Roman Catholic religious orders of women have hemorrhaged members for several decades since the mid-sixties and new recruits are rarer and rarer. These orders are dying. I know a Sister who, at 51, is the fourth youngest woman in her order. While some new and very traditional orders are doing well, the mainstream ones, like the mainstream Protestant churches, are dying.
I have only looked at a few of the websites of the orders of Sisters. A good example is this one, for the federation of the Sisters of St Joseph. How to put it? These hardly seem like Catholic nuns. Rather, they are liberal feminists.
They are run by "presidents" and "leadership teams" and take "corporate stances". They have banded together in "exciting new" mergers, which indicates their declining numbers and aging membership. Their spirituality is shaped by eco-feminism and the leftwing narrative; all the prayers on their sites were nondenominational and neither Christ nor the Trinity were present in them. And their work is determined by the "justice and peace" and "social justice" agendas of the left. The Catholic clergy and orders are pretty well all married to this socialist and pacifist (and usually highly anti-American) Sixties program. I saw long lists of "systemic evils", war, climate change, immigration, the typical concerns of the secular left. I did not see any concern about abortion, for example.
They strike me as groups of do-gooder elderly lefty spinsters; that is what they look like.
Are they Catholic anymore, in any meaningful sense? What these sites suggest is a mass migration out of anything like Catholicism into a feminist religious liberalism. My guess is that most of them would be far more comfortable with their local Unitarians than with their local Bishop.
A Catholic order that is no longer Catholic is a dead end.
They will die out; another casualty of the Boomers.
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