The radicalization and steep decline of nuns

Sisters in Crisis: The Tragic Unraveling of Women’s Religious Communities
By Ann Carey
Our Sunday Visitor, 1997, 368 pp.

In 1965, there were 180,000 nuns in the U.S. Fifty years later, in 2014, there were only 50,000 and most of them were elderly. What caused the steep decline?

In this book, the author attempts to explain the reasons why the bottom dropped out of Catholic women’s religious orders. The RCC was already contemplating modernizing tradition-bound religious orders prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The unofficial aggiornamento “fresh air” theme of the council emboldened nuns in leadership positions, who were simultaneously being drawn into the burgeoning feminist movement, to make drastic changes to their orders. They increasingly viewed the church as a patriarchal institution that devalued women. The church hierarchy watched in dismay as nuns jettisoned habits (uniforms) and convents and became increasingly involved in social gospel causes and New Age philosophies. Pope John Paul II repeatedly attempted to rein in the rebellious nuns, but the horse was already out of the barn.

Author Ann Carey, a conservative Catholic, laments in excruciatingly painstaking detail how American nuns became increasingly radicalized and distanced themselves from the control of the church hierarchy. Readers will need a program to keep track of all of the sundry councils and committees that were involved in the transformation. The traditions and structure that had once attracted fresh recruits to the orders were gone and membership plummeted.

Back in the 1960s in my northeast corner of Rochester, there were three Catholic parishes within a two-mile radius, each with its own grammar school and convent of teaching nuns. Is there anything more cultish than a convent full of virginal women claiming to be brides of Christ, replete with wedding rings? American Protestants had gradually become inured to the bizarre cultishness of convents.

My parish school, St. James, had a mixture of nun and lay teachers. My nun teachers were Sister Imelda (kindergarten), Sister Annunciata (1st grade), Sister Tarcisius (3rd Grade), and Sister MaryAnn Kosakoski (8th Grade – photo below). Other nuns at the school who I can remember were Sister Lourdes, Sister Gemma, Sister Goretti, Sister Virginia, and the principal, Sister Edwardine. Who were these mysterious women in their 14th century garb with their faces tightly squeezed by a multi-layered, cloth tourniquet? How did they live together in that convent building next to the school after classes were over?

In my nine years at St. James (1961-1970), under the tutelage of the Sisters of Mercy, I NEVER ONCE heard the genuine Gospel of salvation by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone. Instead, I was indoctrinated into Roman Catholicism with its false gospel of salvation by sacramental grace and merit and its intricate rituals and cultish practices. Those poor nuns were deluded slaves of a pseudo-Christian counterfeit.

This book was both painfully boring and interesting, if that’s possible. I did appreciate learning the history of how the radicalized nun leadership steered their orders into steep decline.

Above: An enclosed passageway allowed the teaching nuns of the former-St. James Elementary School (left) to comfortably enter and exit their convent house (right) in all types of inclement weather.

The woman above exemplifies today’s radicalized nuns

2018 photo