News video about the Nashville Dominicans

"Religious life: The path is less chosen, but young women still hear the call"

'I knew I wanted to do God's will'

From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

By Ann Rodgers

Photo at left: Sister Mary Elizabeth Liederbach, center (with blonde hair), and Sister Angela Russell, right, with their fellow postulant class at St. Cecilia Motherhouse, Nashville, Tenn.

Angela Russell was a teenager visiting relatives in France when she prayed in a chapel where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared in 1830. That was where she first felt a call to be a Catholic sister.

"It was an overwhelming sense that I was going to dedicate my life totally to Christ," said Sister Angela, 21, a Beaver native who recently entered the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville, Tenn.

Far fewer women than in the past take that path, and those who do are often attracted to traditions that many communities no longer practice. Since 1965, the number of sisters in the U.S. has fallen from 180,000 to 61,000. A Vatican-ordered study is under way of conditions that may have contributed to the decline.

Yet women still answer the call. Sister Angela is among three local women seeking vows in the Nashville Dominicans. Two just made temporary vows in the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, formerly the Millvale Franciscans. The Little Sisters of the Poor, a community in Brighton Heights known for traditional habits and ministry to the elderly, count a medical doctor among two novices. This weekend a half-dozen women were expected at a discernment retreat for the Sisters of the Holy Spirit in Ross.

A recent study from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University found that two-thirds of communities have at least one person working toward final vows, which typically takes at least seven years. Their average age is 32. But in less traditional communities, 56 percent of newer members are 40 or older. In more conservative ones, 85 percent of sisters make final vows by age 39.

Sisters born since 1982 prefer the habits and ancient communal prayers that were standard before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s called sisters to re-evaluate how their lives related to their founders' intentions and to the world around them.

Communities with the most success in gaining new members "wear a religious habit, work together in common [ministries] and are explicit about their fidelity to the church," the study said.

That describes the 252 Nashville Dominicans, who gained 23 members this summer. The community doesn't accept postulants -- candidates -- past age 30.

"There is great hope for young people entering religious life in the future," said Sister Mary Emily Knapp, 39, the vocations director.

Their sisters teach in 34 Catholic schools nationwide, but none in Pittsburgh. The community has attracted local women through connections with the Newman Center, a university outreach in Oakland, and Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

Sister Maria Francesca Wiley, a Franciscan University graduate who grew up in Washington, Pa., and Peters, just received a black veil in her third year with the Nashville Dominicans.

As a postulant she wore a black skirt and vest over a white blouse, while learning community life and studying philosophy and education at Aquinas College. Her novice year, she received a habit and white veil. The black veil marked first vows. Final vows likely will be in 2014.

She thought religious life would be more of a sacrifice.

"The biggest surprise was how happy I was," she said, of her life of prayer and academics.

Her preparation began in the youth group at St. Benedict the Abbot in Peters, where she developed a deep love of the Eucharist.

Becoming a sister "wasn't really on my radar. I had never known anyone who did it, and I wasn't in touch with any communities. But I knew I wanted to do God's will," she said.

When her family moved to South Carolina, she met a Nashville Dominican sister.

"She was very down to earth, a normal, personable young woman -- the kind of woman I thought would have been a great wife and mother," she said. "I had thought of sisters as people who wanted to flee the world. She wasn't like that at all."

She visited the Nashville convent her senior year of high school, and felt attracted to religious life. In college she considered other orders, including the Franciscans at Steubenville and the Sisters of Life, who assist women in crisis pregnancies. While she admired both, "when I was with the sisters in Nashville, I felt they were my family,"she said.

Sister Mary Elizabeth Liederbach, who entered the Nashville Dominicans after her April graduation from the University of Pittsburgh, said her plans left some students speechless.

"They just didn't know how to react because it's such an unknown thing," she said.

She can relate. She felt called years before she understood it.

"It was a very mysterious call for a long time because of my minimal exposure to religious life," she said. "I was captivated by the idea of belonging to Jesus, without having any concept of what that would mean for me."

She majored in civil and environmental engineering, hoping to bring water to drought-stricken lands. She knew of religious orders that would sponsor such work. She also seriously considered the Sisters of Life. But she felt drawn to the Nashville Dominicans, whom she encountered when two sisters visited her campus Bible study.

"As I grew in faith, I stopped asking 'What am I going to do?' and started asking 'Who am I going to be?' Instead of asking myself, I started asking God," she said.

"It wasn't a call away from the poor, but to look to a deeper, hidden spiritual poverty that is all around us."

As she looked at orders' Web sites, she rejected those in which the sisters wore street clothes.

"I think most women feel that our clothes matter. When you are consecrating your whole life to God, that is part of the consecration," she said.

Most of the 1,200 sisters in the Diocese of Pittsburgh are in orders where habits are optional. When Sister Teresa Baldi became a novice with the Sisters of the Holy Spirit in Ross in 2006, she had to decide whether to wear a veil and habit, as about half the 40 sisters in her community do.

"I was really torn, and I prayed about it for a long time," she said.

She was moved by a sister in her 90s, who encouraged her to wear it as a witness for Christ. But she chose street clothes, with the medal that is the sole visible mark for many sisters today.

"In contemporary society there need to be contemporary ways of witnessing to the gospel," said Sister Teresa, who teaches at Immaculate Conception in Bloomfield.

She would never have chosen a community with a full habit.

"I sweat too much in the summer," she said, laughing.

Now 47, Sister Teresa resisted her call for decades. But she served the church full time as a youth minister at St. Bernard in Mt. Lebanon. An encounter with a Holy Spirit sister at a retreat center changed her life.

"She had a great devotion to the blessed sacrament, and would go and sit in front of the tabernacle for an hour," she said. The sister had such a peaceful radiance "that when I sat with her I thought, 'This is what I want.' "

Her life is governed by monastic traditions that some communities have abandoned. Although her wishes are taken into account, community leaders decide where and how she will serve. In her novice year, she could have only two family visits.

Now she has more freedom than would a Nashville Dominican but must clear outside visits with her immediate superior.

"It's like a family. You don't leave your family every night," she said.

Many orders have diverse ministries, and want new members to try several. The Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities have 530 sisters in education, health care, pastoral care, social services and serving as missionaries worldwide.

Moon native Sister Laura Hackenberg, 33, was an administrative assistant at FedEx before entering the Millvale Franciscans in 2006. Since then she has worked with the homeless and at two retreat centers. Speaking just before her temporary vows, she expected to move next to a health care setting.

A growing thirst for life with God led her to respond to a brochure for a retreat to consider religious life.

"I came to see that religious women ... have a great love for one another and, like St. Francis, are advocates for the poor and marginalized and are promoters of peace and justice. The sisters bring the depth of God's love to all that they minister to," she wrote in an essay on her decision.

Avalon native Sister Amy Williams, 37, recently took first vows alongside her. The former legal secretary has done hospice ministry and worked in day care for the elderly. She loved it all, and expects to attend nursing school, specializing in pain relief for the seriously ill.

"I found a sense of belonging with this community that I had never experienced before, and my life suddenly felt full and complete," she said.

Nashville Dominicans Attracting Most U.S. Postulants

From The Tennessean
By Bob Smietana

When it comes to ultimate Frisbee, the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia don't mess around.

On a recent afternoon, a dozen young sisters, dressed in full-length habits or in postulant uniforms — white shirts, black skirts, black vests — and wearing sneakers and blue aprons, gathered at the edge of the convent's playing field.

Then they screamed at the top of their lungs, and rushed another group of nuns as a white Frisbee flew overhead. "Did you see that?" said Sister Mary Emily, watching over her young charges. "They're trying to intimidate the other team."

There are 23 postulants this year at the Motherhouse of Nashville's Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia. It's the largest group of new nuns in training in the United States.

While many religious orders in the United States are declining, the Nashville Dominicans are flourishing. Most of the new sisters are in their 20s and want to be traditional nuns — wearing full habits and living in a convent. They say that life as a nun offers more than the secular world could ever give them.

The new sisters, known as postulants during their first year, are a diverse group. Sister Maria, from Pennsylvania, is 17 and straight out of high school. One, a nurse of Vietnamese descent, came from Sydney, Australia. Another sister is from the Ivory Coast. Others are from Ohio, Michigan and other Midwestern states. One is from Knoxville. Three were engineers before coming to the convent.

