Reality spells end of the vocational path for Belfast Adoration Sisters

Catholics across Ireland, and most especially in Belfast, were left perplexed on Monday by the news that onetime top BBC journalist turned trainee nun Martina Purdy had left her Belfast convent, after being told that her congregation was too small to allow her and three other temporarily-professed sisters to continue in formation.

In a statement to BBC Northern Ireland Ms Purdy said: “My congregation – Adoration Réparatrice – has grown too small and fragile to meet the standards of governance required in the Catholic Church. Consequently my religious vows expired this afternoon and I am no longer a Sister of Adoration. This is deeply painful for all concerned.”

Subsequently she and another high-profile sister in formation, former barrister Elaine Kelly, published personal statements on Twitter in which they spoke of their disappointment, but also their gratitude to God and to the communities in which they had lived happily for the last five years.

“Since entering the congregation in 2014, I have had the time of my life and, without question, I would do it all again,” Ms Purdy wrote, explaining that with declining numbers the congregation was not in a position to allow any of its temporary professed sisters to become fully professed. Adding that she had now entered a period of discernment and would like people to pray for her, she said: “My desire to carry out my mission remains undiminished.”

Circumstances

Similarly, Ms Kelly said while she had never foreseen being required to leave in such circumstances, she understood why “in accordance with canon law and the need for governance in [the] congregation”, her formation would have to come to an end.

“The call from Jesus to follow him continues in a new and fresh way,” she wrote. “I will take all the amazing experiences and all I’ve learned as a Religious and carry it with me as I discern the next stage of the journey as a committed Catholic.”

Since 2014, the addition of four new members to the Sisters of the Adoration community on the Falls Road has been a small but vibrant sign of life and hope for the Church in Ireland, but it is important to grasp that while the sisters’ Belfast was growing, this was not the case elsewhere.

Indeed, neither of the congregation’s two other communities – in Ferns, Co. Wexford, and in the motherhouse in Paris – has any new members in formation, and as was made clear in the Second Vatican Council, religious institutions must have a genuine plausible capacity for growth.

1965’s Perfectae Caritatis ruled, for instance, that: “There may be communities and monasteries which the Holy See, after consulting the interested local Ordinaries, will judge not to possess reasonable hope for further development. These should be forbidden to receive novices in the future. If it is possible, these should be combined with other more flourishing communities and monasteries whose scope and spirit is similar.”

Proportion

The following year, Pope St Paul VI declared in Ecclesiae Sanctae that when considering if an institute should be suppressed, factors to be considered include “the small number of Religious in proportion to the age of the institute or the monastery, the lack of candidates over a period of several years, the advanced age of the majority of its members”.

Guidelines around religious life for women have changed recently through 2016’s Apostolic Constitution Vultum Dei Quaerere on women’s contemplative life and the subsequent implementing instruction Cor Orans. These requested women’s monastic communities to revise their constitutions, including around how to suppress congregations and monasteries with aging and declining memberships.

It is unclear whether or not the Adoration Sisters used these documents as a guideline, but these documents have certainly forced many communities in Ireland and elsewhere to look honestly at their viability.

One might expect that the four newly-released former sisters will seek to join another religious order, but there is no guarantee of that. Orders are like families and indeed like spouses in a way, and one would hardly expect every widow to marry again, and certainly not straightaway.

Not all orders are the same, after all: each has their own charism, and it is worth remembering that the Adoration Sisters on the Falls Road have a very distinct role in their West Belfast community. They have, in a sense, a charism within a charism, and now that they are barred from continuing in that vocational path, the former sisters will need time and space for prayerful discernment.