for the past four or five years, the number of women entering religious institutions has been relatively stable,” Father Thomas Gaunt, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, told Fox News. “Around 200-plus women enter religious life each year in the USA.”
But the number of those who take their vows is outpaced by those ending their service. The average age of a Catholic nun in the U.S. is nearly 80, and convents around the country are shuttering.
Definitely a shift for the Catholic Church ahead. They're going to have to modernize their thinking a little bit to figure out how to fill the role of nun while working with the generations of today.
Give and take.
Grace & Peace & Love to you all -
Matt
p.s. the lady 5th from the left of that picture above has the coolest nun hat (habit?) that I have ever seen; wonder if that style/size signifies anything in particular?