2023 Assembly - Sisters of Charity of New York and Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth
Denver, Colo., Apr 28, 2023 / 15:10 pm
New York Sisters of Charity won’t take new members, signaling end of congregation | Catholic News Agency
The Sisters of Charity of New York, founded in 1846, announced that they will no longer take new members, describing their congregation as on “a path to completion.”
“The Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul of New York will no longer work toward finding nor accepting new members to our congregation in the United States,” the congregation said in an April 27 statement.
In a unanimous vote at their 2023 general assembly, the sisters decided to adopt the recommendations of the congregation’s executive council.
The delegates approved the recommendation to affirm that the New York sisters “continue to live our mission to the fullest, while acknowledging that we are on a path to completion.”
“The decision was not an easy one,” said the congregation, which has 154 sisters. “We will continue to grow in love. We will continue to deepen our relationships with each other, with our associates and with our ministry partners. We will continue to deepen our relationship with our God.”
The Sisters of Charity Federation of North America has 14 member congregations, including the New York body. The federation website gives inconsistent membership figures, reporting that there are 1,871 to 2,500 sisters among its member congregations. CNA sought clarification from the federation but did not receive a response by publication.
The New York sisters said they still believe in “the future of religious life.” The sisters will continue to promote vocations and refer any inquiries to Sisters of Charity federation congregations and the Religious Formation Conference, a Chicago-based national organization that supports Catholic religious life.
The congregation’s statement, citing its 200-year-old history, said New York’s Sisters of Charity will “continue to pass the torch of charity.”
“This is not the end of our ministries. Our mission will continue beyond our sisters, through our associates and partners in ministry, expanding what it means to live the charism of charity into the future,” the congregation said.
Their history dates back to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a native New Yorker who founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph in Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1809. Seton sent three Sisters of Charity to New York City in 1817 to help care for orphans. The New York congregation was founded as an independent community in 1846.
In their time in New York, the Sisters of Charity have opened or staffed 185 schools, 28 hospitals, 23 child care institutions, and other ministries to serve those in need, according to their website.
The New York congregation currently sponsors the College of Mount St. Vincent, a Catholic liberal arts college in New York City with 1,800 undergraduate and graduate students.
It also supports the Sisters of Charity Housing Development Corporation, which provides affordable housing for senior citizens, homeless women and children, formerly homeless families, and adults with disabilities.
The Sisters of Charity has sponsored a mission to Guatemala, where sisters prepare lay catechists and eucharistic ministers and help survivors and victims of the country’s decades-long civil war, which concluded in 1996. According to the congregation’s website, in 2017 Sister Rosenda Magdalena Castañeda Gonzalez became the first Guatemalan woman to profess final vows as a Sisters of Charity of New York.
The Sisters of Charity Ministry Network, launched in 2015, oversees the New York Foundling Hospital and St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Yonkers.
Other congregations have decided to begin a “process of completion.” The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy, based in South Carolina, started the process in 2008. The congregation said it could no longer provide a “viable community life” to new members and decided to sell its motherhouse. In 2022, its remaining sisters relocated to a nearby Episcopalian retirement community, according to the Sisters of Charity Federation website.
As of 2018, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported 45,100 religious sisters in consecrated life. There were 150,000 religious sisters in the U.S. in 1965, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University.
Sisters of Charity will not accept any new vocation from now on.
Good Riddance. Before the filth of Vatican II, they were wonderful sisters, in 1963 1,500 strong, staffinf dozens in elementary schools in the NYC Archdiocese, Brooklyn Diocese, and multiple others, not to mention foreign missions. They also staffed at least 2 huge major hospitals in the metropolitan NYC area, and nursing homes, as well as orphanages. The movie "Doubt" with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams was about their congregation.
Like mostly all USA religious Orders of sisters, they went radical femminist, dissenting. They discarded their very simple and plain beautiful habit....which was exactly the same worn by the great Saint Elizabeth Ann Bailey Seton, who originally founded all USA Sisters of CHarity in the very early 19th century in Baltimore.
These nuns went from over 1,500 with a median age of about 37, to today at about 110 and a median age of about 82. They have not had any vocations for at least 30 years.
Although it is a natural reaction to feel saddness at this news, this Order, and all congregations of sisters like it both in USA and elsewhere DESERVE to go extinct. They DESERVE to have no vocations. They have betrayed the Roman Catholic Church, its traditions and beliefs, their own traditions and those of all the good sisters who went before them pre-Vatican II, and they have betrayed the Catholic faithful who trusted them.
It may sound nasty, but I am very happy that this Order is coming to this end.....all the radical habitless liberal dissidents USA and other Orders (even those similar Orders in places like India), will suffer the same fate.
Shed no tears for these people. THey have destroyed their own Orders by conscious choice and the radical agenda of femminism, dissent, and promotion of homosexuality, gay blessings, women priests, TRANS, and other garbage totally contrary to the teachings and traditions of the Church.
They represent the "Church of Pope Francis" which itself is dying out. They have come to their end, and it is deserved.
On the other hand, the Lord is already blessing the many new traditional/traditionalist Orders of sisters being founded in the USA and elsewhere with vocations. They will slowly step in to replace these people.
The demise of these radical liberal Orders is no loss to the Catholic Church. Faithful Catholics I am sure are happy to see the likes of them go.
Wait! Is that Mother Earth?
HAHAHAHA!!! Loser habitless dissident nuns. They ALL look ready for nursing homes.
"Be unfruitful and walk the path of completion". My Bible must be an expurgated version! How pathetic a path.
Thanks for posting, friend. A very telling sign in the video is that (by my count) I see only two of the sisters who were willing to wear their habit. A good working definition of religious attire: "an outward manifestation of one's vocation".
"who were willing to wear their habit" A simple veil on the head of a nun wearing street clothes is not a habit.
@Kenjiro M. Yoshimori At least, her veil identified her instantly as a member of a religious order with a fair ratio of hair covering, and not half of a veil on the back of the head. Anyhow, beyond garments, the essential is to be holy in evey aspects of our life. Therefore, the most visible problematic element in this video was to receive the Blessed Sacrament in the hands.