They love Pope Benedict XVI and the retired nuns at the convent, as well as Christian rock bands Third Day and Jars of Clay. And they've left everything behind — families, friends, careers, even their iPods, cell phones, laptops and Facebook accounts — all for the sake of Jesus.

"God showed me that everything I longed for in my heart was here," Sister Angela said. "My vocation was a romance with the Creator."

These sisters are younger

The 1940s and '50s were the glory years of American convents, says Sister Mary Bendyna, senior research associate for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which studies American Catholicism.

"In the '40s, '50s and '60s, we saw large numbers of people in the Catholic Church going into religious life," she said. "That was unusual.''

By 1965, there were 179,954 nuns in the United States. Today, there are 59,601. Most are senior citizens, said Sister Mary, who recently completed a study of American Catholic religious orders.

"There are more over 90 than under 60. That was particularly striking," she said.

By contrast, the average age of the 252 Nashville Dominican sisters is 36. And they have 54 candidates in their training program, known as the novitiate.

It takes seven years to become a full-fledged sister. The postulant year gets the incoming sisters accustomed to life at the convent. Then they become novices. In their third year, they take temporary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, followed by permanent vows at the end of the process. At that point, most go out to teach in Catholic school through the order's 22 missions, each with about four to five nuns.

Those first two years are a kind of spiritual boot camp.

"They get up at 5 a.m. and begin the day in the chapel, with prayer, including meditation, the Divine Office, and then the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass," Sister Mary Emily said.

Breakfast is at 7 a.m. Then they are off to class until 12:30 p.m. at Aquinas College, or, if they are novices, in silence meditation or study at the Motherhouse until 12:30 p.m. In the afternoon, they have recreation and classes at the Motherhouse, followed by vespers.

All the nuns eat in silence, while a sister reads from the Bible or a spiritual book — currently they are listening to a biography of Cardinal Stritch, a Nashville native who became archbishop of Chicago. There's another hour of recreation in the evening, followed by spiritual reading, night prayer and an evening service, and then silence. Lights out at 10 p.m.

Postulants and novices are not allowed to make phone calls. Their only contact with family is through twice-a-month letter-writing days or a family visiting day. There's no going home for the holidays.

"It's a real immersion," said Sister Mary Angela, who oversees the novices. "They can't live one foot in and one foot out. They have two solid years where they are really separated, and they can see, 'Can I do this with God alone?' "

Driven by love of God

Life at the order has changed a great deal since Sister Mary Angela first entered the convent 49 years ago. She and many of her peers came straight out of high school, inspired by the nuns who taught them as Catholic schoolchildren.

Sister Mary Angela is encouraged to see all the new sisters coming to the order. Like many Catholic religious orders, they went through a hard time in the 1970s, after Vatican II had modernized many church practices. Some sisters left. But unlike other orders, many of which abandoned wearing the habit, the Nashville Dominicans retained many of their traditional practices.

John Allen, senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter newspaper, said that in the 1970s, many nuns rebelled against the Catholic culture they had grown up in, which was seen as stifling and over-controlling.

"That world no longer exists," he said.

The young nuns in Nashville don't seem driven by conservative theology or ideology. Instead, they seem driven by a love for God.

Sister Mary Emily said that the nuns are glad to have the young women join them.

"We love our life, and we want to share it with others," she said.

"Beloved" - Salt + Light Documentary on the Nashville Dominicans

From Salt + Light Television

"The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, commonly known as the Nashville Dominicans, continue to expand into new territory with a message of hope that the springtime of the New Evangelization is indeed in bloom. For almost 150 years, in the heart of the Bible Belt in Tennessee, the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia have embraced God's love in the living of their vows and apostolic vocation in the field of education. Now, with a median age of 36, the 235 Dominican Sisters of this congregation bring generations of young people the message of Christ in over 30 schools, throughout the United States and Australia.

Like the virgin martyr Cecilia, Nashville Dominicans promise their hearts to Christ. The Lord’s voice fills their ears and secures their promise to be Christ’s alone. Nashville Dominicans show the world a love that is different and unique. It is a love that is eternal. Nashville Dominicans are indeed beloved by God, as you will witness in this documentary. You will be taken inside a religious congregation that continues to offer the world and the Church a compelling model of religious life that is beautiful, hopeful, joyful and alive. "

Fr. Thomas Rosica, C.S.B.
C.E.O., Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation

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Purchase: Order your DVD copy from the Salt + Light online store or call Salt + Light at 1.888.302.7181

H/t to Deacon Dan Gallaugher

Religious Communities and Young Vocations

"A Monastic Kind of Life"
From SLATE
By Harold Fickett
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The Catholic Church has always seen the contemplative life as the "Air Force" in its spiritual struggle, as the Rev. David Toups of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops commented—a conduit of spiritual power. Though the number of young people entering monasteries, convents, and the priesthood has drastically dropped from the mid-20th century, some new approaches to religious vocations have inspired some young people in America to embrace this idea, replenishing several of the older religious orders and filling new ones. One such community with a young population, nestled in the Ozarks, is a place that could symbolize Catholicism's true hope for renewal in our time. Founded in 1999, the Clear Creek Monastery has grown from 13 to 30 monks who are intent on building a community that will "last for a thousand years." Clear Creek is also part of the "reform of the reform," a rethinking of Vatican II that has led a number of religious orders—such as the Dominican Sisters in Nashville, the Sisters for Life in New York, and Benedict Groeschel's Franciscan Friars of the Renewal—to rediscover their original mission and flourish.

The growth in these orders provides a striking contrast to the continuing decline in Catholic monastic and religious life generally. In 1965, there were twice as many religious priests and brothers as today. There are just one-third as many nuns. According to Sister Mary Bendyna, executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, the average monk is in his early 70s, the average nun in her mid-70s. The mission of many orders has become simply caring for their aging populations as they sell properties and consolidate with others.

The Vatican II document dealing with monasticism, Perfectae caritatis, counseled both "a constant return to the sources" of the Christian life and "their adaptation to the changed conditions of our time." Issued in October 1965, this re-examination of the religious life came as the cultural revolution of the 1960s began its magical mystery tour. It was received with wild and contradictory enthusiasms by a restive population of monks and nuns. Many of the large Catholic families of the World War II generation sought spiritual favor—or simply status—by giving one of their children to the church. These donated priests, nuns, and monks often wanted to leave or instead sought to accommodate the religious life's demands to their personal ambitions. For a time, the life of Catholic religious orders became about social justice issues, psychological issues, peace studies, interreligious dialogue, the ecology movement—everything and anything, seemingly, except the central proposition: that one can know a loving God and be transformed.

The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles are the most famous example of the combustible combination of the times and the dissatisfaction of many religious. In 1966, humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers led a series of "encounter sessions" with the sisters, urging them to seek personal fulfillment. Within the next several years, the order nearly vanished. In many orders at the time, the vow of chastity was widely ignored.

Russell Hittinger, the Warren professor of Catholic studies at the University of Tulsa, admits that many of those who entered religious life before Vatican II simply did not have a calling. Those who truly have a call to monasticism—or other forms of the religious life—begin by falling in love with the pursuit of holiness, as did the monks of Clear Creek.

The Clear Creek story goes back to the University of Kansas. In the early 1970s, six young men who would become founding monks of Clear Creek were students in the Pearson College Integrated Humanities Program. Literally hundreds of Pearson's students became Catholic converts, inspired by professor John Senior, who conceived of a contemplative monastery close to the Lawrence campus. After he learned of a traditional Benedictine monastery in Fontgombault, France, he sent two young men off on a scouting mission with an instruction: "Bring back an abbot." These American students, and the others who soon followed, went to France thinking they would soon return to establish a monastery, bringing renewal to American Catholicism and society. But the demands of monastic life and obedience soon revealed this to be youthful presumption.

In 1999, a full 25 years after leaving for France, six of the original University of Kansas students, along with seven fellow monks, returned to America to start Clear Creek, establishing the first foundation for men of the Benedictine Congregation of Solesmes in America. On a 1,200-acre tract of land once owned by an infamous moonshiner, the Clear Creek monks use the old Latin rites both for Mass and the daily offices. Indeed, a return to traditional practices is a common element among those religious orders experiencing renewal. Many young nuns, for example, choose to wear a traditional habit even when their older religious sisters choose modest secular fashions.

