“A Pall hung over the Gathering”

A New Jersey priest and commentator writes:

A pall hung over the gathering of the leadership of 14 religious orders of Charity Sisters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, last month. Among them were the New York Charities who, in April, decided to eventually dissolve their community and will no longer accept new members as they are on a “path to completion.”

Sister Maureen Shaughnessy, the General Superior of the separate New Jersey Charities who was at that meeting, told me: “We’ll be facing the same decision in the next 10 years.” She had served as the head of the order from 2003 to 2011 when there were about 500 sisters in the community. Yesterday, she started her second four-year term after finishing one that began in 2019. Today there are 164 N.J. Charities with the average age of 83. 1)

I have previously covered the decision of the New York Sisters of Charity to, in effect, go into liquidation. 2) The New Jersey “Charities,” as the article quoted above calls them, find themselves in a similar situation. As the joint letter of the two institutions reproduced below indicates, their latest response to the crisis seems to be exploring some kind of combined operations:

In business, a combination of two failing companies usually ends up saving neither of them. But the main problems this letter reveals are not so much faulty tactics of the moment, but fundamental weaknesses. In the joint statement, I note no reference to God or Christ. The sisters, however, do commit to “live into” Pope Francis’ “vision” in Laudato Si’. The issues the sisters identify as critical are entirely secular: climate change, homelessness and immigration. Proposed actions include reducing “our carbon footprint with a focus on our food print,” creating committees and task forces. I cannot imagine that any woman interested in religious life would be attracted to such an organization with these goals couched in this kind of language.

Indeed, in the entire Summer 2023 issue of New Dimensions (the sisters’ publication from which the above letter is taken) only a handful of clearly, specifically Catholic passages stand out. Such as where the founder of the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth is quoted as stating in 1859 that “the principal end (for) which God has called and assembled the Sisters of Charity is to honor Jesus Christ, Our Lord, the source and model of all charity, by rendering him every temporal and spiritual service in their power in the persons of the poor… .” 4) Or where a half dozen young, apparently Vietnamese and African sisters from a variety of orders ( but no Sisters of Charity), while visiting the Blessed Miriam Teresa’s “crypt.” speak of their faith and their appreciation of her life and writings. Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, a Sister of Charity, died in 1927. 5)

I should add that this situation is entirely endorsed by Church authority. Neither the Vatican nor the local bishops, as far as I am aware, have decreed an apostolic visitation or even discussed reforms or sanctions regardless of the status and conduct of these declining religious institutions. Indeed, the opposite is true: in 2015 a Vatican investigation of the LCWR (to which both groups of Sisters of Charity discussed here belong), was terminated (with the direct participation of Pope Francis) with practically no action taken.

1. Santora, Rev. Alexander, “What’s next for Sisters of Charity as members age”?, NJ.com( 7/2/2023). In the 1960’s there were up to 2,000 sisters.
2. “On a ‘Path of Completion’: The Sisters of Charity of New York,” The Society of St. Hugh of Cluny (5/1/2023)
3. New Dimensions, Summer 2023 at 4 (A publication of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth).
4. Id. at 14
5. id. at 16