Modern nuns less conventional

GRAND JUNCTION
— Sister Karen Bland is a thoroughly modern Catholic nun. Her gold Chevrolet Malibu is proof.

The well-used tennis shoes she wears in her early-morning after-Mass visits to a health club sit on the passenger seat. An audiobook — a novel about two boys of different races growing up in Southern California — is in the CD player.

And in the past hour, this diminutive, middle-aged woman who holds five degrees, including a doctorate, and speaks three languages has been making the rounds in the well-used automobile. She has driven from the soup kitchen she administers to the day center she oversees, where the homeless can get warm and clean, to the construction site of an apartment complex she has raised funds to build for the mentally ill.

As Sister Karen demonstrates, nuns are finding their way in the world in creative and sometimes surprising ways.

Long gone are the days of living sheltered in convents, operating on orders from bishops and working as either a teacher or nurse.

Today’s sisters are dwindling in number. There are only a third — 63,699 — of the sisters of a half-century ago.

But many of those left are independent-minded women who have a higher profile in the church. They fill in as “pastoral leaders” at more than 200 parishes across the country that are short of priests. They are engineers, physicians, counselors, ecologists, computer experts, lawyers and artists.

In Colorado, they teach the homeless to plant flowers in downtown Denver. They counsel those suffering marriage woes. They help immigrants. They drive buses. They organize political movements. And they teach tai chi.

They say they do whatever God calls them to do in jobs that fit their particular skills, a change Sister Karen Crouse, leader of 57 Denver-area Benedictine sisters, said has turned unhappy and unfulfilled nuns of yesteryear into “happy campers.”

These happy campers prefer to call themselves “sisters” or “religious” used as a noun. They refer to those still in cloistered convents as the “nuns.”

They are still linked to often-distant religious communities by mutual prayer and teleconferenced meetings, but they make their own way. They apply for jobs, rent apartments, juggle budgets and take on many of the same headaches as those to whom they minister.

They have blogs giving out book recommendations and cookie recipes along with theological discussions.

Leaps of faith

The additions to their ranks nowadays come not from college-age girls who heard the call. Those taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are more often middle-aged women who have raised families and look to a religious vocation as a second career.

“The focus is more on our individual gifts rather than on the group. The motivation comes from within. You are the one who has to make decisions,” said Sister Sen Nguyen, a Franciscan who operates an art gallery in Denver that sells the works of disabled Vietnamese women and orphans.

Sister Sen joined the convent after life-altering experiences during the Vietnam War. She was separated from her mother during the fall of Saigon in 1975. She reunited with her in Denver after 15 grueling attempts to escape Vietnam by fishing boat.

Sister Sen became a teacher, but when her mother was ailing from a stroke, she decided to open the Provide-N-Ce boutique in northwest Denver to sell artwork that would benefit the needy in Vietnam and to leave more time to care for her mother.

“I had no money. I had nothing. I didn’t think my (religious) community would allow it. It took a leap of faith,” Sen said.

Her community did bless her mission, which melds art and spirituality. Many religious orders operate that way. Sisters find a mission and ask permission to pursue it. If superiors believe it fits with a nun’s gifts, it is approved, leading to the array of professions for modern nuns.

This sea change has its roots in the 1960s and the Catholic Church-altering Vatican II council, when the dwindling numbers of convents were instructed by the church hierarchy to reassess their missions. Nuns were liberated just as the feminist movement was getting a grip in the secular world.

It was a tumultuous time. Some nuns, accustomed to living rigidly directed lives in convents, opted to ignore the changes. Others grabbed the new freedom and renounced their vows, leaving a church they saw as out-of-touch when it came to modern women.

In 1965 there were about 180,000 nuns in the United States. A decade later, there were 45,000 fewer, according to figures from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. The average age of those remaining is now around 75.

Time of transition

Sister Faye Huelsmann, a Sister of St. Joseph who operates a counseling center in Grand Junction, said it was a difficult time.

“We had not had much chance to really talk to each other before that. Your superiors just told you what to do,” she said. “We had to learn how to express our own opinions.”

Sister Faye and her partner in the Counseling and Education Center, Sister Pat Lewter, have since spent 27 years in the business of talking with people. They found their mission and entered the counseling business because of their interactions with troubled students and struggling families while they were teaching high school.

Sister Caroline Conway said she has been called to do counseling of another sort after more traditional jobs of administration and teaching in her order, the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. She does spiritual directing, which is a combination of sitting down with someone to pray, listening and making suggestions.

She is also a tai chi teacher, an Eastern form of nonviolent martial arts that fits with her belief that people should be gentle with one another and the world around them.

She is guided by demand.

“I believe that if there isn’t a need that you’re meeting, then hang it up,” she said from her sunny office in her newer home in a Grand Junction suburb.

Sister Caroline’s order pays the bills for that house, and she sends what monetary gifts and wages she receives to the mother house in a system of sharing that has evolved since sisters began living outside the convent.

In some orders, sisters living on their own are responsible for most of their own expenses.

Changes have personal benefit

Modern-day sisters joke that nuns are able to get so much done because nuns don’t retire. When they reach retirement age, if their health is still good but they are suffering burnout in one mission, they grab the Catholic newspaper classifieds and look for another.

“I’m in the process of discerning what I’ll do next,” said Sister Faye. “I’m looking around at the signs of the times and looking at where are the needs and where will I be most useful.”

For Sister Karen Bland, that is now among the homeless.

The Benedictine sister, who previously was the top administrator for her order in Chicago, now deals with very different needs. She is constantly reminded of these as she makes her way through a maze of tables, where volunteers fold napkins, and into the kitchen, where others chop food in preparation for the noon meal for the homeless.

In her warm-up suit and salmon-colored polo shirt, she blends in as she stops to compliment the cook on a tray of simmering creamed chicken. She gives directions to a man looking for a razor so he can clean up for a job interview. She sits down in a noisy throng of the homeless inside the day shelter to offer words of encouragement to a woman with a blackened eye.

“I think they all know I’m a sister,” she says. “And I think they are grateful for that presence.”

Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com