More Young Women Find a Calling in Catholic Order
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This is the VOA Special English Education Report.
For years, the Catholic Church in America has [A]struggled[/A] to find new clergy. The average age of priests and nuns is [A]seventy[/A] and rising. But some Catholic orders are having more success than others.
The Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia are mainly a teaching order. They are based at a convent in Nashville, Tennessee. And they just [A]celebrated[/A] their one hundred fiftieth year.
The sisters are active across the United States and in Australia. There, they teach more than thirteen thousand students in [A]thirty-four[/A] schools.
Today, Saint Cecilia's has its largest number of postulants in many years. A postulant is a [A]candidate[/A] for admission into a [A]religious[/A] order.
Sister Catherine Marie, a [A]spokeswoman[/A], says the current group of first-year students [A]represents[/A] ten percent of the whole order.
SISTER CATHERINE MARIE: "There are two hundred seventy of us and our growth of late has been rather [A]extensive[/A]. This year we had twenty-seven young women enter. Last year, it was twenty-three. Great blessings to us."
Nearly one-third of the women in the order are under thirty.
Sister Catherine says she thinks these young women are looking [A]deeper[/A] into their faith in reaction to changes in society.
Participation in [A]organized[/A] religion is falling among Americans under age thirty. That was the finding of a national [A]survey[/A] last year by the Pew Research Center.
A different group, the National Opinion Research Center, recently found that seventeen percent of Americans do not [A]identify[/A] with any faith. And another poll found that this was true of almost twenty-five percent of first-year university students.
Sister Kelly Edmunds is a first-year [A]postulant[/A] at Saint Cecilia's. She says she came to the order out of a [A]desire[/A] to serve others. She had seen Dominican sisters serving at the University of Sydney.
SISTER KELLY: "Just to watch them, walking down the main boulevard of campus wearing their [A]habits[/A] -- it was just such a powerful witness. I had friends in engineering who were, like, they knew I was Catholic so they would say to me ‘Who are these nuns on campus?' And so it was a really great [A]witness[/A] to me of the power of religious life."
Sister Victoria Marie is in her second year. She came to the convent with a degree in civil engineering. She says she had discovered that people were more [A]interesting[/A] to her than roads or bridges.
SISTER VICTORIA: "So it was a big shift in my life to go from utility to relationship, from ‘What am I going to do? ' to ‘Who am I going to be for the Lord?' "
A postulant's day [A]includes[/A] work, study and prayer.
Sister Victoria says it requires a lot of [A]energy[/A].
SISTER VICTORIA: "For a couple weeks after I entered, I thought, ‘I just want to lay on the [A]couch[/A] for the day, and I don't think they do that here, you know.'"
But Sister Kelly says she was [A]surprised[/A] by how much time she has gotten to simply enjoy life.
SISTER KELLY: "There have been a lot of fun moments just to be [A]outside[/A] and enjoy the beauty of the world and [A]creation[/A]."
