CBY SUSAN ROSE FRANCOIS, CSJP
hange has been a constant since I first entered religious life with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace in 2005. As a youngish woman in my early 30s entering a religious community with a median age near 80, it was clear to me that I would be facing a lot of goodbyes in my future. During my first year of novitiate, I attended 12 funerals for sisters I had just gotten to know.
Since then, I have said goodbye to more than 100 women I was blessed to call my sister. It has been painful, and it has also held unexpected grace and blessings. The grief has become deeper as more women I have loved and lived with over the past 19 years have gone home to their loving God. Yet I am better for having shared community with each woman. I would not trade our sisterhood for anything.
I am not the only one who has experienced religious life as a series of transitions. Vowed religious life in North America is going through a time of decline and emergence. Demographic shifts have led to organizational restructuring, with individual governing units of religious congregations—such as provinces, regions, or areas—coming together through formal mergers.
Increasingly, religious communities are exploring other creative connections and supportive relationships to serve their missions and care for members. Communities are transforming motherhouses and other long-held properties for new purposes
or selling them to fund the care of religious men and women in their elder years. Meanwhile, leadership of beloved sponsored ministries in education, health care, and social services has shifted to the capable hands and hearts of lay partners, who continue to carry the charism and mission forward.
The feelings of grief and loss amidst all this change are very real and valid, both for the vowed members who find themselves called to let go again and again and for the wider church members who miss the vibrant presence and activity of men and women religious. Yet this is only part of the story.
Remember, this is a time of both decline and emergence. While we let go, we are also called to let come. Change can draw us forward toward possibility. Vulnerability can lead us to build connections and deepen relationships. Our borders become more porous when we share our resources in creative and courageous ways. I like to imagine that the Holy Spirit is at work in all of this, calling us out of our mythical self-sufficient silos onto the path of synodality and togetherness.
If it seems to you as if everything is in never-ending flux, from our formal institutions to our political and economic systems to the pressures of daily life, you’re not imagining things. Change, it seems, is the new normal.
I entered my religious community during one of those governance structure mergers I mentioned. In 2008, I attended
my first chapter, a meeting we have every six years to elect our leaders and decide our future direction. The theme of the chapter was “The Crossing Place,” a phrase taken from “Trasna,” a poem by a Sister of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Raphael Consedine.
At the 2008 chapter, the delegates voted to shift our governance system to one central Congregation Leadership Team. My community spent months in prayer and small group conversations, discerning the change from three autonomous provinces to becoming one congregation without provinces. The closing lines of the poem became our mantra: “You will have the light for first steps.”
When going through such a major upheaval, ritual is important. It helps us to wrap our heads, hearts, and bodies around the letting go so that we can welcome the new. The memory of the ritual serves as a touchstone when the going gets rough. At our chapter meeting, we ritualized the moment by literally crossing over a bridge. As each sister and associate walked over a wooden bridge, we read out their name. Those not physically present also passed over, in the form of banners held aloft with their names attached to ribbons.
We may have had light for those first steps, but if truth be told, since then we’ve been figuring it out as we go along. The pace of demographic change has only increased in recent years, and we have been faced with difficult decisions such as selling properties and closing ministries. We have also been given opportunities to collaborate and share our resources for mission in ways we never would have imagined in the past.
We like to say that we are called to risk the bigness of smallness. The more connected we are, the more possibility there is. Hopefully it is becoming less about us and more about God and all of God’s people and creation.
Pope Francis has called the church to reform. He cautions, however, that this does not involve change simply for change’s sake. Reform, be it of a religious congregation or a parish or family of parishes, must always be guided by the Spirit.
“The reform of the church then, and the church is semper reformanda… does not end in the umpteenth plan to change structures,” the pope has said. “It means instead grafting yourself to and rooting yourself in Christ, leaving yourself to be guided by the Spirit—so that all will be possible with genius and creativity.”1
Looking back at the past 16 years since my congregation changed our structure, I see how much more connected we are across the miles. As we move further from what we used to do, we are called to read the signs of the times anew and open ourselves to possibility. We seem less focused on how things are done and more on who we are called to be.
In fact, the document that came out of our most recent chapter of affairs, in 2022, is titled “To Be Who We Say We Are.”
1 Pope Francis, “Not an Era of Change but a Change of Era,” transcript of speech delivered at the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, November 10, 2015, https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/ not-an-era-of-change-but-a-change-of-era/