Scores of families have purchased land nearby to raise their families in the shadow of the monastery, where they often join the monks in their liturgical celebrations. These families tend to be the crunchiest of the Crunchy Cons, into home schooling, the "local foods, local markets" movement, and sustainable farming. This growing community is one of the surest signs of Clear Creek's importance. This follows the classic spiritual pattern: Saints traipse off into the wilderness, and the world eventually follows, unbidden, as with the Cistercians, who turned the swamps and fens of Europe into arable land and saw communities spring up around them.

The emergence of Clear Creek and other growing monastic communities suggests there will always be young people who ask whether their devotion to God should take precedence over their own personal ambitions and even the natural desire for a family. (The A&E special God or the Girl was an insightful documentary about this.) Today's young people, who have grown up in a highly commercialized and manipulated landscape, are particularly eager to connect with a more authentic way of living. Far from being pressured into pursuing religious vocations, they find their families often protest, feeling they are losing their children to a life that's too isolated.

But after the first heady period of romance comes a long and difficult obedience, as every monk or nun eventually recognizes. Fidelity can result in humility, though, which is the deepest source of the beauty to be seen at Clear Creek and other monastic foundations. From its rich liturgical rites to the pastoral details of its life as a working farm, as the monks raise sheep, make furniture, tend their orchard, and care for a huge vegetable garden, Clear Creek is what a monastery is meant to be—a sign of paradise.

Father Anderson says, "We were only a bunch of bums, but by becoming nothing, you can be a part of something great."

Harold Fickett is an associate editor of GodSpy.com and the author of The Living Christ and other books.

New Principal for Cardinal Hickey Academy

From Southern Maryland Newspapers Online
By GRETCHEN PHILLIPS

Sister Mary Juliana Cox stepped out of her office for a few moments one afternoon only to return to a small piece of chocolate that had mysteriously appeared on her desk. These sweet surprises have helped Sister Juliana feel welcomed as the new principal of Cardinal Hickey Academy.

Sister Juliana comes to Cardinal Hickey Academy from her Motherhouse in Tennessee, the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia congregation. Before joining the private school in Owings, Sister Juliana taught for five years in the Tennessee area.

Sister Juliana said she has brought with her a focus on community, faith and excellence.

She said she is working to ensure that teachers at Cardinal Hickey are provided ample time in their classroom for instruction to take place.

Her first week of a school full of students has been a good one, she said, and in an interview she repeatedly mentioned the respect she has observed from both staff and students.

Prior to the students’ first days, Sister Juliana prepared for school with staff meetings and got acquainted with her new building.

Sister Juliana said one of her priorities was making sure the eighth grade students had a memorable last year at the school. She met with each eighth-grader’s parents and the class to get to know them. She said she was hoping to get ideas from students on how they can ‘‘be leaders and take an active role in the leadership of the school.”

During the first week of school, Sister Juliana visited classrooms and said she was ‘‘impressed with the eagerness of children to learn and do their best.”

‘‘In a classroom you see how God is working with your group of [students] and those families but as principal you see the Holy Spirit working in the school and it is so very humbling to recognize that God has placed these souls into my care to guide, nurture and challenge to greater heights,” she said.

Students at the school should not be intimidated by Sister Juliana’s Habit because she said she enjoys being outdoors as much as possible, including boat rides, playing ultimate Frisbee and soccer—all of which, she said, she does while wearing the traditional nun’s attire.

Sister Juliana said she also likes getting involved with the community and religious activity is on the forefront.

‘‘As a member of the religious community, my interests involve community prayer, activities and outings,” she said.

Sister Juliana said she is full of ideas for the coming year and eager to work with students and staff.

"3 Priorities for Promoting Vocations"

From ZENIT

Interview With Dominican Sister and Bishops

By Kathleen Naab

Photo by John Russell

NASHVILLE, Tennessee, JULY 27, 2008 (Zenit.org).- There are three high priorities in fostering vocations to the religious and priestly life, said a Dominican sister with 15 years of experience in vocational work.

Sister Catherine Marie Hopkins is now the executive director of the Dominican Campus in Nashville where the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia own and operate Overbrook School, St. Cecilia Academy and Aquinas College.

Recently named a member of the U.S. bishops' national advisory council, Sister Hopkins suggests the three highest priorities in fostering vocations: education, sacramental devotion and youth ministry that exposes young people to both prayer and evangelization.

ZENIT spoke with Sister Hopkins about supporting young women who are discerning a vocation to the consecrated life, and about how she discovered her own call.

Q: You worked for 15 years as vocation director for your order. What was the key to finding your own vocation? Did your own experience help you to aid other women in discerning theirs?

Sister Hopkins: The key to finding my own vocation was the realization that God had the plan and I just needed to discover exactly what that plan was. It began with inner turmoil at the thought that God could ask such a thing of me, but I very quickly found out that if he were calling, everything that I needed in order to respond would be provided by him as well.

That brought me tremendous freedom and my turmoil was replaced by a very strong attraction.

I was 24 years old and very happy, but not at peace since I couldn’t say for sure what God’s will was for my life. All I knew with certainty was that daily Mass had made me hunger for more, and so I went in search of where I could best root a growing desire to give of myself. I finally investigated religious life so that I could rule it out and marry with a clear conscience. When I actually visited our community and saw very tangible joy, youthful zeal and a long history of fidelity, fear was reduced by a newly formed conviction that this is what God had created me to do.

I would say that my own experience made me sensitive as a vocation director to the fact that successful discernment takes place apart from any pressure and within the challenging silence of prayer. When I looked for God’s will, I sought advice and asked lots of questions, but I wanted to make a decision that, while informed, drew strength from an interior conviction that I recognized as coming from God.

The Dominican Sisters in Nashville understood that it wasn’t a matter of recruitment but of exposure.

As a vocation director, I made it a point always to respect the delicate interior struggle through which most people must pass. My job was not to make a good sales pitch, but to convey the beauty of our life and to expose young women to it through a visit or retreat experience. I had to help those who had the inclination, but struggled with uncertainty, realize that the simultaneous fear and attraction they felt was normal; and that a sense of unworthiness is not a bad thing since really none of us is “worthy” of divine espousal! Making the choice entails a movement away from a career mentality to the realization that religious life is about giving yourself to a love that is without limit.

Q: You have three brothers that are priests. Do you think there is a different strategy for discerning and fostering the vocation of young women than for young men? In what ways?

Sister Hopkins: My experience has been that, in general, men take a lot longer in the discernment process, whether it regards marriage or religious life. Once a woman has “conviction” she is usually impatient to begin a process.

I wonder if men tend to intellectualize it in the beginning, whereas most women religious begin intuitively and very privately. They may struggle longer before admitting they are considering the idea, but once they discern, it is very much a matter of the heart and they are propelled past fears and natural ties to offer that gift of self without reserve.

Men need to balance their discernment with devotion and women need to consciously anchor the process with an intellectual understanding of the call.

In guiding women in discernment, the idea of espousal is a considerable attraction since we are all programmed by our feminine nature to love and to nurture in a unique way. I had aspirations of a big family and came to understand that God wasn’t asking me to deny that desire but to expand it!

Both men and women need to know that a desire to enter into the married state is not only good, but is even necessary if one is considering religious life. The absence of such natural desire may signal a problem of selfishness or difficulty in giving or receiving love. Such an emotional handicap would make happiness in the religious life impossible.

Regarding my brothers, each of them was different in his discernment. A discussion about them is a real study in temperaments. I used to hold them up as examples to illustrate that there is no "one type" that God calls, but that each of us with our unique characters can contribute in unique ways. And yes, my brothers are "unique characters." We weren’t born religious and occasionally have to remind people that we were in the mainstream in our youth and that none of us was voted “Most likely to become a religious” in high school. There is hope in that fact.

Q: There are certain orders of both men and women religious -- including your own -- that have enjoyed tremendous growth in the last decades. What do you see at the key to this growth?

Sister Hopkins: I believe the key to growth in vocations is found in the witness of joyfully living an ideal that is single-hearted, Eucharistic, faithful to the Church and her teachings. It is lived in the vibrancy of community life while rooted in prayer. That was what I experienced with the Dominican Sisters in Nashville.

I believe that young people today are as idealistic as they always have been and they are looking for a way to channel their zeal and to find support in a desire to grow in holiness. I do not think it is fancy programs or complicated spiritualities that attract, but rather simple fidelity.

There are movements of the Holy Spirit lighting fires in many directions today that are picking up significant momentum and should fill us with hope. The Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious is an organization of religious communities who are committed to living the essentials of religious life and are supportive of one another. I would recommend that young women exploring a religious vocation visit the CMSWR Web site to see the many communities which are growing today, in spite of reports to the contrary.

