They Took Vows of Poverty and Assumed They Would Be Cared For in Their Old Age; but Facing a Financial Crisis, Elderly Nuns for the First Time Are Appealing for Help : Faith, Hope-and Now Charity

Last Sunday morning, during 9:30 Mass at Holy Family Church in Glendale, Sister Mary Realino Lynch came out of retirement to face the parishioners once again, this time from the pulpit. A quiet-mannered, white-haired woman in an off-white knit dress, she spoke with little emotion, letting her words carry the urgency.

It was humbling, she told them, to be appealing to people who face concerns about retirement in their own lives. But the plain fact was that many religious orders--of men as well as women--could not provide for the care of their elderly and infirm members. It was, she said, “quite a serious problem.”

They had always worked for next to nothing, and that was fine--teaching, nursing and ministering to the needs of an immigrant church for small stipends that as late as the 1960s averaged about $100 per month. There had never been anything to put aside for retirement funds, but then, no one had been thinking about such things. Besides, retired sisters were always in the minority, and with the constant supply of young sisters entering the convent, the income of the working members provided for the needs of the retired.

Things had changed. Using her own order as an example, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she laid out the sad facts. Out of a community of 1,248, there are 557 sisters, or 44.6% who are fully retired, and only one young woman currently seeking admission to join them.

“Some people say the Catholic Church is rich,” she said, mentioning the property and beautiful buildings religious orders often own. “They’re imposing in many regards,” she agreed, and many religious communities, hers included, were selling them and investing in retirement funds. But it wasn’t enough to meet the crisis.

A Similar Plea

A few hours later, Sister Maura Byron stood in the gold-trimmed white marble pulpit of St. Mel’s Church in Woodland Hills and made much the same plea. A Sister of St. Louis from Ireland, she works at the parish, ministering mostly to sick and elderly parishioners.

“It seemed there was no need,” she said of the seemingly sudden lack of retirement funds. “The system worked very well.”

Then, drawing to a close, asking people to be generous in the collection that would be taken up the following week, she reminded them of the ways their families had been touched by many in religious orders.

“It’s a situation of justice, really,” she said, flushing. Her voice wavered just slightly as she said, “This is an opportunity to respond with acts of justice and love to an appeal from a segment of our community that has never asked for it before. This is the first time such an appeal has ever been made in the history of religious orders in this country.”

Today, a week after Sister Maura’s appeal, a special collection will be taken up in most parishes across the country, the first of what will be 10 annual collections for the Retirement Fund for Religious. The appeal and the fund are part of the Tri-Conference Retirement Project sponsored by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Conference of Major Superiors of Men. Money collected will be administered centrally by the project and distributed to religious communities on an “as-needed” basis.

The project was established in 1986 after a 1985 survey, “The Retirement Needs Survey of United States Religious,” warned of the possibility that some impoverished orders might be unable to care for their aging members. The survey results shocked and embarrassed the church and took both Catholics and non-Catholics by surprise, though almost everyone will say now that changing demographics should have clearly pointed to problems ahead.

In the 1960s, due to what church historians, sociologists and religious leaders call a combination of circumstances, there was an exodus of nuns from convents. At the same time, there was a drastic decline in “religious vocations,” that is in the numbers of young women who entered the convent in response to what they perceived as a call from God.

None of that had passed unnoticed, yet few were prepared for the reckoning. The survey became known as the “Oh my gosh survey,” Sister Mary Oliver Hudon, director of the Tri-Conference Project, said in a recent interview--since that was usually the initial response. But because of it, the project was established, a second survey was made and, in 1987, the fund was set up.

The combined findings of the two surveys, both conducted by the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson & Co., determined a $3-billion retirement liability, what is now called “the unfunded past-service liability.”

The surveys highlighted other telling demographics: In 1966, there were 181,421 sisters in the United States. Today there are 112,489, a 38% drop. The median age of female religious is 64; of men, 56. Those sisters older than 70 account for 39% of the membership. Religious are living longer than the general population, especially women religious, of whom 2.4% are now older than 90, while only 1% are younger than 30.

Using the age of 70 as the average retirement age, congregations surveyed estimated the average cost of caring for a retired member at $10,000 per year. Because of their vow of poverty, religious were not salaried as individuals, and as such, were not eligible for Social Security until the law was changed in 1972. Many of those retired do not receive Social Security.

How could it have come to this? It is a question the Tri-Conference project has had to deal with in a formal, highly professional public relations campaign. And it is a question that nuns, laity and clergy are asking themselves and each other, often with much emotion.

One former nun, hearing of the appeal, angrily lashed out at “the church,” by which she seemed to mean the male clergy and hierarchy who do not belong to religious orders or take vows of poverty, charging they could take care of it if they wanted. She swiped at their comparatively luxurious life styles and deplored that the laity were being asked to take care of the crisis. “And now they’re making the nuns beg for it,” she said.

Hearing of the remarks, Sister Gemma Fisher, a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in Reseda, called them unfair. She did not agree with that sort of attack, Sister Gemma said, calling the financial crisis “an unfortunate thing that happened.”

