Nuns’ Vow Is a Matter of Survival

During Barbara Dreher’s first year as province director of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, 27 elderly nuns died.

More important, no young women enrolled to take their place. Those who remained were aging rapidly, and the order lacked the long-term resources to care for them. A mortality study showed that the 350-year-old order was destined to disappear one day without a trace.

Dreher’s leadership team took drastic action. They sold property and cut living expenses. They asked former parochial school students and hospital patients served by the nuns to dig deep. They raised enough money to cover the order’s future expenses and build a nursing home for aging sisters. They even launched a $10-million renovation of their stately 19th century convent on the banks of the Mississippi, so their presence will still be felt long after the sisters themselves are gone.

“Imagine opening up the chapel to everyone, inviting everyone to come pray with us on Wednesday evenings,” mused Dreher, a trim, energetic woman of 52 who could easily pass for a corporate executive. “The renovation enables us to say we’re here to stay.”

The Sisters of St. Joseph will not go quietly. Their mission now is survival, and their determination says much about what it takes these days to lead a religious life in deeply secular America.

*

In their long dark habits, white wimples and black veils, Roman Catholic sisters once were a familiar presence on America’s urban landscape. More numerous than priests and as fearless as police, they did much of their work in poor immigrant neighborhoods, educating generations of children in parochial schools, nursing their families in Catholic hospitals and running orphanages.

Today, only 80,000 Catholic women remain in religious life in America, far below the peak of nearly 200,000 in 1965. Of those who remain, half are over the age of 70, a quarter over 80.

Catholic orders face an “unfunded liability” for future medical and retirement expenses of $5 billion, according to the National Religious Retirement Office of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Church leaders say that is far more than they can erase with the two traditional sources of financial support: sisters’ earnings outside the convent and charitable contributions.

Like the Sisters of St. Joseph, many larger orders are trying to make ends meet by selling property, engaging in new forms of fund-raising and investing in the stock market. But some orders are so poor that they have no land or hospitals to sell. Making matters worse, 15% of Catholic sisters never enrolled in Social Security and Medicare, and 10 states bar church-operated nursing homes from receiving Medicaid subsidies.

“I think the common perception is that the church takes care of us . . . and the Vatican sends us checks,” said Sister Andree Fries, director of the Washington-based bishops’ retirement office. “And that’s not the way it is.”

As the sisters have gradually vanished from the American scene, so too has the vast network of social services they administered. Hundreds of parochial schools that once served poor neighborhoods have closed, as have orphanages and other service projects run by sisters. Some of the work is carried on by secular and quasi-religious agencies, such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services. But something has been lost, in the view of academics and church officials.

“There was something about the dedication that the sisters brought to their work,” said Fries. “I don’t mean to suggest that laypeople aren’t dedicated too. But for the sisters, there was a certain passion for the mission.”

*

The first six Sisters of St. Joseph arrived in St. Louis in 1836 by boat from New Orleans, sailing up the Mississippi after a lengthy voyage from France. They were in the vanguard of a Vatican campaign to ensure that America was not entirely lost to the Protestants. Awaiting them was a hard life in what was still part of the American frontier.

St. Louis was a magnet for Catholic immigrants--primarily German, French and Irish. It is a city where to this day one of the first questions natives ask each other when they meet is: What parish are you from?

The Sisters of St. Joseph thrived. By 1920, they were involved in about 200 local institutions, including 175 parish schools, several women’s colleges, two schools for the deaf, nine orphanages and 10 hospitals.

Their success reflected religious and cultural forces that led many young Catholic women to embrace convent life.

In large Catholic families during the first half of the century, it was not uncommon for a daughter to enter the convent.

“Becoming a sister offered an [acceptable] alternative to young Catholic women who wanted more education and more meaningful work and who were choosing not to become wives and mothers,” said Carol Coburn, who chairs the humanities division of Avila College in Kansas City, Mo., and has written extensively on the Sisters of St. Joseph.

In addition, it offered opportunity.

“What advantage did a woman have in society in the 1940s and 1950s?” noted Sister Virginia Anne Argenziano, now the prioress of a Benedictine convent in St. Louis. “She could maybe be a teacher or a nurse or she could have a subservient job to a man in an office. But in religious life there were educational possibilities, job opportunities. She could become the CEO of hospitals, orphanages, whole infrastructures worth millions of dollars.”

But by the 1960s, the traditional world of American Catholicism was breaking down. The women’s movement was demonstrating that women could rise in professions once dominated by men. It was the era of the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps and VISTA. Many idealistic young Catholic women saw new opportunities to serve in the secular world.

And the sexual revolution caused people to think twice about embracing celibacy. These and other social changes not only reduced recruits but also triggered an exodus from the convents. Thousands of women who entered in the 1950s and 1960s simply walked away from religious life.

*

Dreher swam against the tide. She was one of five children in a Catholic family. Her father was a salesman for one of St. Louis’ hometown companies, Anheuser Busch. Her mother was a housewife who later told Dreher she prayed that one of her daughters would become a sister.

Dreher chose the Sisters of St. Joseph because they had taught her in parochial school, and she found them spirited and independent.

“They weren’t the old barren, matronly women that people think of when they think of nuns,” Dreher said. “These were real vibrant, gutsy women.”

She took her first vows in 1966, at the beginning of the convent exodus. She was 18, full of hope, pride and ambition.