Q: There is much talk of the vocations crisis and whether or not it is nearing an end for priestly vocations. How about vocations for women religious? Is the crisis nearing the end?

Sister Hopkins: Women religious have been the backbone of social service, education and health care in this country. The drop in the number of women entering religious life has impacted these fields and it will take many years to see a significant return.

I am reminded, however that the Holy Spirit is not limited by Gallup Polls or the predictions of sociological studies.

Consider the simplicity and tenacity of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta at a time when the numbers of women religious were declining. Her response to God’s call yielded a new religious order that grew to over 4,000 sisters, an associated brotherhood of 300 members, and over 100,000 lay volunteers, operating 610 missions in 123 countries.

What our world needs is more Mother Teresas, people with zeal, humility and a fearless love. Over the past 20 years I have seen the numbers of women inquiring into the religious life grow both in numbers, quality and openness. Given the fact that our culture is not supportive of such ideas, nothing short of grace can explain it.

Q: You were recently named to the U.S. bishops' national advisory council. On the heels of Benedict XVI's visit to the United States, what do you see as the priorities for fostering vocations in the States?

Sister Hopkins: I think that in order to foster vocations to the priesthood and religious life the three highest priorities should be in the areas of education, sacramental devotion and youth ministry that exposes young people to both prayer and evangelization.

Young people are hungry to learn the faith and quickly recognize the unreasonableness of relativism. They have a natural desire to “know” God and will be more likely to devote themselves to a life dedicated to him if they have been educated in the faith. I think that this generation is quick to identify the need for such an apostolic focus since the lack of it has produced such confusion and suffering. It is important that the Church continues to strengthen Catholic education that is focused, faithful and rooted in excellence.

Devotion to the sacraments is key to discovering as well as nurturing a vocation. When young people benefit from regular reception of the Eucharist, confession and begin to develop a prayer life, then God’s call has a chance of being heard. Eucharistic adoration is drawing many vocations to the priesthood and religious life, a fact which makes sense if you consider that such time spent in God’s presence brings light and warmth to our souls.

There is a movement of the Holy Spirit in progress that increases in intensity whenever youth affectively influence one another. There is nothing more powerful than the witness of young people striving to know and do God’s will. Love is not meant to be contained, and so when we discover the Person of Christ, it is natural to experience an interior compulsion to share that discovery with others.

Substantial youth ministry which prompts conversion, devotion and exposure to positive peer influences has been successfully producing vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Of course, it is important for young people to be exposed to priests and religious who are joyfully and faithfully living that commitment.

Pope Benedict put it best to the youth he spoke to in Dunwoodie when he challenged them saying, “Strive for a pattern of life truly marked by charity, chastity and humility, in imitation of Christ, the eternal High Priest, of whom you are to become living icons.”

U.S. Dominican nuns turn heads, spread God's love to youths in Sydney

By Dan McAloon
Catholic News Service

SYDNEY, Australia (CNS) -- Everywhere they go in Sydney, the three Dominican nuns from Tennessee keep turning heads. Dressed in their distinctive white habits and black and white veils, the sisters stand out in the crowd.

At Sydney Harbor, where the tourists fix their cameras on the iconic Opera House and bridge, the arrival of Sisters Anna Wray, Mary Rachel Capets and Mary Madeline Todd gets everybody's viewfinders swinging in their direction.

The reaction of local residents in Belmore, the multicultural suburb where they are staying, is similar. The Vietnamese baker and his wife tell them of the kindness of Catholic nuns to war orphans in their homeland. The older people in the street stop to reminisce about the nuns who taught them at school. The "hijab"-wearing Muslim women, at first surprised at the sight of the nuns' veils, smile broadly with the recognition of the love of a common God.

"You're making our neighborhood a different place," the Lebanese shopkeeper told them. And when his customers ask if he has seen the strange new nuns about, the shopkeeper boasts: "Yes, of course! They are my friends!"

The nuns are in Sydney at the invitation of Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher, World Youth Day 2008 coordinator and fellow Dominican. Normally they would be at home teaching, but their motherhouse in Nashville has sent delegations to assist with preparations for each World Youth Day since Denver was the host city in 1993.

"It's part of our apostolic mission to spread God's love to the youth of the world," said Sister Anna, 28, noting that as Dominicans their lives are balanced between "contemplation and action."

"Wherever we are, we live by our values. Our founder Dominic was about taking God's word into the world and influencing people. We have a capacity to be adaptive, you could say. We know that people won't listen to us unless we are clearly living what we preach," she said.

A colleague at the Sydney Archdiocese describes the three as a "breath of fresh air about the place."

While Sister Mary Madeline is working as an assistant to Bishop Fisher, Sister Anna works with the liturgical committee and Sister Mary Rachel helps plan the youth festival.

As the July 15-20 World Youth Day events approach, there are still myriad details to be finalized in time for the arrival of the pilgrims. More than 125,000 are expected to arrive from overseas for the event, including 38,000 from the United States.

Sister Mary Rachel, 32, said that despite the 20-hour flight from Los Angeles, pilgrims from the U.S. won't be disappointed.

"They will find a beautiful, friendly city. People here are very generous because many are migrants and they know what it is to be the stranger," she said. "And for the pilgrims there's the special grace of being in the presence of the pope and in experiencing the beauty of the universal church."

"All Catholic life is a pilgrimage, and every experience teaches us something new," added Sister Mary Madeline. "I think the people of Sydney will be very surprised by how many pilgrims are ready to make that journey for Christ and celebrate their life in communion."

Sister Anna, a Dominican novice, has her own pilgrim story to tell of the influence World Youth Day had in calling her to religious life.

"Being in Rome for World Youth Day (in 2000) really was a catalyst for my entering religious life," she said. "I had no intention of being a sister then, but I did hear the offering of the church and the Holy Father, 'Do not be afraid to live the Gospel directly.' And that is something I have tried to do ever since."

How Things Have Changed

Recently I had to read a book for our Permanent Diaconate formation that spoke to the idea of how "liberated" the Church had become post Vatican II, particularly in that Sisters had been freed from their enslavement as teachers in Catholic schools (not an exact quote, but that gets to the point of the author's message). How much better it is today that Priests, Sisters and laity are equals in "ministry" was the point of the text. Which gave me pause. Without the great number of vocations to religious teaching orders, what has happened to Catholic education? Here in the Diocese of Raleigh, where our Catholic schools are overwhelmingly staffed by lay teachers, the cost of tuition is out of reach for most. Elementary school tuition is around $4000 and the Diocesan High School is about $10,000 a year.

Long gone are the days when the likes of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Katherine Drexel founded schools to educate the children of immigrants, minorities, and the poor. Where has Catholic education ended up post Vatican II? The Diocese of Raleigh once had an exemplary history of Catholic schools founded by women's religious communities. St. Katherine Drexel supported schools in our Diocese and even visited them. Rural communities had schools where poor children received fine educations. Today many of those schools are closed, and a Catholic education is, for the most part, reserved to the wealthy. This is not to speak poorly of those who are blessed to send their children to these schools, or the schools themselves - they have to make ends meet and pay their teachers a competive wage with benefits. It is to comment on how things have changed - for the worse, due to the vocations "crisis" in many of our country's great religious teaching orders.

Thankfully there is good news. Some of the "teaching orders" that are very faithful to the Magisterium of the Church and continue to wear habits, among them the Nashville Dominicans and the Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist, are seeing an increase in the number of vocations to their communities. In turn they are sending out Sisters to more and more schools - DEO GRATIAS!

Great video from the Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist: "Our Mission is to Teach"


‘Growing Up Catholic’ in mid-20th century: Nuns in habits provided great formation

By Kevin Cullen
3/7/2008
The Catholic Moment

LAFAYETTE, Ind. (The Catholic Moment) - Millions of middle-aged and older Catholics remember Sister Mary Margaret, their third-grade teacher. She told gory stories about the martyrs, lived and breathed The Baltimore Catechism, and made you hold your nose to the blackboard if you didn’t do your homework.

Fuel for some funny stories, yes. But noted Catholic scholar Robert Orsi says that Sister provided fervent religious formation and helped transform Catholics into one of the most educated, most successful segments of American society.

Teaching nuns in 1960 were “the most educated sisters in all Catholic history,” he said in a lecture at Purdue University Feb. 8. “They had been going to summer schools since the 1920s … The idea that these were ignorant women who knew nothing about the world was simply not the case.”

