Angela Russell was a teenager visiting relatives in France when she prayed in a chapel where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared in 1830. That was where she first felt a call to be a Catholic sister.
“It was an overwhelming sense that I was going to dedicate my life totally to Christ,” said Sister Angela, 21, a Beaver native who recently entered the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville, Tenn.
Far fewer women than in the past take that path, and those who do are often attracted to traditions that many communities no longer practice. Since 1965, the number of sisters in the U.S. has fallen from 180,000 to 61,000. A Vatican-ordered study is under way of conditions that may have contributed to the decline.
Yet women still answer the call. Sister Angela is among three local women seeking vows in the Nashville Dominicans.
The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia rock!
This should be compared to the USA Today article (Aug 31) by Mary Zeiss Stange, also mentioned at TitusOneNine. That article discussed another branch of Dominicans who have been evolving from the habited, religious teachers, to the plainclothes, social-justice types. She implied that the latter were somehow better. The Vatican has been looking into this, too. But she did not mention that in her other religious articles, she is generally anti-Catholic both in terms of doctrine and church organization; she is also a radical feminist.
The current article, on the other hand, is more sympathetic to traditional nuns, and (surprisingly) these are the kind that are getting more recruits.
Any Dominican nuns at this blog? There are Dominicans trained in Michigan, located where I am in California. I just spoke to one of them, about the Stange article. I got the impression that there is some sort of Dominican versus Dominican rivalry, among the various formations?