The sisters staffed schools and hospitals and social service providers. And they watched their numbers steadily diminish in the following decades.
From The New York Times (gift article):
It was happy hour at the assisted living building, with snacks and a live entertainer, and Sister Stephen was doing her best to be happy. She clapped along to “Hello, Dolly!”
About 20 women and one man sat in a brightly lit activity room, some in wheelchairs. Here, happy hour comes every Friday at 2 p.m.
“You’re a sister?” a woman asked Sister Stephen. “You don’t look like a sister.”
“Well, what does a sister look like?” the sister asked. The woman did not have an answer. What does a sister look like?
“I’m going to get up and dance in a minute,” Sister Stephen said. At age 96, after two knee replacements, she is limited in her dance steps. But get up she did, using her walker for support, and swayed to “Save the Last Dance for Me.”
Still, she felt something was missing. For starters, there was no white wine.
“Only red,” said Sister Mary Martin, taking orders around the room.
But more than that, where were all the other sisters?
Sister Stephen looked around the room with some bafflement.
“It’s funny,” she said, surprised by what she saw. “Most of the people in this room now are not nuns.”
Because usually, she said, there were more. A lot more. Through a confluence of forces, the center has become one of the last places in New York where you can find an abundance of nuns.
In the mid-1960s, America was home to more than 180,000 Roman Catholic nuns; now there are only about 35,000, with an average age of over 80. Congregations have had to sell or close their convents, forcing these older sisters to find new places to live.
For many in the New York area, that has turned out to be an unlikely place: a Lutheran care center called Wartburg. Founded in 1866 as a farm school and home for Civil War orphans, the center spreads across 34 acres in Mount Vernon, N.Y., with care options ranging from independent living to skilled nursing and memory care.
Since the first wave of about 30 nuns from the Dominican Sisters of Hope, a congregation in Newburgh, N.Y., arrived in 2009, the number of sisters in the center has swelled to about 80, more than one-third of the residents.
“When the cardinal was here last year,” said David Gentner, the president of Wartburg, “he said there’s more consecrated women religious on this campus than anywhere in the archdiocese.”
The sisters at Wartburg, now mostly in their 80s and 90s, belong to a cohort of women who took their vows in the decades after the World War II in numbers never seen before or since. It was a boom time for American religion, when churches saw record attendance and the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. The sisters staffed schools and hospitals and social service providers; they marched for peace or against hunger. And they watched their numbers steadily diminish in the following decades, as fewer and fewer women followed them.