Orsi, who earned a doctorate from Yale, holds the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University. His talk, titled “Growing Up Catholic: A Case Study of Catholic Children in Mid-20th Century America,” drew a crowd of approximately 150. It was based on the research he did for a book on the social and cultural history of 20th-century Catholic childhoods, which will be published by Harvard University Press.

The lecture was sponsored by the Aquinas Education Foundation and the Religious Studies Program at Purdue.

Well prepared for the world

“My dad is Irish-Catholic, so it’s interesting to hear how he grew up,” said Michael O’Neill, a Purdue economics major from Indianapolis. “I grew up in Catholic schools, too. Our sisters said they would pray for us students.”

Orsi previously taught at Fordham, Indiana University and the Harvard Divinity School. He is past-president of the American Academy of Religion. The author of several books, he is an expert on Catholicism in the United States.

His research focused on Catholic children between 1925 and 1975. During that 50-year period, Catholics caught up with Protestants and Jews educationally, and by the 1970s they were more educated, and earning more, than either group, he said.

“These children were prepared for the world and did very well in it,” he said.

Catholic children, especially those taught in Catholic schools, tended to be disciplined and extremely well-versed in their faith, Orsi said. To them, supernatural things were real. Guardian angels were real. Souls in purgatory were really released. The saints depicted on religious cards shed real blood.

“Before World War II, if the crayon makers made colors just for Catholic children, they would come mostly in shades of red,” said Orsi, whose study involved interviewing adults across the country about their Catholic childhoods.

Solemn rites, deep theology

In addition to teaching academic subjects, school sisters wanted to ensure that the souls of their students were saved, he said. They made them memorize their catechisms. They stressed the sacraments, and expected them to understand complex theological concepts at an early age.

Because Catholic high schools were relatively rare, “the nuns and priests knew they had children until eighth grade,” Orsi said.

Catholic rites were solemn, and that intensified the imaginations of children. There was no such thing as a “children’s Mass.”

Some interview subjects admitted that they didn’t understand transubstantiation, and were terrified when they entered a confessional for the first time. They worried about the souls of unbaptized children in limbo, and cried when an adult told them that a beloved neighbor, who was not Catholic, could not enter heaven.

In many cases, the Church presented by adults “eluded their grasp,” he said. They were presented with “secrets and knowledge they were not ready for,” but that still prepared them for their adult roles.

Some kids tried to invent ingenious ways to “get around” Church prohibitions, especially those concerning fasting. All sorts of rumors and superstitions arose about Catholic sisters.

Still, Catholic children learned that evil was real and that the forces of grace offered protection and care, Orsi said. They saw themselves as embodied beings, and they often accepted heroic challenges. They knew that much was asked of them, both on earth and in heaven.

A priceless gift

Today, those long-ago children are adults. Often, they like to emphasize the distance they have traveled, intellectually and spiritually, since they memorized the questions and answers of their little catechisms.

Still, they received a priceless gift. Thanks to adults who taught them their faith, Orsi said, “the world made sense.”

The Catholic Church today is “very healthy,” he said, but few Catholic children are molded as they were when Sister Mary Margaret taught school.

“It was a very powerful formation,” Orsi said. “I can’t imagine it today … it was a striking way of engaging children’s minds and hearts.”

Video of Nashville Dominican Sisters

I posted on this video before, but I couldn't get it to embed at the time. Enjoy.

Hat tip to the Anchoress.

Young Nuns

This is an EXCELLENT post about women's vocations! It is also a great post for everyone discerning a religous vocation. You can read the post (which is transcript of the video) about the Nashville Dominican's and the fact that young women are called to habited religious orders below, or you can watch the video at these links below (one of the novices at the end of the video praying the rosary in front of the statue of Mary taught with me at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh):

View the video here. (This is a Windows Media file and seems to have some breaks in the video)

Watch the Quicktime video here. (This file plays without problems)

This post is from PBS's Religion and Ethics Newsweekly

February 8, 2008 Episode no. 1123

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The Vatican reported this week that the number of Catholics in religious orders around the world continued to decline. In the latest figures for 2006, there were just over 945,000 monks and nuns, down about 7,000 from the year before. The overwhelming majority, 753,000, about 80 percent, were women. Around the U.S. the number of nuns has also been going down, and their average age rising. But there are a few places where the reverse is true. Betty Rollin found a Dominican teaching order in Nashville fairly bursting with dedicated young nuns.

BETTY ROLLIN: They are the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee, a traditional order that began in 1860. Their day begins at 5 a.m. with meditation followed by a Mass. Meals are held in silence. Their vocation is to teach. The sisters here have come from different states and different backgrounds, most of them raised Catholic, some not. In 1965, there were about 180,000 nuns in America. By 2007, that number dropped to 63,000 with an average age of 70. The average age of the Dominican sisters is 36. Their numbers have increased so steadily in the past 15 years that they have had to build a 100,000 square-foot addition to the property. The sisters here -- the first year postulants, the second year novices, and those who, after seven years, have taken their final vows all say they have been called by God and that they are in love.

Sister KATHERINE WILEY: When you're a little girl, you're planning your wedding, you're playing bride. But just to allow the Lord to transform my heart to see that I would still be a bride, but I would be his bride.

Sister CHRISTIANA MICKWEE, O.P.: When you have fallen in love with God, everything doesn't seem quite so important anymore because God, the creator of the world, has asked you to be his bride. No, I will not be having sex. No, I will not be having children. No, I will not be marrying a spouse. But my very body and blood is united to God in a way that isn't offered to everyone in the world.

Sister CHRISTIANA MICKWEE, O.P.
Sister AMELIA HUELLER: A woman wants to give herself so totally to one man, to hold nothing back, to be so intimate with him and to bring forth life with him. It took me awhile to understand -- well, "understand" is the wrong word -- but to see that God will fulfill all of that, that he was asking me in a total way to give myself totally to him.

ROLLIN (to Sr. Hueller): How do you know that this God that you've given everything to is really there?

Sr. HUELLER: Because it's whom I am in love with, and when you fall in love with someone, it has to be a someone. You can like something a lot. You can say I love this or that. But when you are falling in love, and a woman knows when she is in love, it has to be a person.

ROLLIN: Sister Amelia Hueller was brought up in a non-religious home and converted to Catholicism.

Sr. HUELLER: I finished high school, I went to college in Washington, DC for four years, and I came up against relativism: the idea that we can't -- people said that we couldn't know what was good, what was bad, what was true. So I really began questioning where truth comes from. Where does goodness come from? I know I have values. Who gives them to me? And so between that moment and here, it was a process of, "This is scary, I don't understand this. I don't see why I would be called. How can I be called? I am so normal."

Nuns at worship.
ROLLIN: After seven years of study and contemplation, Sister Christiana Mickwee took her final vows last summer. She teaches fifth grade at a parochial elementary school.

Sr. MICKWEE: For me, it wasn't so much a voice per se but through prayer -- just in the silence, just letting him be there and finding out, really asking him, "What do you want from me, God?" I mean, I really had everything I could have wanted in the world, and there wasn't anything that I was trying to get away from.

ROLLIN: Sister Catherine Marie Hopkins, who has been a Dominican nun for 23 years, helps direct the order's educational program.

Sister CATHERINE MARIE HOPKINS, O.P.: Very rarely do people come and say, "I've always wanted to be a sister." You know, I always found that very suspect. You know, usually it was, "I was going through life very happily and suddenly this strange idea came and I tried really hard to eliminate it." In my own life, that was the case.

ROLLIN: This life is not for everyone who comes here. Who is most likely to remain?

Sr. HOPKINS: I would say those who are most comfortable with themselves -- the young person who would have made a good wife and mother, who would have made a good career person. They're not the loner. They're not the introvert, necessarily, although we have all personality types in the religious life.

Sister CATHERINE MARIE HOPKINS, O.P.
ROLLIN: Colleen Carroll Campbell, who is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote THE NEW FAITHFUL: WHY YOUNG ADULTS ARE EMBRACING CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY. Ms. Campbell found that the conservative orders, like the Nashville Dominicans, are the ones that are attracting young people.

COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL (Author, THE NEW FAITHFUL): These are orders where the sisters still wear their full-length habits, where they still gather to pray seven times a day, where they still live what is really a very traditional religious life.

ROLLIN: The new nuns say they were hugely affected by Pope John Paul II, who reached out to young people in his World Youth Days and rallies, entreating them to remain faithful to the traditional teachings of the church.