However, it was clear the appeal distresses her: “I just simply could not get up and beg from our people. There are so many demands placed on them already. I guess if there is any anger, it’s that I’m upset somebody (in authority) did not hear before now of the difficulty we were in.

‘A Grain of Truth’

“Perhaps there is a grain of truth,” she continued. “Maybe there are some points of justice that need to be looked at. I don’t go in much for attacking, though. As for priests living in luxury, that’s the exception.”

Msgr. Royale Vadikan, pastor of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, agreed. Generally speaking about the past, he said, “Let’s face it. We were all cheap help.”

As Arthur Anderson & Co. pointed out in their background report, the men and women religious who account for those alarming statistics are members of a labor force that taught, nursed and otherwise ministered to an increasingly growing immigrant church. By 1920, 1.7 million students attended nearly 6,000 parish schools. In addition there were more than 900 Catholic academies, colleges and universities. By 1930, there were 624 Catholic hospitals. It was all done with a labor force that worked on the stipend system, essentially for nothing.

Except for shelter, the stipends were to cover all living expenses, including food and medical bills. In addition, a portion was sent to the motherhouses for the education of new members, to cover administrative costs, care of the sick and infirm, and ministerial works such as overseas missions and work with the poor.

As Hudon said of last Sunday’s appeal, “In a sense, we are appealing to the people who got the services. They never really paid for them when they got them,” adding that, for example, tuition in grade school was often about $10 per year.

The Historical Reasons

In the video produced to educate the public and congregations about the crisis and its roots, Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, a lecturer in church history at Catholic University in Washington, outlines the historical reasons, acknowledges the poverty of the immigrant church and the necessity of low stipends. He observes, however, that while most parishes could not have paid more, there were wealthy, well-off parishes that could have paid more and helped others.

That they did not, he says on the video, “amounts to a scandal. There is a moral obligation on the part of the Catholic Church in the United States to do something.”

(The current crisis is peculiar to America. In Canada, where there was also an immigrant church, nuns were paid salaries commensurate with other teachers and nurses.)

In the United States, the Catholic Church is run by the bishops and financed by the laity. When the impending crisis became apparent, the bishops commissioned the Arthur Anderson survey, established an emergency fund of $60,000, raised the annual stipends (in Los Angeles they are an average $11,000) and agreed to participate in the Tri-Conference project.

And as the project’s video takes pains to point out, since the early ‘80s, and in some instances before, religious orders have taken steps to plan for the future. There are now retirement funds, pension plans, insurance coverage. Property-rich, cash-poor orders are selling some of the stately looking but expensive-to-maintain buildings. And, in some instances, the care of the elderly is being financed at the expense of the work the orders used to do for the poor. The funds brought in by the 10-year appeal will be spent mainly on those now over 70 for whom future planning has come too late.

But for some, including Sister Joanne DeQuattro, a Holy Names sister doing peace and justice work in Los Angeles, “This is only one side of it. This (the appeal) is still charity. The other side is justice. Justice is the part nobody wants to talk about--the negotiations that are still going on between the bishops and religious women. We are still not getting what the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is asking for--adequate compensation.”

As a result, she said, many sisters are looking for salaried jobs outside of the diocesan system to enable their orders to continue ministering to the poor.

“For me,” De Quattro said, “the fact that a collection is taking place, although God knows it is needed, is in response to the fact that historically women religious have not been adequately compensated for the work they do.”

Lingering Questions

Sister Mary Oliver Hudon is familiar with the blame-placing accusations and questions. How could the bishops have paid so little? How could religious superiors have been so blind? How could the nuns have signed on for such wages? How could the laity have taken so much for granted? How come?

“Part of what I have come to understand,” she said, “is that so much of religious life is countercultural. The norms by which (orders) operate are not understood by a materialistic or business society.”

Nuns are probably one of the most highly educated groups of women, she said, and yet they are financially ignorant. They entered convents often as young women fresh out of high school or college, she said, took vows of poverty by which they signed away all rights to property or personal income, and set about their work in religious life.

Most never gave money another thought, assuming they would always be provided for. As Sister Mary Glennon, who oversees 2,400 sisters as vicar of women religious for the archdiocese of Los Angeles, put it, “The assumption was, ‘God will always take care of you.’ Well, yes, but you have to do a little bit more.”

For years, that was not obvious. Sisters were provided for, and they managed to live, in most instances, what Hudon called a simple but middle-class existence.

Those were the days when families sent quarters of beef or baked goods to convents, when doctors and dentists waived their fees, when the sister who could teach music gave lessons that supplemented the income of the whole convent.

The days when “Sister could run the school out of a coffee can” are over, Msgr. Vadikan said. “We’re caught up in a system designed to be rather simple. Now we can’t fit. It’s a whole new world.”

One of the hardest things about the current situation, Glennon said, is that so many of the prudent measures--like selling property and investing in retirement plans--have cut into financial support for “our main thrust--our ‘option for the poor,’ we call it. We want to have money to support our sisters who work for nothing--in soup kitchens, peace and justice centers, poor parishes.”

Sister Mary Oliver Hudon echoed that, saying “No religious congregation was formed to take care of its own members. It was for mercies to others that they were founded.”