Where have all the Sisters gone?

Several years ago I read a report on the declining numbers of women religious in the United States. At our parish, we have several nuns living in residence so I can affirm how much we benefit from their prayers and ministry. Needless to say, I found the contents of the report very disappointing. One aspect of the report stuck with me all these years and I haven’t been able to forget it. Everyone in the Church today knows that vocations are down but the statistics don’t really have the same impact as seeing it for yourself. I cannot forget this graph.

The peak occurred in 1966 at 181,421 women and in 2014 the number stood at 49,883 women for a decline of 73% over 50 years. For comparison, the US population increased by 120 million in that time. You don’t usually see trends that appear this tidy. I’ll save for another time any speculation on how such a dramatic change could have been brought about but for now I think we can agree that the situation is very troubling.

The Church needs women religious in so many ways. For their service to the Church’s ministries, for the example of their vocations, and most of all for the prayer they offer on behalf of the Church. Hopefully this will serve as an warning to us all to redouble our personal efforts at prayer, to continuously seek to improve our devotional life, and to support possible vocations from within our own family. As we’ve all heard many times now, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few.”