16 July 2019

HuffPost Highline on the Millennial Nuns

"I went to a science magnet high school, graduating in 2001, but in my late 20s, I began to notice that some of my classmates were turning toward the Catholic faith. It surprised me: My high school was ostentatiously secular. We had a steel statue on the front lawn depicting the triumph of mathematical logic. Our senior class president wore a giant calculator costume to football games. When my government class held a mock debate over abortion, only two students out of 18 volunteered to argue the 'pro-life' case.

"And near the end of the 2000s, a half-dozen old friends I'd remembered as logical skeptics and trend-forward internet connoisseurs had become deeply religious. Some of them had been raised loosely Catholic, some had not. They blogged. They wrote Facebook posts about their conversions and shared memes about contraception-free family planning. They seemed to want to celebrate their lives. . . . .

"These people intrigued me, because they didn't quite fit. The presumption, I had always thought, was that the U.S. is on a steady, if bumpy, progressive drift. Books published about America's demographic destiny like to warn religious folks to be afraid of the young. Each successive generation, the thinking goes, wants to exercise more choice over what they eat, over how they live, over who they love, over their dreams, over their truths. The young aren't interested in tradition or moral constraints.

"Catholicism seems especially out of step with contemporary American life. . . .

"But right around the time I began to notice my high school classmates' burgeoning faith, something flipped. After 50 years of decline, the number of young women 'discerning the religious life' - or going through the long process of becoming a Catholic sister - is substantially increasing. In 2017, 13 percent of women from age 18 to 35 who answered a Georgetown University-affiliated survey of American Catholics reported that they had considered becoming a Catholic sister. That's more than 900,000 young women, enough to repopulate the corps of 'women religious' in a couple of decades, even if only a fraction of them actually go through with it."

A recent Huffington Post article reported on the trend of more and more young women being called to the religious life ("after 50 straight years of decline").

To access the complete article, please visit:

HuffPost: Highline: Behold, The Millennial Nuns (11 JUL 19)

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