Ms. CAMPBELL: Young adults really saw in Pope John Paul II someone who was calling them to something the world never dared called them to, and that is sacrifice, self-denial, laying down their lives at the feet of Christ and asking him, "What do you want me to do with my life?" And for a lot of these young women when they ask that question, following John Paul's example, what they heard is that I want you to give up everything and follow me as a consecrated woman.

Sister AMELIA HUELLER
The younger sisters we're seeing tend to be very firmly in support of the pope in terms of Catholic teaching, including on the non-ordination of women. So this is kind of an interesting reversal here, and often it is referred to by some of the older Catholics as, you know, the "young fogies" because they're in many ways more traditional than their elders. There's an element of reaction there. After Vatican II, there were many good changes. There were a lot of things that got tossed out prematurely: the devotional life -- almost completely obliterated; liturgical music and the liturgy itself just became very entertainment-oriented.

ROLLIN: Regimentation, rules, sacrifice -- all part of convent life. But those who are here speak mainly of their joy.

Sister HUELLER: With sacrifice can come great joy. We know that sacrificing is not opposed to being happy. In fact, it can be our path to happiness. So sadness, no; sacrifice, yes.

Sr. MICKWEE: The joy I see in my sisters is far greater than the joy I see in many of the people that I grew up with.

ROLLIN: Colleen Carroll Campbell thinks that their initial passion may fade, but that the joy these young women feel will sustain them and encourage others to a more religious life.

The Church’s Religious Life

From First Things
Posted by Ryan T. Anderson on February 5, 2008
(Emphases mine)

The Drudge Report is highlighting this BBC article on the decline of religious life in the Catholic Church. Here’s the basic gist:

Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006.

During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, the number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by a quarter.

The downward trend accelerated despite a steady increase in the membership of the Catholic Church to more than 1.1bn.

However, correspondents say even this failed to keep pace with the overall increase in world population.

I’ve often wondered what the decline in religious life has meant for the average Catholic. Personally, I can count the number of religious sisters and brothers that I know on one hand–and this includes people I met growing up in Baltimore, attending college and then working in Princeton, and now living and working in Manhattan. If I include diocesan priests (technically “secular”), the number jumps up, but even then it’s fair to say that I don’t really “know” most of the priests who have administered the sacraments to me. If push came to shove, there would probably be a couple priests from college and New York who, in a time of trouble, I’d feel comfortable going to see. My parents experienced something different. They, of course, went to Catholic schools all their life, were taught by religious brothers and sisters, and still have vivid memories of the relationships that were forged–relationships that secured them in the faith. One wonders what the loss of religious witness and a ministry of presence has meant to the Church simply on a person-to-person level.

Of course times change. Renewal movements in the Church have opened new possibilities for Christian vocation and holiness in ordinary life. People who might have joined religious communities in times past now find themselves involved with groups like Communion and Liberation, Opus Dei, Regnum Christi, Focolare, and the Neo-Catechumenal Way–all providing lay people with models, organizational supports, and what certainly seem to some like lay vocations. The members of these groups say that a rising tide lifts all ships and a general increase in holiness in the Church will–and, according to their experience, already has–led to priestly and religious vocations. If they’re right, and they likely are, one shudders to think how much more drastic the decline in religious life would be if the renewal movements didn’t exist.

Some will argue that the Church doesn’t need robust religious communities, especially not the ones in monasteries and convents. It’s no longer the Middle Ages, and the Catholic Church doesn’t need to sustain Western culture behind the walls of the Carmel. So much for contemplative life–and the prayers that sustain the Church. The active religious communities? Well, they’re fine and good, but can’t we leave this social work to professional social workers? And in light of the feminist movement, can’t women aspire to something more than soothing bed sores in Calcutta? Somehow the personal witness of a life radically devoted to Christ in loving service to others seems radically discounted.

Yet the institutional loss has been no less severe. And here my mind immediately jumps to some of the most pressing needs daunting contemporary society: decent education for those who can’t afford it; food, drink, shelter and assistance to independence for the homeless; health care for those whose salaries can just meet their bare necessities like rent, heating and electricity, and groceries. One wonders if the state will ever be able to meet these needs–let alone the need for personal care and human love. Maybe the charitable activities of the Church alone will suffice. What would happen to our inner cities if Catholic schools, hospitals, soup kitchens and shelters shut down? But the sad reality is that many of them depend on governmental moneys. When the Church had a ready supply of celibate religious–without the need to earn a wage to provide for a family, with the freedom to give themselves completely to their ministry, and expecting (even vowing) a life of poverty–staffing Catholic schools and Catholic hospitals was much easier.

The situation isn’t entirely bleak. One is forced to think about communities like the Nashville Dominican sisters, or the Sisters of Life, or the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal–youthful, vibrate, orthodox, flourishing communities. Maybe they’re the future of religious life.

I’m just thinking out loud, and I’m rambling, so I’ll stop here. But maybe this Lent a prayer intention should be for an increase in vocations to religious life.

Vocations Holy Hour in the Diocese of Raleigh with the Nashville Dominicans

Saint Catherine of Siena Parish is happy to sponsor the first parish based Holy Hour in conjunction with Bishop Burbidge's monthly Vocation Holy Hour. Because of our patroness, Dominican Sister, St. Catherine of Siena, we are honored to initiate this Holy Hour to promote women's vocations to religious life with special guests from the dynamic Dominican Sisters of Nashville who will also join the youth at the John 6:35 Retreat the following day in Garner. The night will follow the same schedule as the Bishop's Holy Hour so that we may all be united with our Bishop and Shepherd and join him in one prayer for vocations in front of our Lord, the Master of the Harvest. Please join us as we pray Evening Prayer on Friday February 1st at 7PM, a reception will follow from 8-9PM where young women can meet and greet the Sisters and discuss the joy of discerning a vocation to religious life.

Video from the Nashville Dominicans...

***VIDEO*** Interview with Sr. Mary Jordan Hoover, OP, Principal of the New High School in Virginia

Foxnews interviewed Sr. Mary Jordan Hoover, OP of the Nashville Dominicans about the opening of the new John Paul the Great High School in the Diocese of Arlington. Despite the strange intro conversation between the cohosts to start the segment, the interview is decent. You can watch the video here.

For more information on this story see my previous post below.

Nashville Dominicans to Run New High School in Virginia

Buzzworthy Sisters in Habits Headed to Va. School
Nashville Dominicans Known for Youth, Adherence to Traditions

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2007; A01

People wait an hour in line to talk with her, pack standing room only into a bar to hear her, and some even squeal when they see her, this woman in a sister's habit.

She is Sister Mary Jordan Hoover, principal of Northern Virginia's first new Catholic high school in two decades, a $60 million state-of-the-art project that will open in Dumfries next fall. At a time when it's possible to count on one hand the number of Catholic secondary schools that open each year in the nation, her arrival in Virginia represents good news for supporters of Catholic schools.

But the cheery 42-year-old brings another major layer of buzz to the Arlington Diocese because she is a member of the Nashville Dominicans, rock stars in the world of Catholic religious orders. Although the number of religious sisters in the United States has plunged since the 1960s, resulting in an average age of about 70, there has been an increase in recent years among traditional, habit-wearing orders, including the Nashville-based Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, which has 226 members and a median age of 35. It recently raised $46 million to expand its chapel because the sisters were spilling into the hall.

In her floor-length white habit with black veil and a rosary around her waist, Hoover is the picture of affirmation for traditional dioceses, including Arlington's.

And that makes her a hot property. With a stated mission of teaching, the Nashville Dominicans get letters and phone calls almost daily from dioceses across the country, asking that they send their youthful -- and overtly devout -- vibe to one school or another.

"The bishops are circling Nashville," said Timothy McNiff, schools superintendent in the Arlington Diocese, who introduced Hoover at an open house in Woodbridge this month for the new school, which will be called Pope John Paul the Great Catholic High School. Officials have a target enrollment of 475 next fall for the four-year school.

More than 150 people came to what was about the 20th such event in the past couple of months, including one in a packed Irish pub in Alexandria. McNiff himself has been to Nashville six times.

There is little detailed research on women who join Catholic religious orders -- called "women religious," "sisters" or often "nuns," although technically that means a woman who is cloistered. Although traditional orders make up a small slice of the pie, they are where the growth is.

"This generation is more conventional in their outlook and more traditional in values," said Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocations Conference. "Given the relativity of our culture, they really want to know what it means to be Catholic, and symbols -- like habits -- speak to them deeply. They want people to know they have made this radical choice."

