A 177-year-old Catholic religious order is preparing to receive its own last rites as fewer Americans appear to be pursuing a faith-based calling. The Sisters of Charity of New York confirmed the vote by its general assembly to cease accepting new members, a move that will culminate in the nonprofit religious organization’s dissolution at a still indeterminate future date.
“The decision was not an easy one,” according to a statement by the congregation leadership. “We will continue to grow in love. We will continue to deepen our relationships with each other, with our associates and with our ministry partners. We will continue to deepen our relationship with our God… expanding what it means to live the charism of charity into the future.”
The handwriting, however, is on the wall as the group begins what it is officially calling its “path to completion.” The congregation, which currently has 154 members, has had only two sisters profess their final vows during the past four decades after once admitting as many as 50 or more new members annually at its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a result, most of the dwindling membership is now well advanced in years with a median age of 82, congregation spokesperson James Rowe told The NonProfit Times.
It is unknown what the congregation’s assets are since, as a church-affiliated charity, it isn’t required to file a federal Form 990 financial statement. However, the eventual disposition and transfer of its assets and timeline for its “completion” are just a few of many administrative and legal tasks that lie ahead. “This is just the beginning of the conversation rather than the middle or the end,” said Rowe. “The congregation’s newly elected leadership will have to determine how the completion proceeds and what it’s going to look like.”
The Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul of New York – as the organization is officially known – traces its history back more than 200 years to when Elizabeth Ann Seton, a widowed native New Yorker, founded the first Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland in 1809. She later sent three sisters to New York City in 1817 to care for orphans, leading to the founding of the New York chapter as an independent religious community in 1846. Since then, the New York congregation has opened or staffed 185 schools, 28 hospitals, 23 childcare centers, and other institutions to serve the sick, poor, indigent and others on the margins of society, according to organizational data.
Several of these institutions are still in existence including the New York Foundling Hospital, founded in 1869 to care for abandoned children, and two other hospitals and a children’s rehabilitation center in suburban Westchester County, New York along with several homes for disabled, retired, and formerly homeless individuals. The congregation also sponsors the College of Mount St. Vincent, a Catholic liberal arts college in New York City with an enrollment of 1,800 undergraduate and graduate students founded under the sisterhood’s auspices in 1847. All of these institutions are now run by lay people and will continue with minimal impact to their operations, said Rowe.
The New York congregation, one of 14 within the Sisters of Charity Federation of North America, isn’t alone is facing an existential crisis of this type. The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy, in Charleston, South Carolina, began a similar process of “completion” in 2008 culminating in the sale of its motherhouse and relocation of its remaining members to a nearby Episcopalian retirement home last year. It’s a conundrum with which Rowe acknowledged the Catholic Church – and a number of other religious organizations – continue to grapple as church attendance falls and fewer young people enter the priesthood and religious ministry in general, both in the United States and much of Europe.
Elsewhere in the world the situation is much different as the Catholic Church continues to grow throughout much of Latin America, Africa and Asia. The trend has produced a corresponding shift in the church’s center of gravity to the global south as manifested by the 2013 election of Pope Francis, an Argentinian, as the first non-European bishop of Rome in more than 1,200 years and first ever from the Western Hemisphere.
Leaders at The Sisters of Charity of New York recognized this trend several decades ago when the congregation began sponsoring a mission to Guatemala to aid victims of that country’s devastating decades-long civil war that ended in 1996. The special relationship continues to this day and includes several medical clinics it operates in the country as well as the Barbara Ford Peacebuilding Center, named for a New York sister who was murdered there in 2001.
The New York congregation’s leaders continue to “believe in the future of religious life” and will refer those interested in pursuing a Catholic religious calling to other Sisters of Charity affiliates and to the Religious Formation Conference, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to supporting those entering the Catholic ministry.
