The Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary are celebrating 175 years of existence with an enthusiasm undimmed by the fact only 600 are left in the nation — with just five in Colorado to mark the milestone.
The five, all over the age of 70, are not the least bit perturbed by their small number or advancing ages, which are emblematic of their order nationally and the dwindling memberships of the roughly 700 other U.S. orders.
The sisters don’t see the decades- long decline in their numbers as a crisis or sign of a weakening church. They see it as providential.
Fewer sisters means more ordinary Catholics, the laity, are more fully engaged in God’s work, says Sister Betty Voss.
“I think we see the declining numbers of vowed religious and the elevation of the Catholic laity as a spirit-led movement,” Voss says.
In other words, she believes God calls whoever is needed, when they are needed.
The numbers of religious sisters and cloistered nuns in the United States was almost 180,000 in 1965. This year there are just over 59,000, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
The median age is 75.
“There is some nostalgia for our larger numbers, but there’s so much going on — and such a strong commitment to the Gospel — you don’t have time to grieve the losses,” Voss says.
Journalist Ann Carey’s 1997 book, “Sisters in Crisis, the Tragic Unraveling of Women’s Religious Communities,” was less upbeat.
Carey concluded that many groups went too far in their “reforms” after the liberalizing Vatican II Council in 1962-65. In eliminating sisters’ habits (uniforms) and transforming their communal lifestyles into more ordinary routines, Carey found, many orders lost their distinct identities and appeal.
Georgetown University researcher Mary Bendyna says there is another way to look at it.
Americans fail to realize, Bendyna says, that the bust in religious vocations in the United States in the 1960s was preceded by a big boom in the 1940s to 1960s.
Americans assume they always had the high numbers of vocations in this country until the social upheaval of the late 1960s, Bendyna says, yet the peak was a mid-century phenomenon, a combination of sociological factors — possibly immigration, war, education.
Between 1900 and 1945 the numbers of religious sisters had swelled from under 50,000 to about 122,000.
A possible rebound
If falling U.S. numbers have alarmed church members in the last four decades, at least religious recruiters are seeing early, if inconclusive, signs of a turnaround.
In the past three years, reports Vision Vocation Guide, American religious communities have experienced a 19 percent increase in candidates. Half are under 30 years old.
Half of the candidates also are expressing a preference for distinctively religious dress, and almost a fifth want more traditional communal life than what today’s independent sisters are living, the 2008 report says.
“One misses the vibrancy that youthful members bring. But, I don’t know, we’re all still pretty vibrant,” says Voss, situated comfortably in the living room of a small northwest Denver bungalow she rents with one other sister.
Outside in the yard Voss has planted a few trees and a sign reading: “War is not the answer.”
A lifelong teacher, Voss will be the new reading coordinator for a Catholic elementary school this fall.
Her order’s influence never came from great numbers, she says, but from its values. She estimates that Colorado probably never had many more than 20 Blessed Virgin Mary sisters at any one time.
The order got its start in Colorado with even fewer nuns than its current population.
Sister Mary Theodore O’Connor came to Boulder for the dry mountain air in about 1888. She and two others landed at the foot of the Flatirons to establish their order’s first school in this state. Yet the mother superior did not survive her tuberculosis long enough to see the completion of Mount St. Gertrude Academy.
The only night O’Connor spent under its roof was her wake, held in a doorless building, with coyotes and late October wind howling outside.
The boarding school opened Nov. 9, 1892. It would educate generations of Colorado women before it closed its doors in 1969.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus School opened in Boulder in 1900 with four Blessed Virgin Mary sisters and is still open, run now by the parish.
No time for self-pity
The order’s celebration of its 175th year is not bittersweet because of low numbers. Sister Mira Mosle of Dubuque, Iowa, says the sisters are excited about plans to build a new water system for villagers in either Tanzania or Honduras, part of the order’s new mission to take “care of the world’s water.”
Marilyn Wasmundt of Loveland is a former BVM who left the order in the late 1960s at age 30. She married and raised four children.
Wasmundt, the oldest of eight children in a strict German family, had entered the convent in 1957 at age 18. She saw the order then as the only avenue for her to become a teacher and make a new life for herself. She stayed 12 years.
“I joined for the wrong reasons. But I owe who I am to the BVMs,” Wasmundt says. “I will always support them.”
During the mass exodus of the late 1960s, Voss didn’t have to agonize over whether to stay or go.
“I love the life. For anyone called to it, it’s a joy,” Voss says. “It gave me time for prayer and opportunity for service. I just thought of it as a gift. I still do.”
Colorado’s Blessed Virgin Mary sisters celebrated the anniversary locally at 4:30 p.m. Saturday with Mass and a reception at the Most Precious Blood Church in Denver.
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
