Further Signs of Impending Demise for American Monasticism

It's a brief reprieve as one failed monastery goes to a failing monastery. The decline of liberal Catholic Monasteries is probably irreversible and in a decade or so, a very modern Monastery will go the way of the dodo. If the materialists are correct, then Monastic life is just one more organism which has seen its time come and gone. Perhaps it's more likely that the nuns, most of whom accept that thesis themselves, are simply participating in the demise of their own religious houses?

Sisterhood ends where it began for 2 merging nuns

By PATRICK CONDON (AP)

ST. JOSEPH, Minn. — Sister Mary David Olheiser and Sister Helenette Baltes professed their vows together in 1936 as two of the 21 new sisters to join the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict that year. At the time, their central Minnesota Roman Catholic monastery was overflowing with youth and energy.

Sixty-two years later, the classmates and old friends are together again. St. Benedict is taking St. Bede back into its fold. The smaller group is facing demographic realities by closing its Wisconsin monastery and moving 29 remaining sisters back to Minnesota.

"It's just a blessing," said Helenette, 94, of her reunion with the 92-year-old Mary David.

It also reflects the massive changes in the lives of nuns in their lifetimes, as once-flourishing orders merge or close. A 2009 Georgetown University study for the National Religious Vocation Conference found the median age in Catholic women's orders to be in the mid 70s, and that 34 percent of religious women's orders surveyed had no new candidates for the sisterhood. About half of those orders with new candidates had at most one or two in the pipeline.