Back in the 1970's when the Sisters of Mercy were re-imagining religious life and ridding themselves of all things that we associate with sisters, there was a group that knew it was suicide and jumped ship. They kept the charism of the Sisters of Mercy, the modified habit, seim-clositered spirituality and life in community. They called themselves the Sisters of Mercy of Alma Michigan.
Like the Nashville Dominicans and the Dominicans of Mary Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Abor, MI, the Sisters of Mercy have many young recurits and are a young orders of sisters.
We had three of them speak to us today in Rome. They were young, energectic and joyful. A far cry from the group from which they seperated to keep the true Sisters of Mercy charism in place.
YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT THEM BY PRESSING HERE!
What is so puzzling is that the only religious orders of women that are prospering today with young recruits are the traditional ones. The LCWR brand is like a dinosaur from the 1970's and so out of date. No one wants to join them and they will soon be extinct. Thank God. You would think they would wake up and smell the coffee, but they are so drunk on what they thought was renewal that they are in a stupor of psychological denial.
In Macon, the Sisters of Mercy once had over 30 sisters in my school, their own private hight school and in other work. Today there are 0 sisters of Mercy in Macon. They don't even have a sister in their very own High School or Middle School, Mt. de Sales. This isn't what most people would call renewal.
10 comments:
...and you'll never seen one in the diocese of Savannah for many years to come. The status quo reigns supreme.
Your link doesn't work, but these sound much like the Alma (MI) Religious Sisters of Mercy who are now in Knoxville with a half-dozen or so of these vibrant orthodox fully-habbited sisters. I knelt behind them at a 6:30 am Mass one morning last week at Holy Ghost Church here. You can see how young many of them are in this short video about the blessing of St. Justin's Convent by Justin Cardinal Rigali (Philadelphia emeritus) who is now resident in Knoxville (when not in Rome):
http://vimeo.com/6938675
I think my uncle's yearbooks from MDS 86-90 feature some... And they CERTAINLY were LCWR types.
I see the problem with the link:
Looking at the link in the source code I see:
href="http://http://www.cmswr.org/member_communities/RSMA.htm">
(There is a redundancy of http://-hypertext transfer protocol designator)
If you remove the "http://" at the beginning of the web site link,
It should be like this:
href="http://www.cmswr.org/member_communities/RSMA.htm">
then it will work.
I did this and pasted into my browser and it worked fine.
There was an article a while back about the closing and possible demolition of their beautiful mother house in New York. Here is a link. So sad. I had a few Sisters of Mercy at MDS in the 1980's.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/nyregion/17convent.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
In my previous post I should have had it as
paste the following into your web browser:
http://www.cmswr.org/member_communities/RSMA.htm
Leave off the "href=" and ">"
The status of the religious life in the diocese of Savannah leaves a lot to be desired. I'm hoping one day sisters from institutes like the Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist or brothers from an ancient institute like the Mercedarians would pop up somewhere down here... maybe some OP friars.
An OSB monastery like the Norcia brothers or the Solesmes congregation would be nice.
Fr, I wish you would invite those Dominican Sisters who came and taught at PREP several years ago to return. Those were some of the best meetings we've had. They really knew their theology and doctrine and taught it with passion and enthusiasm.
Beyond rude and misinformed. That you willingly wish to do away with the real Sisters of Mercy--those "LWCR types"--who do good work for those in need and poverty is unimaginable. News flash--there are people in need outside schools. The Sisters of Mercy originally began schools and hospitals in communities where there were none--where there was need--now they are continuing to follow that call to other locations. You sound like the dinosaur who can't deal with change.
"That you willingly wish to do away with the real Sisters of Mercy--those "LWCR types"--who do good work for those in need and poverty is unimaginable."
The REAL Sisters of Mercy? The Sisters of Mercy of Alma are real too, I assure you.
"News flash--there are people in need outside schools. The Sisters of Mercy originally began schools and hospitals in communities where there were none--where there was need--now they are continuing to follow that call to other locations."
The original Sisters of Mercy DID do all of those things - but they were nuns FIRST and foremost. Our local Sisters of Mercy decades ago first modified their habits, then switched to lay clothes, one of them with a little veil perched on a bouffant hairdo. They smoked if they wanted to, drank, some wore makeup, and one nun left - to marry our curate two months after taking her final vows, a nice touch When just 5 nuns were left in the convent, they moved into a shared, rented house, took lay jobs, had a minimum of community life, and eventually disappeared altogether, being little different than lay people, who focus on the needy. ANYONE can help the poor and the dispossessed - and should - but if your a religious, it is THAT calling and lifestyle that your actions and activities spring from. Strip most of that away, live and act like a lay person - that's what you are, your "hanging by a thread" vows notwithstanding.
You sound like the dinosaur who can't deal with change.
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