In Britain, it’s a crisis that could lead to extinction, according to the BBC:

The future of four Catholic orders in Cambridge is in doubt, because no new nuns have joined since the 1980s.

Sister Gemma Simmonds is a lecturer and from the Congregation of Jesus, which set up, but no longer runs, the Cambridge girls’ school, St Mary’s.

She does not believe there is a crisis of vocation and said: “I meet women all the time who are thinking they want to give their lives to God.”

She added: “The crisis is not in vocation. The crisis is in culture.”

“I think that religious communities, if they want to have new recruits, have to be willing and open to the possibility of change and challenge.”

There are four Roman Catholic orders of nuns in Cambridge. They are the Dominicans at Blackfriars, the Dominican Sisters, the Congregation of Jesus, and the Sisters of the Holy Family.

All four orders live in a similar way. The nuns share a house, and the running costs are met by pooling their wages or pensions into a communal pot.

Sisters Anna-Marie and Valery are Dominican Sisters, and have known each other for nearly 50 years because they started as novitiates at the same time.

“I think we enjoyed ourselves very much in our first years,” said Sister Anna-Marie. “Of course it was a different world. The prayer was all in Latin so we had to make sure our Latin was up to standard. We had to learn how to sing plainsong and perform adequately.

“So we had classes in chant, classes in Latin and so on, which wouldn’t be so urgent today.”

Sister Valery believes there are advantages and disadvantages to the dwindling numbers of nuns: “Being fewer has meant we can’t live so institutionally as we used to do, as there aren’t the numbers to run things.

“I think there are disadvantages to it. We would very much like to have more sisters. We could run our schools better, for example, and our nursing homes.

“At the same time I think the smaller numbers have helped us to build friendship more than before.”

There are now only three nuns living at the Dominican Sisters’ house in Cambridge. They sometimes take in foreign students to help with funds and also host nuns from abroad.

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