Featured News

By Albert de Zutter
Of Catholic News Service
Published January 15, 2005

ROME — While much emphasis is placed on the decline in numbers, religious orders today are creatively engaged in ministries for a new millennium, said the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Benedictine Sr. Christine Vladimiroff, prioress of her community in Erie, Pa., was interviewed recently while in Rome for the first International Congress on Consecrated Life, which brought together some 800 leaders of men's and women's religious orders from around the world.

Sr. Vladimiroff said religious orders are exercising creativity in founding new ministries, especially with the poor in inner cities. She also said religious communities are pooling their resources and collaborating more with one another and with the diocesan church.

Examples she cited include:

• The founding of a new school by three congregations of women religious in Baltimore.
• An organization founded in Erie by the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of St. Joseph and Benedictine Sisters to help the homeless rent an apartment, establish credit and eventually become homeowners.
• Also in Erie, three religious orders and the diocese have established Catholic Rural Ministries, which now has two sisters working in rural areas.

"Our founders came over without knowing the language or the culture, and built great institutions," Sr. Vladimiroff said. "We are called to equal that greatness in our time."

Her Benedictine order "came in 1856 from Bavaria, young German women founding monasteries and schools and living in terrible poverty," she said.

She said religious orders today have "areas of energy and vision," as well as areas of struggle and concern. Among the concerns are the decline in the number of religious and the aging of religious communities.

Another struggle is "to live a purposeful, meaningful and Gospel-oriented life, and not be absorbed with survival and maintenance," she said.

"We don't want our focus to be the retirement fund and worrying if we will be cared for," she said.

The concern should be about what our founders would want us to do at this time, she said. "If it is a good work, God will provide. If not, something will grow in our place."

New ministries are needed to respond to conditions in the world today, Sr. Vladimiroff said.

In the United States, globalization and the mobility of the population are creating a pluralistic environment while free trade and "our neoliberal economy" are creating poverty for some and wealth for others, she said.

"We have structures that create great poverty — and wealth for a few," she said. "Do we have anything to say from the Gospel to the world about that?"

When society in the time of St. Francis of Assisi was characterized by the wealthy taking advantage of the poor, Francis began living with the poor to demonstrate their dignity, she said. "In this third millennium, maybe we have to re-found our institutions."

In addition to direct ministries to people, religious communities must "raise our voices in the halls of power," she said. "If anything, religious communities should be a voice and a sign of hope."

The institutional church is a human construct — "fallible, provisional and in need of constant renewal," she said.

"We don't gather for liturgy to feel good about ourselves, but to find what it means to belong to the Church and to care about others," she said.

Regarding the problems of the world, Sr. Vladimiroff said, "You can be bitter or keep stoking the hope so that others can carry on and bring about what you're not going to see."