There is an informative, positive and completely uncynical article in yesterday’s Times by Ruth Gledhill about how more and more women from the UK are entering religious orders. For those of you without a Times subscription it’s reprinted here in the Australian.
First of all she looks at the figures:
UNTIL recently, nuns in Britain had fallen out of the habit. In parts of the country, years went by without any women seeking to get themselves to a nunnery. Then, suddenly, convents have reported a spike in interest.
It is not huge in numbers; but in significance it is of a new order. In the past three years the number of women entering the religious life has nearly tripled from six to 17 and there are also many more who have entered convents but have not not yet taken their initial vows. This influx is thought to be a result of the Pope’s visit to Britain last year. Such has been the sudden surge in inquiries that religious orders have had to ask bishops how to cope, so unused to receiving new vocations have they become, and so accepting of the received wisdom that, with many convents closing and being sold off, their way of life was likely to be coming to an end.
Now, if these inquiries result in more women taking their vows and becoming novices, numbers could edge back up to where they were in the early 1980s, when more than a hundred women a year took vows as sisters in enclosed and other religious orders.
This week, the media have reported that even a former girlfriend of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has become a nun called Sister John Mary. “I thought of marriage … then God called,” Laura Adshead, 44, told a television documentary about the Benedectine order she joined, the Abbey of Regina Laudis in the Connecticut hills in the US.
Father Christopher Jamison, director of the National Office for Vocation, adds some comments:
Many people today, especially the young, find it difficult to listen to their deepest spiritual desires, so the Church needs to offer a structured approach to vocation if the call of Christ is to be heard by more people.
It’s against a background that’s surprisingly upbeat given the general perception of the state of the clergy and religious life in this country. In the last few years, the number of people applying to seminaries has been gradually increasing and, in more recent years, just in the last couple of years, ever since the Papal visit, the number of women approaching women’s congregations has also been increasing.
[It was not fully reflected yet in the figures because it takes time from an initial approach to become a novice, said Father Jamison]. But it is certainly more than anecdotal. There are congregations of women who have been contacting us to say, ‘Could you help us because it’s been a while since we’ve had this sort of response’, and so we are now happily supporting them in dealing with an increase.
Judith Eydmann, development co-ordinator of the National Office for Vocation, gives some interpretation:
“For young women it is not just the life that is attractive. They feel that it is what Christ has called them to, the total dedication of their lives to the service of God. We have moved away from a model of recruitment to one of discernment and that gives people a safe environment in which they can make safe choices.”
She says new Catholic movements such as Youth 2000 have been key to the increase. Among the general Catholic population of more than five million across the UK, about 10 per cent have had contact with new movements but among those entering monasteries, convents and seminaries, the proportion is 50 per cent. In a further new development, one in five of the new vocations are converts to Catholicism, compared with the 1970s when nearly all those seeking to become priests, monks or nuns were cradle Catholics.
And here is Ruth Gledhill’s uncynical and unironic signing off:
Whether these newly formed nuns are finding God, or God is finding them, the religious life is coming back into fashion as one that offers not so much riches, but a way of life exemplified by courage, wisdom and serenity – not bad for women who might be tempted to think they haven’t a prayer.
The only puzzle is why the huge photograph advertising the article on the cover page of Times 2 is clearly of a model posing as a nun – it’s way too posed, and the habit and crucifix are complemented by plenty of lip-gloss and eye-liner. Why didn’t they take the trouble to find a photograph of a real nun? That’s not a criticism of the article, just a question!
Sounds like good news. I don’t remember even seeing a nun from age 13 when I left the Catholic school system to about 35 when my children joined it (other than on a couple of trips to Rome).
I thought the movie “No Greater Love” was good. Particularly the prioress saying she wanted to choose a way of life that was pointless if God didn’t exist. I imagine other documentaries like The Monastery have planted seeds in peoples minds.
God forbid should a real nun ever be seen with a little lipgloss and eyeliner, might make her completely virtueless ;0) x
I think it is all about people’s accessibility to witness, maybe. The more contact the secular world has with religious, the higher the percentage of people will be inspired by them. Especially as religious are having to change the way in which they interact with the wider modern world in order to keep the convents alive. ‘The Vatican II effect’ has to be as much about the way that religious women interact with secular women, just as much as the way clergy have changed the way they interact with their parishioners since Vatican II, if there is to be collaboration.
This is such good news for the Church! I particularly like the emphasis upon discernment rather than recruitment by Judith Eydmann.
But really this emphasises the thirst for that ‘something else’ in life that we encounter in many people in our work.
[…] there, too, as it is in this country. Though the Times site is behind a paywall, there’s a partial summary of the piece on the Bridges and Tangents blog: Until recently, nuns in Britain had fallen out of […]
Some UK communities have always had a consistent stream of enquirers and entrances – St. Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight springs to mind :)
11 more people isn’t anything to get overly excited about —
The main point of interest is how to get people from the initial interest stage — which a LOT of people have to actually joining a community …
Most people are just ‘enquirers’ — the reason why they don’t do a ‘live in’ or become a postulant / or stay to join the noviciate should be our main focus ?