Some experts say the growth of traditional groups is because their work goals of teaching and nursing, for example, have remained clear; they haven't strayed as much as more progressive orders into a broader array of careers where they often live and work alone, apart from their sisters. Others say they are the natural result of Pope John Paul II's papacy, during which the church refocused on its orthodox roots after the social turbulence of the 1960s and '70s. Some think their meditative lifestyles are simply more attractive in an era of nonstop communication.

Regardless, a sister in a habit makes clear what is unique about Catholic schools at a time when there are hundreds of thousands fewer students there than a decade ago.

"If Catholic schools don't look any different and use the same textbooks and have the same teachers and the same standards, why have them?" asked Sister Patricia Wittberg, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who studies religious orders. One way to distinguish yourself is "to get a bunch of women in habits in there. They are icons of Catholicity in a diocese that wants Catholicity."

The Nashville Dominicans stick out even within the traditional group because their identity has been so solid, said Michael Wick, executive director of the Institute on Religious Life, which is affiliated with the conservative Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious. They have never veered from teaching, and they move to new cities in groups so they can stick to their schedule: wake at the same time, pray and chant together three times a day, meditate together, eat together in silence. Their reputation is of being upbeat and young; promotional material shows them playing soccer and walking on the beach.

"They have always been clear as to what their identity is as a community and how it's expressed. If you diversify your ministry so much, it's hard to say what your community does," Wick said. "And young attracts young. I think other [traditional orders] are learning from them."

The Nashville Dominicans' growth started about 15 years ago. At the time, about three or four women would join each year. Since then, the number has jumped to about 10 to 15. From 1965 to 2000, the most recent year for which data are available, the number of women religious in the country dropped 54 percent to about 80,000.

The audience at the recent high school open house was stirred to applaud after McNiff rattled off some of the features of the new school: a glass-walled cafeteria with "bistro-style seating" overlooking the woods, 11 life-size statues of saints, three athletic fields, a 500-seat auditorium. "But all of this would be for naught if we didn't have adults who are willing to wear their faith on their sleeves," he said in introducing Hoover to loud applause.

The school will be the single largest expenditure of Bishop Paul S. Loverde's eight-year tenure. The money will come from bonds, a capital campaign that has raised $12.5 million so far and fundraising. The land, worth $14.5 million, was given to the diocese and isn't included in the $60 million cost. Construction is expected to continue into next summer.

Arlington is an exception to the national norm, with its school enrollment increasing 15 percent over the past decade to 18,500 students, due in part to population growth in the region. Diocesan officials say this helped them attract Hoover, a trumpet-playing sports fan who was once a resident assistant in a college dorm, and two other sisters from Nashville.

Arlington also has what is considered one of the nation's more conservative dioceses and was one of only two -- along with Lincoln, Neb. -- to ban female altar servers until Loverde lifted the ban last year.

Religious sisters and brothers and priests haven't vanished from Catholic schools: There are 42 out of 1,200 full-time professional staffers in the Arlington Diocese's school system. Nationally, the percentage is about 4.4 percent, according to the National Catholic Education Association.

But the religious life is remote to most American Catholics. When Hoover gave a lecture in August at Pat Troy's Ireland's Own pub in Old Town Alexandria to a group of young Catholics, she went through the basics of how sisters differ from nuns, what a habit is, what it means to be chaste. "It means to give our entire being to the Lord. We don't become neutered; we're still real women," she said in her upbeat, teacherly cadence.

Only four Catholic secondary schools opened nationally last year, so the opening of a high school is rare. And this school is even more so: Pope John Paul will have an extensive bioethics curriculum required for all four years, a first for a U.S. Catholic high school, according to the National Catholic Bioethics Center, the country's largest Catholic think tank. This was a major draw for the Nashville Dominicans, who are writing the curriculum as well as running the school.

At the open house at St. Thomas Aquinas Regional School in Woodbridge, Marie Meyer and Stephanie DeRaymond beamed as a 50-person line waited to talk to Hoover.

"I'd love my children to be taught by a nun! It's just unheard of, especially in this day and age," said DeRaymond, a 41-year-old mother of two, practically squealing. "They're going to say 'No' to a nun? Not do their homework?"

Meyer, 39, a mother of three, nodded in agreement: "To have them be taught by nuns in a habit -- that alone will make a major difference."

Across the room, Maria Moghtadaie and Tania Kestermann, both parents from Woodbridge, reminisced about sisters who taught them when they were growing up. Moghtadaie remembered being ordered to kneel for hours in a public hallway; Kestermann remembered being told to slap her own face.

"There weren't nuns like the Dominicans. They're happy, open," said Moghtadaie, 44, who works in sales.

Kestermann, 38, who does clerical work part time, agreed. "I looked at them as distant," she recalled about the sisters of her childhood. But today, sisters know music and the Internet, she said. "You see them dancing, interacting with the kids. That's the Dominicans."

Religious communities notice more young women open to religious life

Rachel and Stephanie who both entered the Sisters of Life this fall. Rachel's older sister is already in the Sisters of Life, and Stephanie is quoted in the article below. Picture was taken just before the Sisters of Life had professions of vows.

By Andrea Slivka
Catholic News ServiceWASHINGTON (CNS)

Girls often dream of saying "I do" at the altar to their future spouse.Katrina Gredona hopes she'll be saying those words to Jesus as a religious sister."When I look at a community of religious women, I see women who contribute fruitfully to the church and to the world in a very special way and in a very essential way, and I think that's exciting," said Gredona, a student at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

Ten years ago, Gredona's interest in religious life would have been unique in comparison with the majority of other Catholic girls, as reports indicated a decline in the number of religious sisters in the United States. But recently campus ministers and the vocations directors of some women's religious communities have been noticing a new trend of more young women looking into religious life.

Many vocation directors, in interviews with Catholic News Service and in responses to a survey by Vision Vocation Guide, reported a notable increase in the number of women contacting them for information. A small number of communities reported a stable increase in young entrants.At the same time, more campus ministries are helping young women learn about discernment and religious life.

The cloistered Dominican Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit, N.J., is one community with a significant increase in interest in the order. Founded in 1919, the community has had 15 aspirants spend time with the sisters in the past three years to discern whether to enter the community.That number is much higher than in previous years, when the community would be lucky to have one aspirant each year, said Sister Mary Catharine of Jesus, novice mistress."

The Lord is giving these young women the grace to respond to him and he is so powerful and irresistible that they want to say yes to him," she said. "Given our culture, the fact that so many women are feeling that God is calling them to this life and that they want to respond is nothing short of a miracle."Of the 15 aspirants, more than half entered the Dominican or other communities and two continue to discern whether they are called to the Dominican community.

Sister Mary Scholastica Lee, vocations director for the Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles, said the change is more than just an increase in numbers -- she has noticed more commitment by young women to follow through on their initial interest in her community."

This year, the desire for religious life seems more deeply rooted," she said.In a recent survey sent to 165 communities' vocations directors, 71 percent said more people inquired about their community recently. Nineteen percent said they have had more candidates preparing to enter in the past three years than in previous years. However, 41 percent said they currently have no women in formation.

The survey was conducted by Vision Vocation Guide, a magazine for those discerning vocations to the religious life and priesthood, and 80 percent of respondents were for women's communities.

Secular news organizations have recently highlighted rapidly growing communities, such as the Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, Mich., the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecelia in Nashville, Tenn., and the Sisters of Life in New York, that have up to 15 young women entering each year.

But other communities recently have had a steady inflow of three to seven young postulants, according to Michael Wick, executive director for the Institute on Religious Life in Libertyville, Ill.

Those communities include the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Mich., founded in 1970; the Sisters St. Francis of the Martyr St. George in Illinois, founded in 1869; the Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus, based in St. Louis and founded in 1891; and the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Missouri, founded in 1874.

Sister Mary Gabriel, vocations director for the Sisters of Life, said the girls she talks with want more than what the society and culture have to offer and are drawn to the freedom they find in religious life through living the vocation to which they are called.

"It's not a kickback to the '50s. It's so different. Young women have seen it all," she said.In answer to questions sent to them by CNS, young women shared the reasons they're open to and discerning religious life."

I think it's my responsibility as a faithful young person to seriously discern whether or not God is calling me into direct service of the church through religious life," said Lindsay Wilcox, a student at Boston College.

