“These women are looking for something deeper,” said Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference.
“They are looking to develop their Catholic identity and given our secular values in the US where we promote sex, money and power, it is a very counter-cultural thing to profess celibacy, poverty and obedience.”
Bednarczyk and others also credit the late John Paul II's charisma and his effort to reach out to younger Catholics for the mounting popularity of some communities.
“The John Paul II generation is a generation of young people, a generation of authenticity,” said Sister Joseph Andrew Bogdanowicz, vocation director at the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, located in the midwestern state of Michigan.
“They have seen the emptiness of many worldly values and many want something more,” added Bogdanowicz, 54, who founded her community in 1997 along with three other women.
The convent today counts 71 women whose average age is 24. Next summer 20 more postulants are set to join the order which is rushing to raise funds for a new building to house the inflow.
“God in his goodness is sending us so many young vocations that we can't build fast enough to keep up with the number of young women entering our community,” Bogdanowicz said.
But apart from divine intervention, those interviewed also credit the Internet with breathing new life into the nunnery. Most orders today have Web sites and about 20 nuns run their own blogs.
“The (church) today needs to be on the Internet because that's where young people are going to go,” Bednarczyk said.
Julie Vieira, 35, who began a blog entitled A Nun's Life last July to chronicle her experience as a sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, said she gets about 600 hits a day and at least a half dozen emails from people inquiring about religious life.
“One of the reasons I started the blog was to explain what it's like to be a nun and to address the stereotypes out there,” said Vieira, who works at Loyola Press, a Catholic publisher in Chicago.
“I just wanted to tell people: ‘Hey, I'm an ordinary person.’”
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