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Religious Life: Discerning the Future

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Religious Life: Discerning the Future Religious Life: Discerning the Future Research project on the experience of women seeking to enter religious life in Britain and Ireland from 2000 to the present day Dr. Gemma Simmonds CJ Dr. María Calderón Muñoz 2017-2020 Contents Introduction Page Chapter 1 Project Descriptor and Methodology. Data collection and analysis: process and purpose 4 Chapter 2 Narratives of the Call 15 Chapter 3 Seeking and Finding 24 Chapter 4 Becoming 43 Chapter 5 Belonging 61 Chapter 6 Leaving 75 Chapter 7 A View from the Bridge: Experience of Leaders, Formators and Vocations Personnel 91 Chapter 8 Expert Reflections 98 Chapter 9 Summary and Conclusions 108 Bibliography 114 Appendices: 1. Participant Codes 116 2. Participant Information Sheet and Questions 117 3. Ethical Consent Form 118 4. Vocational Statistics in England and Wales 2018 120 2 Acknowledgements There are many people to whom we owe gratitude for the successful completion of this project. We could not have begun it without a generous grant from the Catholic Sisters’ Initiative of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. For a second time they have supported our research financially and with their commitment to the life and work of women religious. The stated authors of this report are Dr Maria Calderon Muñoz and Dr Gemma Simmonds CJ, but the work is not ours alone. From the outset this has been a collaborative project of three academic institutions. We would like to thank in particular Professor Paul Murray, Principal Investigator of the project and Mrs Yvonne Williams, Project Coordinator, as well Professor Karen Kilby at the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University. At the outset of the project Mr Andy Harston undertook the delicate negotiations with respect to the funding grant. His work was invaluable. At the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge we acknowledge the expert help and enthusiastic support of the principal, Dr Anna Abram and of Dr Catherine Sexton and Dr Amy Daughton, now at the University of Birmingham. We received further expert help from the members of our Academic Advisory Group under the guidance of its chair, Dr Carmen Mangion of Birkbeck College, University of London and from the Reflection Group who gave so generously of their time, experience and expert opinion. Members of these groups are: Br. Paul Bednarczyck CSC, Dr. Petá Dunstan, Dr. Matthew Guest, Dr. Theodora Hawksley, Dr. Susan O'Brien, Dr. Martin Poulsom SDB, Dr. Ethna Regan CHF, Dr. Kate Stogdon RC, Dr. Jim Sweeney CP and Prof. Peter Tyler. Their comments and observations are incorporated into the text of this report. The lengthy interviews were transformed into written transcriptions with superbly professional accuracy and speed by Ms. Linda Mortimer. During the undertaking of this project the Religious Life Institute moved its base from Heythrop College in London to the Margaret Beaufort Institute in Cambridge after the sad demise of Heythrop. The RLI was originally founded by and for religious to provide expert research as a support for their life and ministries. The Steering Committee of the RLI deserve every thanks for their unswerving support of this project. The project would not have existed without the courage and honesty of the women who came forward to tell their story. We have done all within our power to treat those stories with the respect they deserve. We also thank those religious congregations who helped us to find the vocation seekers, new entrants and former members and who were willing to reflect with us on their experience as recipients of new sisters. For neither cohort was this an easy undertaking. We hope that our report has done justice to their generosity. 3 Chapter 1 Project Descriptor and Methodology One of the aims of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation is to foster and support the witness, advocacy and action of religious sisters globally in order to increase their capacity in education, leadership and service provision. For this to happen, new sisters are needed. The Foundation is achieving its aims by funding reliable research which will help religious congregations to apply strategic analysis to their vocational and formation programmes in order to foster well-grounded and lasting new vocations to the religious life. Some congregations resist this language of analysis, seeing the receiving and flourishing of vocations as the work of God alone. But the Holy Spirit is present in the development of best practice in religious life today, which includes some analysis overall of what that practice might be. Congregations articulate consciously in word and deed a sense of their own charism and identity. But unconscious cultural and theological attitudes and behaviour can also develop and become embedded among established members. This can prove alienating to newer members seeking incorporation among them from outside the normative perspective. Awareness of such unconscious trends can help to foster a community culture that is more open to changes within the society from which new entrants emerge. Recent statistics regarding religious vocations in the global north have been discouraging. A report dating from 2013 https://www.hiltonfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CHF_SistersNarrative_2012-3.pdf notes that while the number of Catholics worldwide had increased by 14% since the millennium, the number of religious sisters had decreased by 9%. Significant increases in the number of Sisters in Asia (18%) and Africa (26%) were offset by dramatic decreases in Europe (-20%) and North America (-27%). Conflicting and sometimes contradictory reasons are given for these figures, but often debate about the demographic crisis is restricted to theologians or to long-established religious without the voice of vocational seekers themselves. The invitation of that voice into this conversation is consistent with qualitative research’s ‘avowed humanistic and social justice commitment to study the social world from the perspective of the interacting individual’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). Analytical research enables the formulation of vocations promotion and formative programmes that are in dialogue with the lived experience of those who are still coming forward, seeking a future in religious life. 4 Qualitative research has variously been described as montage or quilt making in which ‘many different things are going on at the same time – different voices, different perspectives, points of view, angles of vision’. While it is impossible to capture objective reality in such a study, the purpose of this kind of research is to help congregations to hear and reflect on the authentic voices of today’s vocational seekers through ‘a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness and depth to any enquiry’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). In the narratives of the women interviewed here, who have explored their vocation since 2000 in Catholic and Anglican religious congregations in the UK and Ireland, we hear from the differing perspectives and paradigms from which they view religious life. This opens up the meaning that these events hold for them and allows for insight into their experience. Whatever the outcome of their exploration, the narrators offer rich and vital data on what today’s generation of entrants is seeking and finding in religious life. This anonymised data, combined with equally anonymised reflections from formators and leaders of congregations on their experience of receiving new members, forms the core of a ground-breaking report which will be essential reading for all those committed to the future of religious life. We invite the report’s readers to join us in a collaborative and creative conversation about what will help to build a future full of hope for the religious of tomorrow. Notes on Methods and Methodology The narratives in this study tell us about women’s experience of a call to religious life, the challenges they faced while attempting to become part of a community and the support they received from other members. In some cases, entrants subsequently decided or were asked to leave the community they had joined, and we explore the reasons for this. We also consider their opinions on what congregations might have done to support them better and what they think about religious life after experiencing it. To answer our questions, we used open-ended interviews as our main method and in analysing the data we used a narrative analysis approach. In this section, we will discuss our methods and methodology, our assumptions and the challenges found along the way. We will start by talking about the women who took part in the study. Participants When the project was first designed, our focus was on the experiences of Roman Catholic women. As it unfolded, we found that many Anglican sisters, former members and congregations were interested in participating in this project. 5 At their request we decided to include them as well and found that their experiences were very similar to those of Catholic participants. Our initial intention was to have as many Irish participants as British, but we encountered difficulties gaining the support of Irish congregations. Some of this was due to distance, the research team being based in the UK, and to an internal reorganisation of AMRI (the Association of Leaders of Missionaries and Religious of Ireland). In addition, AMRI had commissioned its own research on the fall of vocational numbers in Ireland, so some congregations were understandably reluctant to take part in another similar research project. There were possibly
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