IHM novices in the 1950s
After a thought-provoking conversation today with a woman who shared my high school experience, I went back and read a talk by Sandra Schneiders, a prominent New Testament theologian and a Catholic Sister in her eighties - which means that she joined her religious community in the 1950s:
"...Rather than annual double-digit entrance classes of teenage high school graduates ready to be trained in and deployed by their respective congregations into its well-institutionalized and highly respected ministries and the majority of whom would persevere, today's entrants are usually lone individuals, at least college graduates (often saddled with debt), and usually closer in age to 40 or even 50 than 20. Only 1% of women religious today is below age 40. Even someone as mathematically challenged as I can see that these indisputable facts seem ominous.
"...These new Religious were slated to live and minister
in the Congregation they entered and its institutions for the whole of their
lives. And no one, veterans or recruits, thought that there would be any real
changes in the life or the Congregation’s ministries (called “apostolates”) any
time in the foreseeable future. Today, as we are very aware, the situation is
extremely different from anything any of us could have imagined in the 1950’s.
We have very few new members, none very young, few coming from solidly, much
less exclusively, Catholic backgrounds and usually with, at best, fragmented
religious formations if any at all. But they are often professionally quite
well formed, credentialed, and to some extent experienced. And the Congregation
does not have placements for them even if it did have the luxury of forming
them according to its requirements or desires. There are at least two important
points to make about this comparative situation if we are not to see it as a
description of the beginning of the end of the lifeform we call Religious Life.
First, there is nothing normative about
the 1950s version of the life. In the history of the Church there have been
periods in which large numbers of the faithful entered Religious Life and other
periods in which very few did. Different forms of the life have attracted
large numbers at certain times and places as other forms have declined or waned
or even disappeared, only to experience, in some cases, a sociological
re-emergence at another time or in another place. And the numbers have
fluctuated greatly geographically, just as is the case today when vocations are
multiplying in some parts of the world even as they decline in others. The
still widespread, even if unarticulated, idea that Religious Life is healthy when
it is numerically huge, financially flush, institutionally established, and
approved of by the powers that be, and unhealthy when the numbers are smaller,
resources are scarce, and approval is spotty may say more about the extent to
which we have internalized the might-makes-right, capitalistic, politically
dominant value system of the first world than about the health of Religious
Life in our context. Jesus’ movement, especially his chosen itinerant band that
made a life choice of total devotion to his project – that is, the biblical
precursors of Religious Life as I have suggested elsewhere – was hardly the
most sociologically successful operation in first century Palestine. Jesus’
band never seems to have exceeded, at most, a few dozen in his lifetime, and it
does not seem to have greatly increased in the immediate aftermath of the
Resurrection..."
In some congregations, there were as many as 120 postulants entering at a time, mostly 17-18 year old high school graduates. In my own community, there were about 60 postulants in the "band" of 1964. By the time I entered in 1978, there were 3 of us.
But back to that large number of postulants. How did the sisters in charge of their formation handle them, and form them? In lock step, I think. This was quite different from my experience almost 15 years later.
I am not sure what I am trying to say, except that with so many new entrants, their individual gifts and talents became expendable. I know sisters who were talented violinists who could never play the violin again.
I still don't know where these musings are going.
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