“It’s an image woven into America’s cultural fabric: Catholic nuns, heads bowed in deep devotion, reciting prayers and lighting candles. But today, the nuns’ time-honored pledges of service, chastity, poverty, and obedience seem far removed from the modern orbit in which we live – igniting a vocal push to save nuns across the nation. For years, the number of women donning habits and devoting their lives to the Lord has been declining, raising fears that the several hundred orders of nuns are not only endangered but teetering on the edge of extinction.”
Hollie McKay, FOX News

On this Sunday, today’s read is from Joan Chittister, a Bendictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania. Here’s an excerpt:

For years, there has been a growing concern about the diminishing number of priests in the church. Everybody talks about it. I, on the other hand, have watched it all a bit wryly. After all, the real builders of the church, the people who have taken care of the church by developing ministries that few could yet see, but really needed badly, the ones who actually set out to meet the issues of the day, and gave their hearts and minds and lifetimes to the world have really been the orders of sisters. They, too, it seems are dwindling in number, if not in spirit. Will anyone notice? Will it matter?

Read the entire column here.