(Image credit: Andrew Sullivan)

Nuns mystify. And, despite often being misunderstood, they continue to enchant. This past year, Roman Catholic religious sisters were a ubiquitous media topic. The Sundance documentary Rebel Hearts narrated a convent’s rebellion against the Los Angeles archbishop in 1969. iHeartRadio’s 10-part podcast The Turning, which debuted last spring and garnered significant media attention, described haunting stories of women who left Mother Teresa’s community of religious sisters. Former sisters told stories of lashing themselves nightly during prayer and sexual and emotional abuse by superiors. And summer brought Claire Luchette’s debut novel, Agatha of Little Neon, about a young defector from religious life who leaves her convent.

But none of these stories depicted religious sisters who stayed. Or even religious sisters who seemed to enjoy being sisters. So I wanted to hear from the sisters themselves about their media image. Of the nearly dozen sisters interviewed for this article, many found these stories trite or inaccurate. Most depictions of religious life caricaturize it as sexually repressed and coercive. Popular stories about religious sisters, like The Turning or Agatha of Little Neon, describe rigidly hierarchical environments. The Turning and Rebel Hearts focus on when things go wrong. But the essential motivation of what draws women to religious orders and why they stay somehow eludes popular media.

Religious sisters—women in the Catholic Church who vow themselves to communities that embrace poverty, chastity, and obedience—have undergone major changes in the past 60 years. Those changes have been underexamined by their own Church and by the media that tells their stories.

Pope Francis dedicated February 2022 as a month of prayer for religious sisters. In a video message broadcast by the Vatican, Francis highlighted the radical work of the sisters: caring for the poor, the marginalized, the trafficked. Although they no longer fill the staff lounges of Catholic schools or run Catholic hospitals, religious sisters play an important role in the ministry of the Catholic Church. They have, in a unique way, embraced many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. They minister to those on the margins of society, and they are bridging the gap between traditional faith communities and digital natives looking for stability in the transitory and transactional internet age.

Religious Sisters’ History

Religious sisters have been a staple of popular media from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Sister Act. “Nuns” is a common word for women who take religious vows, but “nuns” actually refers specifically to women who live in a cloister, a monastic community committed to its own internal life of prayer and work instead of working in the world. Whether nuns or active sisters, communities of vowed religious women and their unique contributions are vital to understanding the story of the Catholic Church.

In the Catholic Church—both its Western and Eastern branches—monasticism became the ideal way to imitate Christ once Christianity became incorporated into the Roman Empire in the fourth century C.E. Male and female monks—known as anchorites—rejected citizenship in the empire and embraced a solitary life of prayer and fasting in the desert.

During the fall of the Roman Empire, the anchorites developed into communities of cenobites, monks who lived in the same community and vowed to the same rules. In 516, Benedict of Nursia wrote the famous Rule of Benedict for religious orders. His sister, Scholastica, founded the first cenobite community of women based on his rule. Today, many Catholic religious orders still follow Benedict’s 73-chapter rules for communal living. At the heart of religious life is the search for God, what Benedictines call quaerere Deum.

Second Vatican Council

There are approximately 40,000 women religious in the United States. Their numbers have dwindled since a record high of roughly 180,000 in 1965. Churchgoers who remember when habited sisters populated the staff lounges of Catholic parochial schools and tended to the sick in Catholic hospitals often bemoan the loss of the “golden age” of American religious life. But experts say that this boom in women joining religious congregations after World War II was an anomaly. “There were overflowing novitiates, overflowing seminaries after the War, and people talk about, ‘let’s go back to normal, to the 40s.’ But actually, that wasn’t normal at all,” said Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American religious history at the University of Notre Dame. Cummings and other experts attribute those overflowing convents to the general baby boom of the post-war years.