"I am considering religious life because God has placed that inclination on my heart -- to totally give my life back to him, who laid down his life for me," said Stephanie Ray, who is preparing to enter the Sisters of Life. (OK this is pretty cool, my former student, dear friend, and Godmother to our son is quoted in this article!)

The late Pope John Paul II plays a large role in the new trend, according to several vocation directors and campus ministers interviewed by CNS.

At World Youth Days, the pope challenged young people to live their Catholic faith in a radical way and to not be afraid to seek out God's will for their lives, said Sister Mary Emily Knapp, vocations director for the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville. Many of the sisters have told her they first started thinking about vocations at a World Youth Day.

The congregation has 228 sisters, the highest number in its history. In early August, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, cited the community as an example of the vitality of the Catholic Church in the United States. The cardinal was in Nashville to attend the Knights of Columbus annual national convention.

Another reason for the increase in the interest in religious life, according to vocation directors and young sisters, is more campus ministries nurturing and promoting vocations.Sister Mary Gabriel said not long ago it was a "rarity and oddity" to be a college student discerning a vocation. But now she sees girls coming from campus ministries, particularly at public schools, that have eucharistic adoration, Scripture study and daily Mass.

"If you put these together, it's a recipe for falling in love with the Lord," she said.At the University of Illinois, campus minister Sister Sarah Roy, a young Sister of St. Francis of the Immaculate Conception, said religious vocations weren't talked about much when she attended the university. Now the campus ministry makes the option more visible, and she sees how the students themselves are more willing to consider it.

Likewise, a discernment group at Boston University provides young women with the opportunity to discuss religious life, visit nearby communities and participate in retreats at the end of each semester.Sister Olga Yaqob, an Iraqi who is a member of the Missionaries of the Virgin Mary who leads the group, said the overall purpose is to help the girls become familiar with the will of God and prepare them to respond with a "yes" to whichever vocation they are called by God.

Other contributing factors to the increase, according to those interviewed, include:

-- Web sites making information on discernment and religious communities easily accessible.

-- Dioceses working with religious communities to promote vocations.

-- More general interest in spirituality among a growing number of young adults.

It's uncertain still whether the current increase in interest will lead to a significant increase in the number of those entering, according to Holy Cross Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference, an organization in Chicago serving vocation directors.

"It's still too soon to say; however, this is very good news," he said.

"Sisters are Doing it for the Sake of Others"

From the Sydney Morning Herald

Linda Morris Religious Affairs Writer September 5, 2007

WHAT do three religious sisters pack when they are sent to assist the largest religious gathering in Australian history? Answer: 600 rosary beads, personal prayer books, two guitars, mum's cookies and a frisbee.

Sister Mary Rachel, Sister Anna and Sister Mary Madeline are members of the Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee. They arrived three weeks ago, as volunteers for World Youth Day next July, at the invitation of the Australian event co-ordinator, Bishop Anthony Fisher, himself a Dominican.

They belong to a tight-knit and revered order of 200 nuns that is considered small by standards in the US but positively blessed in Australia, where vocations to religious life are in steady decline.

So it is understandable that their presence, at a time when many sisters have shed the habit, has been a source of public wonderment.

During a recent sightseeing tour of Taronga Zoo, a visiting party of school children bounced excitedly yelling, "nuns, nuns, nuns" as their teachers sought to hush them.

On their arrival at Sydney Airport, an Australian man quipped to them: "Three nuns, all in habits, all happy and young. It's the second miracle of Mary."

The sisters are the first of what is expected to be a flood of Catholic religious figures who will come to Sydney for the event.

Each woman came to religious life soon after graduating from high school, and each has attended world youth days before and can attest to their spiritual value and influence on their journey of faith.

Sister Anna went to World Youth Day in Rome in 2000 and left transformed. "There was this moment in the [overnight] vigil," she says. "We'd walked 20 kilometres, it was 1am and we were trying to get to sleep.

"I woke up and the Pope's address had been broadcast. He said, 'There are so many of you out there but I see you one by one and I say do not be afraid to follow Christ and live radically.'

"I heard it and I thought, he is speaking to me. It was a moment of grace given of courage."
Recent revelations that even Mother Teresa had expressed a fear of abandonment by God are evidence that no life can be perfectly fulfilled, Sister Mary Madeline said. It reinforced the Christian hope for a new Pentecost, a fresh kindling of the Holy Spirit in each Catholic.

"It's easy to say 'I love Jesus' in the midst of World Youth Day, but when it is over people return to their ordinary lives and there is darkness, but faith tells us we can't rely on ourselves.

"Maybe we don't feel God is with us but he gives us that faith."

More About Habits

Habemus Papam posted this over at Adam's Ale...

THIS IS BECOMING A HABIT

Have you ever walked down the street and noticed a policeman, fireman, doctor, or even a priest? You probably noticed them because of what they were wearing. What I find most disheartening is what you TYPICALLY don’t see while walking on the streets are habited nuns. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are some nuns roaming about, however, you would never know. I thought nuns, like priests, are supposed to be a visual representation to the world, show they are married to the Church, and are giving up their life to serve it. It marks their life as a living witness and shows their detachment from vanity and greed. I, along with many others, believe that nuns should wear the full habit.

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A while back, at the recommendation of my parish priest, I went on a “Where Are You Going” retreat that the diocese was putting on. The retreat was up at the seminary and I felt very uncertain about going, as this would be a step in the right direction for discernment of a religious vocation. I still went, afraid as I was, and put myself into the unknown. While there, we had the chance to talk to some of the sisters, habited and non-habited. Sitting down at the table, I chatted with some non-habited nuns. They told me they were Dominicans I was excited and let them know that I would be heading off to Nashville to visit the Dominicans there. (The Nashville Dominicans are a habited order.) Once I opened my mouth they got up from the table and vanished. My reaction was one of dismay and hurt. Are you kidding me, because I mentioned the name of another order that wore habits I was unworthy of their attention?

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After they vanished, I wanted to run and start questioning them. What made them not want to wear the habit? Were they ashamed? Did they think they were giving up too much of themselves? If so, I guess they didn’t realize what it meant have a religious vocation. I believe if you had this type of vocation you would take pride in the spirit of your order and what you have been called to do and want to make that known to the world. Wearing the habit is a sacrifice, to be recognized as a spouse of Christ, to be connected to tradition, to humility, and to a life centered on Christ.

I had a friend that just received the habit from The Sisters of Life. She had sent a letter and told me about receiving the habit and her experience wearing it. She said receiving the habit was one of the best moments of her life. She exclaimed how beautiful and how much deeper she was drawn into Christ’s warm embrace. AMAZING!! She said the first time she wore the habit while in the Bronx, where her order is located; she received some of the weirdest stares. At first she mentioned that it was a bit uncomfortable, she was not sure how to even move in it and of course it made daily work much different. But what I gathered from her letter was that she embraced the habitat as a new piece of her, a visual piece that gave no questions about what she was doing with her life. She didn’t need to tell people what she believed or what she did; they could see it first hand.

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I am a firm believer in the fact that part of the reason younger girls are not joining religious orders is that many of the orders are not wearing a habit. If you take a look at thriving orders, they are all wearing habits, they live in community, and have taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. At a time when the entire world is in chaos, young adult women are finding solace in these vows and in an order that upholds a tradition. Most of the new orders springing up do not have a common chrism, they do not live in community, and they do not wear a habit. It angers me when I hear that the Church traditions are not important to these new orders. I often wonder if they feel that by organizing a new order that is more lenient and to their liking they will bring in more vocations. If that is the case, what are they giving up, what does the act of laying ones live down for Christ mean to them? It apparently means little to nothing. Not that these orders aren’t doing good things and helping people, but this is not what an order should be, it should be sacrifice and discipline. Mary, Mother of the Eucharist is a newer order that has girls knocking down their doors to enter. They are a great order that is centered on their vows, wears a habit, lives in community, and cares greatly. However, if you know anything about their history, you will find that they branched off from the Nashville Dominicans who have been around for hundreds of years. This I believe is an exception to the rule of new orders. I feel there is much work to be done with newer orders examining their place in the world and if the Church is really calling for more orders to spring up instead of valuing the orders that we have now.

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I hope and pray that with the new Bishop in the Cleveland diocese, he will reaffirm the tradition that the Church upholds and put some focus on women’s religious orders. There are a vast number of girls looking to answer God’s call and would like to stay in the Cleveland diocese, yet they feel they won’t find a home. Please pray for the increase of vocations for orders that are staying close to their roots of poverty, chastity, and obedience.