Behold, the Millennial Nuns - more and more women are being called to the religious life, after 50 straight years of decline -- What is going on?https://www.huffpost.com/highline/ar...llennial-nuns/
After 50 years of decline, the number of young women “discerning the
religious life”—or going through the long process of becoming a Catholic
sister—is substantially increasing. In 2017, 13 percent of women from
age 18 to 35 who answered a Georgetown University-affiliated survey of
American Catholics reported that they had considered becoming a Catholic
sister. That’s more than 900,000 young women, enough to repopulate the
corps of “women religious” in a couple of decades, even if only a
fraction of them actually go through with it.
* * *
These young women have one last surprise: They tend to be far more
doctrinally conservative than their predecessors. If you go deeper into
their social media feeds, past the wacky photos of habited nuns making
the hang-loose sign, you’ll find a firm devotion to the most traditional
of Catholic beliefs. They fervently protest abortion. They celebrate
virginity not as a necessity to free up time to serve God—how some
“liberal” sisters see it—but as something in itself holy. It’s a
severity that overlaps neatly, actually, with the OMG maximalism that
dominates social media.