Aging Nuns Transform Mobile Home Park : The elderly: Women who took their vows 50 years ago can no longer turn to their orders for care. About 70 find refuge and ministry in Florida facility.

From the first streak of dawn until the last glimmer of twilight, the Roman Catholic chapel in the white trailer at Rocky Creek Village is never unattended. On church feast days, when the Eucharist is on display in a golden monstrance, there is standing room only.

Once a mobile home park, the senior citizens community on the north side of Tampa is home and convent to 70 Catholic nuns from 24 orders whose busy lifestyle of helping others contradicts the word retired , which they fervently reject.

Most of the nuns are here because the motherhouse is no longer able to care for elderly nuns. In some cases, the motherhouses, like the schools the nuns taught in and the hospitals they worked in, no longer exist. They were sold out to make ends meet.

So those who arrived at their novitiates 50 or 60 years ago with their trousseaux--black steamer trunks packed with bed linens and clothing--amid that peculiarly religious aroma of incense, simmering soup and furniture polish, kneel before the final flickering candles in a makeshift monastery without walls or chiming bells, without the long flowing robes and starched wimples that went out with Vatican II.

Although many cannot escape the feeling that for most of their careers a male-dominated church underestimated and misused their education and talents, they eagerly embrace the freer lifestyle that has suddenly been thrust upon them by the financial conditions and lack of recruits in their congregations.

“A lot of talent was wasted,” said Sister Margaret Sullivan, who will soon be celebrating 60 years with the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters, based in Monroe, Mich. “The church could have used all its gifts, male or female. But we were always the handmaids of the church, doing all the little service things that were unrelated to ability.”

When they took their vows, there were many younger nuns to care for a few elderly ones. Now there are few younger ones to care for the many elderly sisters. Twenty-five years ago there were 176,341 nuns in orders throughout the United States, and their median age was 46. Today there are 99,337 nuns with a median age of 65.

These sisters served their church during a period of great turmoil over the role of women. They saw convent friends give up their vows and join the exodus returning to the world to take up careers, marry, have children and in some cases undergo divorces and abortions.

They witnessed nuns standing up to lecture Pope John Paul II on the ordination of women when he visited Washington and saw the American bishops, after 10 years of rewriting and debate, abandon a pastoral letter on women.

While the American church in their lifetime grew from 42 million Roman Catholics to 58 million, parochial schools declined by nearly 30% and Catholic hospitals by 22% as convents and novitiates closed for lack of vocations.

“The problem today in religious life is that no one can afford the help needed to run a big house and take care of the grounds,” said Sister Rose Ehrenfeld, a Mission Helper of the Sacred Heart. Five years ago her order sold its motherhouse in Baltimore to a nursing home.

“We don’t have the money to support our elderly sisters, to pay nurses around the clock,” she said. “Until 1973, we weren’t even on Social Security.”

But Sister Ehrenfeld, who spent years “in the barrios of Venezuela among people so terribly poor we didn’t even have water,” has no regrets that at 83 she has not been relegated to a convent top floor. “I’m so happy it’s gone, all gone. A lot of that time spent cleaning and scrubbing, waxing and polishing could have been used helping the poor.”

A news story about nuns nationwide facing a $2-billion deficit in caring for their elderly prompted Rocky Creek Director William Lupo, a former seminarian, to invite some mothers superior to inspect the mobile home park, which in 1984 had been converted to an adult congregate living facility.

“Mother Foundress,” the nuns have nicknamed him for helping maintain their religious lifestyle and for his expertise at qualifying them for Medicare, Medicaid, rent subsidies, food stamps, and other public and private grants that supplement the meager funds from their congregations.

Various church organizations pay the rent for the nuns and many collect Social Security.

The vitality of the 70 nuns has transformed the 50-acre village of 850 mostly non-Catholic retirees into a tightly knit community not unlike the mission stations where many of them served.

With most of them in street clothes but some of them wearing their traditional habits, they visit shut-ins, read to the blind, push wheelchairs and carry food trays for the infirm, mend clothing for the needy on their sewing machines, and perform endless other volunteer chores from teaching ceramics to calling bingo numbers.

“The sisters here don’t want to retire to a convent. They feel the need to reach out to others while they still have something to give,” said Sister Philomena Schwirzer, a Visitation nun who came here after her monastery in Parkersburg, W. Va., closed last summer.

After ministering to drug addicts and alcoholics in Boston’s “Combat Zone,” Sister Antoinette Hough volunteered on arrival to tend the terminally ill in the trailer set aside for the hospice program. Recently, while knocking on doors for a village census, she was able to convert two residents to the Catholic faith.

“You just don’t stop being a missionary,” she said. “I suppose we were meant to die with our boots on.”

All are “prayerfully confident,” as one sister phrased it, that their shrinking congregations will somehow survive.

“Maybe some orders will fade away; that’s always happened,” said Sister Clare Brandon, a Visitation nun with a Ph.D. in French literature. “Our African monasteries have to turn girls away. We are flourishing in Central and South America and could become a South American order very easily. In this country our houses are not doing very well.”

“Contemplative life is more humane now,” said Sister Mary Austin Leach, who was mistress of novices in her Visitation monastery when Vatican II came along. “We no longer see visitors in the parlor from behind a grill. Years ago we never went out, even to vote.” “

Religious life “is evolving toward a new future,” said Sister Frances Dunn, who spent more than a quarter of a century as a nurse in the Solomon Islands with the Marist Sisters. “Not many convent walls are left except in the cloistered orders. The trend is toward smaller groups living out among the people.”