What future is there for women religious in the West?
Most Americans are more likely to know Catholic sisters as fictional characters in books, movies, or television shows than they are to meet or know one in real life. The fictional Protestant sisters of the (also fictional) order of St. Raymond Nonnatus on the BBC series Call the Midwife are more numerous than the real-life ones I’ve met in the course of my life. The show, set in postwar London in the 1950s and early 1960s, portrays sisters who may be just another quaint period detail, like the Bakelite telephones and the unexploded ordinance leftover from the Blitz.
Is there a future for religious women in North America and Western Europe? Even heavily Catholic regions like Ireland and Quebec have populations of Catholic sisters who are overwhelmingly elderly, with few younger women to replace them or even to care for them within their communities. In the course of researching 18th-century Ursulines, I visited their monastery in Quebec City, which was founded in 1639 and hosts the oldest school for girls in North America. It felt more like a retirement home. I met no religious women under 70, and almost none of them were performing any of the work central to their apostolate. All of the teachers at the school are now laypeople. Sometimes it feels like the sisterhood is on its way to extinction.
The Roman Catholic church in the West no longer represents for women the alternative to secular society that it once did. For women in Catholic countries, religious life used to offer a different path from marriage and motherhood, one that included the opportunity to develop leadership skills, manage and invest money, and run important social institutions that were spiritually powerful and widely respected.