The Second Vatican Council, which consisted of meetings of lay and ordained theologians, bishops, and Protestant observers gathered in Rome from 1962-1965, sparked reforms in the Church that are still being debated, implemented, and resisted today. “It will probably take 100 more years to figure it out,” said Cummings with a wry chuckle over the phone. The Second Vatican Council’s mission was to “open the windows of the church.” During the European age of revolutions in the 19^th century, the first Vatican Council resisted changed and metaphorically closed the windows of the church to a changing world. It condemned liberalism and modernism as serious errors that threatened Christendom and papal power. The Second Vatican Council shifted the sails slightly, promoting an enculturated church: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age…these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ,” the council promised. The Second Vatican Council asked religious congregations to examine how their founders would respond to the world of the 1960s. Documents on the liturgy expanded the use of the laity’s mother tongue and changed the orientation of the priest at Mass. But changes in the language and the liturgy, which defines the weekly religious practice of one billion people, were difficult for many Catholics—particularly the clergy.

“For some priests, change was very difficult,” said Mary Southard, CSJ, a sister of St. Joseph LaGrange, Illinois. She joined the order after attending a high school staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Southard vividly recalls the difference between religious life when she entered and how the reforms of the Second Vatican Council transformed it.

“The first half-year was very difficult for me,” Southard recalled of when she joined in 1954, “In those days, the style formation was to bash the ego—it was an old kind of spirituality where you were put down.” By the time Southard had professed vows and was put in charge of sisters’ formation a decade later, she remembers devouring Vatican II documents excitedly, particularly Perfectae Caritatis, the constitution on religious life. “We read everything in sight,” she said with a giggle. The document directed congregations to examine the roots of their order and their founder’s original intent. They took up new ministries, serving the incarcerated, fighting for racial justice, and responding to the “griefs and anxieties” of the people of the modern age.

As Southard pointed out, the Second Vatican Council’s changes have continued to meet resistance. Many parishes that still cultivate a pre-Vatican II style of worship—all-male altar servers, communion received kneeling at a rail, copious Latin and incense—make prayers for vocations a staple of their Sunday worship. “Choose from our homes those who are needed for your work. Bring forth from our families, priests, and religious, obtain for us many more,” one prayer goes. Religious life was seen as one of the key collateral damages of the Second Vatican Council. Catholics yearned to see habited sisters staff schools and fill church pews once again—there was a nostalgia for this visible sign of an influential, “strong” Church.

But Cummings said that one of the points of Vatican II is an emphasis on the laity’s ownership and responsibility for the Church. “It’s time for the laity to take responsibility more for Catholic institutions,” she said. Religious sisters are part of the laity. They are not ordained ministers, like priests or part of the hierarchy of bishops. After the Second Vatican Council, many orders doffed medieval styles of habits as a result of their discernment discussions—they wanted to emphasize their place alongside the laity, as part of the people of God, not separate from it.

A Modern Spin on Religious Life

Popular media often focuses on the deprivation of religious life, what these women “give up.” Left out of the frame is what sisters gain. Before the 1960s, women – generally – did not have as many social options for their lives. Vowed religious life gave them an avenue to earn a degree and have a profession or ministry outside of the social structure of marriage and without being legally dependent on a man. So why, after cultural revolutions that have offered women a variety of options and a revolution in the Catholic Church that elevates the laity, do women still choose religious life?

“Why do you get married?” Linda Romey, a Benedictine sister in Eerie, Pennsylvania, shoots back. “You don’t know how it’s going to turn out.” Falling in love is at the heart of how Romey depicts religious life. Another, younger sister similarly describes the choice to commit oneself to poverty, chastity, and obedience as a deeply personal mystery. “It’s the mystery of how God calls the individual,” Sr. Virginia Joy said. She belongs to the Sisters of Life, founded in 1991 in New York City by Cardinal John O’Connor.

(Sisters of Life. Image source: sistersoflife.org)

Sr. Virginia Joy entered the Sisters of Life when she was in her early 30s. She grew up in South Carolina and was a practicing Catholic but did not know much about religious sisterhood. “I saw it in Sister Act and The Sound of Music, but it didn’t strike me as something people live, currently,” Sr. Virginia Joy said. She attended a Catholic college, became more involved in her faith, and joined the Sisters of Life several years later.

