Between 100 and 200 young women enter into a religious vocation each year in the U.S., and not all of them will complete the process to become a nun.
For those who do, they are giving up many trappings of modern life — dating, material wealth and sometimes even cellphones and fashionable clothes — for the sake of a radical religious life and intergenerational community, at a time when the average age of an American nun is 80. This past year, the pope urged orders to pray harder for more priests and nuns as he acknowledged the number of men and women entering Catholic religious life continues to plummet in parts of the world, including Europe and the U.S.
Here are more takeaways from the AP’s recent reporting on young nuns. From sharing flip phones to wearing habits, nuns choose a radical life In August, Zoey Stapleton, 24, joined the Franciscan Sisters, T.O.
R. of Penance of the Sorrowful Mother, a community in rural Toronto, Ohio. It’s part of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, a U.
S. association of orders often seen as more conservative than its larger counterpart, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The order’s patron saint, Francis of Assisi, led a life of poverty.
In emulation, the sisters dress in modest habits consisting of a long white veil and gray robes that many choose to pair with modern sandals. The women abstain from other forms of modernity, using only a set of shared flip phones and the internet when necessary for their minis.
