Wednesday, October 08, 2008

From the Deacon's Bench - a Time Magazine story on young nuns from 2006:

Today's Nun Has A Veil--And A Blog

"Over the past five years, Roman Catholic communities around the country have experienced a curious phenomenon: more women, most in their 20s and 30s, are trying on that veil. Convents in Nashville, Tenn.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and New York City all admitted at least 15 entrants over the past year and fielded hundreds of inquiries. One convent is hurriedly raising funds for a new building to house the inflow, and at another a rush of new blood has lowered the median age of its 225 sisters to 36."

This is old news to those of us who have followed the young traditional/older liberal split in the Church and religious life.

The article also quotes a native Long Islander:

"For those who are called, there is a real falling in love. You are filled with a joy and desire to be with God," says Sister Mary Gabriel Devlin, 32, vocation director at Sisters of Life. "Their families are not experiencing this, so it can be hard for them to understand."

One of the blogging sisters is mentioned:

"There are people out there who wonder what being a nun is like," says Sister Julie Vieira, 36. "These are people who were exposed to stereotypes of nuns and don't understand how we really live." So last summer Vieira began a blog titled A Nun's Life, in which she has chronicled her days as a sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and also a conventional-dressing, apartment-dwelling, master's degree--holding production coordinator at the Loyola Press, a Catholic publisher in Chicago."

You can see a huge list of Blogs by Religious on the Catholic Blog Directory. Overall the article is nice, although it contains this (understandable) error when discussing veils:

"Decreed unnecessary by Vatican II and shed happily by many older nuns, the headdress is for many of today's newcomers a desired accessory. "A lot of my older sisters would never wear the veil," says Sister Sarah Roy, 29, who is the only member of her Sisters of St. Francis of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, Ill., to do so. (The others wear a simple dark dress adorned by a pin.) "

Of course Vatican II did not decree any such thing, although many nuns did happily shed their veils or modified them.

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