She describes religious vocation—hers and others—as a call that begins with God. “We believe baptized Catholics receive their unique vocations at the moment of their Baptism,” she said. The Sisters of Life are a habited order, but their mission is distinctly modern, as is the way they speak about vocations. The “universal call to holiness” was a key focus of the Second Vatican Council, particularly in the document Lumen Gentium, which describes all baptized persons as “consecrated” and “commissioned.” It puts the work of lay persons in the world on par with the work of vowed religious. “God created you for a reason, the world has a need of you, the world misses out if you don’t fulfill your purpose,” said Sr. Virginia Joy.

In the past 30 years, the Sisters of Life have grown from eight sisters to 120, in houses from Phoenix to Philadelphia. Most sisters are in their late twenties and early thirties. As their name suggests, they are staunch pro-life advocates. But their version of pro-life lobbying doesn’t focus on Washington politics. Some of their chief ministries are supporting young mothers or women experiencing difficult pregnancies. At one of their houses in Midtown Manhattan, nine sisters live alongside five young mothers who need a home for various reasons: an unsupportive family, shelter from an abusive partner, or lack of resources.

The rhythm of their day is set by the monastic liturgy of the hours. They have dinner with their female guests in a living room filled with baby toys. And they have a good amount of fun. “Come back for the cornhole tournament this weekend,” one sister says, grinning. And they do it all while wearing a distinctive blue and white habit designed by Cardinal O’Connor.

Religious habits have become divisive symbols in the post-Vatican II United States. Cummings describes them as “a lightning rod.” For some sisters, she says, the habits symbolize a regression to a former more hierarchical style of religious life. But, to others, they function as a beacon for people needing help, much like a priest’s collar. The Sisters of Life’s habits strike an emotional chord with many Catholics, the sisters say, particularly Catholics yearning for the Church of their youth. But the sisters themselves are quick to say that the habits don’t make them any better or more special than others. They see the dwindling numbers of some orders and the burgeoning numbers of others not as competition or replacement, but as the natural growth of a family. “Many older religious congregations recognize that new charisms will replace them,” said Virginia Joy. The Sisters of Life, she said, have benefited from the 30 years of discussion and experimentation that happened after the Second Vatican Council. “We stand on the shoulders of the sisters who came before us,” she said.

But one thing is for sure: the Sisters of Life draw millennials and Zoomers. Their community’s median age is in their 30s. Of the ten women who joined the order last fall, most are in their mid-twenties. Many digital natives, experts say, are often drawn to religious communities that have concrete traditions. They are searching for, “a real group or ‘tribe’ that they can be a part of,” said Read Mercer Schuchardt, professor of communications at Wheaton College via email. Schuchardt, who observes the effects of digital media upon his students, said that when knowledge is no longer passed down from books and professors but looked up on a Google search bar, young people begin to lose a sense of shared culture — “the things that we know on recall.” Some digital natives are seeking that tradition in religious sisters, even those who don’t identify as religious. 

Sisters and Seekers

“Tradition offers guard rails through which you can move through life,” said Katie Gordon, “and there’s often a lot of freedom in that paradigm.”

Gordon is, in many ways, your typical millennial woman. She grew up Catholic but identifies as agnostic. She is passionate about climate change and fighting for racial justice. And she lives in a Benedictine monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania.