At the time, the order was one of the most prominent in the Midwest. The St. Louis division alone had about 1,500 sisters, and branches had spread to cities as far away as Los Angeles; St. Paul, Minn.; and Albany, N.Y.

The order valued education for its members and paid for Dreher’s undergraduate training in elementary education. The sisters also supported her while she got a master’s degree in religious education at the University of San Francisco and a second master’s in theological studies at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley.

But at the same time, Dreher saw many of her fellow sisters depart for lives in the secular world.

“Some of my best friends left,” she said. Among the dilemmas faced by sisters was how to think about celibacy in a world where many of them now dressed as laywomen and worked alongside men.

“Many of us joined so young we had never dated. So in the 1960s and 1970s, when the United States was having a sexual revolution, we were having puppy love,” Dreher said.

Dreher recalls the encounter that made her realize a man might find her attractive, even though her hair was cropped and she wore austere clothes: “I remember the first time somebody looked and said, ‘Hey!’ And I thought, ‘You really think I’m pretty?’

“You wonder what it would be like to have someone to go home to, what it would be like to roll over in bed and find someone there who loved you unconditionally.”

Dreher struggled for several years before coming to the conviction that she could live a celibate life.

“I still remember the day I realized I would never have a child of my own. But I’ve discovered religious life is . . . the way I can give birth.”

*

The demographic forces sweeping the convents had ominous financial implications.

Typically, the young women entering an order constituted its retirement plan. The new sisters would take paying jobs, and their wages were used to care for the older members.

Through the years, most nuns have been employed by local parishes as teachers, and most were shockingly underpaid. Even in the mid-1970s, a teaching job in a parish elementary school often paid no more than $1,200 a year. Once an order had paid the utility bills and bought food, there was often little left to put into retirement savings. And the government doesn’t make up the difference: Retired sisters receive an average annual benefit of $3,300 from Social Security--one-third the national average.

Sister Mary Frances Johnson, financial manager for the Sisters of St. Joseph, said she saw the disaster coming years ago. “Our community has had actuarial studies done since the 1970s, but they weren’t taken seriously because, you know, ‘God would provide.’ ” said Johnson, shaking her head.

At least the Sisters of St. Joseph had entered the Social Security system. That was not even an option until 1973, when Congress changed the law so sisters could buy in. But it was expensive: Orders had to pay the government five years’ worth of payroll taxes for each sister they enrolled.

“We put everything into hock to cover the cost,” recalled Sister Jane Ruoff, now 70 and living in the nursing home run by the sisters.

*

When Dreher, Johnson and a third sister, Suzanne Giblin, were elected to the order’s leadership in the early 1990s, they resolved to put their financial house in order.

Giblin focused on recruiting laypeople to become adjunct members of the order. That meant they could participate in some missions without taking vows of chastity, poverty or obedience. Today, the order has 110 associates--men and women--who not only work closely on projects with the sisters but also tend to make generous financial contributions.

Johnson, a tall, no-nonsense sister with an MBA and a doctorate in chemistry, concluded that the order needed to sell some of its property.

To the sisters’ relief, Johnson recommended that the order keep its mother house. But it sold other land and buildings, freeing up $5 million.

Austerity measures came next. The leaders cut the living expenses allotted for each sister. They halted sabbaticals and reduced charitable contributions. In an even bigger departure, they decided to stop paying education expenses.

Johnson turned the sisters into aggressive fund-raisers. She got them to track down laypeople they had served over the years, assembling a sizable list of potential contributors.

“They’ve found people who were patients in our hospitals and students in our schools, and now they are bringing in $2 million a year,” she said.

The sisters instituted an auction that brings in about $100,000 a year. They began sponsoring a golf tournament that raises about $60,000 annually. (Johnson is an avid golfer.)

But their biggest gamble was to convert a convent building into a nursing home and retirement community for aging sisters.

Retired sisters contribute their Social Security benefits and any pension income they have, and the center now operates in the black. More important, it enables older sisters to live with many of the people they have known for decades.

The hard work and tough calls paid off. Johnson invested the order’s new funds in the booming stock market, and the sisters currently have about $100 million in the bank to help cover future costs. Dreher now feels comfortable encouraging younger sisters to do the kind of work they believe in, rather than taking jobs just to earn money for the community.

Still, nothing they have done can reverse the trends that point toward a day when the order will have too few members to survive. In fact, Dreher is taking some unorthodox steps she hopes will create a legacy that will outlive the order.

The $10-million renovation project will make the 19th century convent a better place to live for sisters who are elderly but not yet infirm. And it will create conference space and other amenities that can be rented out for corporate retreats and meetings, providing the order with another source of revenue.

Dreher said the project demonstrates the order’s commitment to a poor, deteriorating neighborhood located just beyond the St. Louis city limits.

“We want our presence to be of service to the neighborhood,” she said. “And when we’re gone, it will be a nice piece of property for someone to take over.”

*

When Dreher feels overwhelmed by financial worries, she visits the convent’s sandstone-walled chapel with its heavy, dark wooden pews and soaring classical columns. As she walks the length of the sanctuary, she looks up at the stained-glass windows for inspiration.

It is here, she reminds herself, that the Sisters of St. Joseph got their start with just a few nuns to help the needy, the deaf and the sick. It is here that they have come together to pray, to make difficult decisions and to open their convent to neighbors. It is here, she says, that they still have decades of service ahead of them, and it is her job to make sure that they--and she--stay focused on their mission.

“This is where I professed my first vows,” she said. “My perpetual vows.”