More women joining social justice convent

ORLANDO, Fla. – At a time when American religious orders report smaller and smaller classes of young women, one researcher says a convent in Central Mexico has tripled the number of new nuns, largely because of its commitment to social justice.

The women willingly undertake a rigorous life of rising before dawn, cold-water showers, hours of prayer, and silent meditation, says Rebecca J. Lester, author of “Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent.”

“Each year scores of young women – more and more each year – are leaving the warmth and protection of their homes,” she writes, “leaving their friends, their families, their high schools and universities, to march through the convent door, where they will surrender themselves body and soul to Christ for eternity.”

Lester, an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., spent 18 months in Puebla, Mexico, in the mid-1990s, studying postulants – women who wanted to become nuns.

In 15 years, the convent she studied tripled the number of postulants.

“The majority of them are women who have other opportunities,” she says, but instead they pledge themselves to spirituality and working against economic exploitation and political corruption.

Dorothy Donnelly, a former member of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, is not surprised by the success of the Mexican order, and she agrees with Lester that it is an expression of feminism.

“Joining a group like that, that is definitely what we call ‘a word spoken,’ ” says Donnelly, author of “Radical Love.”

“They use their power to choose to speak a word in the culture and to the culture about their values.”