She first encountered religious sisters when she worked in interfaith organizing with college students. At climate marches in Grand Rapids, she would notice Dominican Sisters. She struck up a conversation with one sister while holding a banner together at a climate march in 2015. “What drew me to nuns wasn’t their piety, but their prophecy of speaking up against injustices,” Gordon said in a phone interview. She began building a friendship with one of the Dominicans, and she realized that the college students and sisters had much in common and a lot to learn from one another. “Boy, I’ve really got to get these people together,” Gordon said. She organized conversation circles that became a movement: Nuns and Nones. Nuns and Nones, a loose, grassroots collective, brings agnostic young people and religious sisters into conversation to learn from one another. Gina Ciliberto, who helped the Dominican Sisters of Hope in New York’s Hudson Valley form a Nuns and Nones community, said the learning is mutual. “Millennials like me are asking very similar questions to the ones 70 or 80- or 90-year-old sisters are,” Ciliberto said. “It isn’t just the millennials who are curious and active. The nuns are curious and active!”

(Nuns and Nones gathering. Image source: nunsandnones.org)

Gordon said much of the sisters’ counter-cultural life resonates with the longings of millennials, particularly their commitment to community and vow of stability in an epidemic of loneliness and a culture constantly on the move. “Women religious have a model community that sustains a lifelong commitment to spirit and to social action. Their community life sustains them over a lifetime,” she said. This radical way of living resonates with young activists, she said, who are already burned out and exhausted from working for change. The sisters’ communal work for justice gives millennials a “longer window of the present,” said Gordon. They’re more connected to generations of the past and grounded in their identity as elders of the future.

Gordon reads the Rule of Benedict each morning with the community, which she calls “grounding” and has come to see freedom in the sisters’ vows. “If you’re living a life that is not attached to material objects so much more actually becomes possible. So much space is freed up in your life when you are able to commit to that,” said Gordon.

The questions asked of religious sisters, much like their depictions in media, often demonstrate the assumptions of the askers. Virginia Joy said the questions they receive about ordination, power, and the secular comforts they give up (like going out to restaurants), often say more about the mindset of the speaker and a patriarchal society than they do about the sisters.

People also often ask about how sisters view their position in the Catholic Church. When asked about her role in the hierarchy, Linda Romey, the Benedictine sister in Eerie, said, “I don’t really think about the Church much.” She clarifies: “I don’t think about the institution—I don’t dwell on it. I think of the church as the people of God who share their faith.”

But the institutional church is concerned about them. Pope Francis made amends with a congregation of nuns in France at the end of last year, apologizing for the Vatican’s mishandling of their reports of abuse within their order. He said the officials displayed “a lack of understanding of religious life.” Francis also recently appointed Sr. Nathalie Becquart of the French Congregation of Xavières to a powerful position in the Vatican Curia. He recently urged religious sisters to choose joy in the face of challenges. “The Spirit is inviting us amid our crises, and crises there are—our decreasing numbers—and our diminishing forces, to renew our lives and our communities,” Francis said to religious congregations in a Mass on World Day for Consecrated Life on February 2, 2022.

“Maybe our call is a sense of ambiguity, of not knowing the future,” said Sister Jane Herb, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States. Religious life, even in its commitment to tradition and stability, continues to evolve. Francis remonstrated the religious orders in his homily, “We cannot pretend not to see these signs and go on as usual, doing the same old things, drifting back through inertia to the forms of the past, paralyzed by fear of change.” Sister Linda Romey echoes Francis’ sentiment: “Women religious show the church faithfulness over the long haul. They keep on keeping on, stand up for what they value, and find a community to help them do it.”

From the outside, Nuns and Nones and the Sisters of Life may not share much in common—one is a more traditional-looking habited congregation of sisters, another is a loose collection of nuns in street clothes dialoging with the disaffiliated. But both are living out the unique call of the Second Vatican Council to open the windows to the church to the joys and pains of the modern world. And both are beacons of light for young people seeking a commitment to justice rooted in lived community. They stand on the shoulders of a tradition, a way of life and culture of faith that is rooted and connected to the past—and something more. Romey believes the underlying desire that has led women to seek religious life will always remain a common human desire. “Benedict’s qualification for the monk was the desire to seek God,” she said, “And there will always be people who desire to seek God in this intense way.”

Renée Darline Roden is a freelance journalist covering religion. Her writing has appeared in the Associated Press, Religion News Service, Washington Post, and The Tablet.