Hope blooms at CTU despite vocations drop

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 20, 1998 by Tim Unsworth

Mercy Srs. Barbara Heneghan and Virginia Peacock have each been members of their community for nearly 40 years. They work out their calling where the rubber meets the road.

Heneghan works with pregnant women and single mothers at Maryville, part of a huge network of church and state facilities serving the poor in Illinois. Peacock commutes from their five-sister convent in Oak Park to St. Malachy's School, a Chicago inner city elementary school, where she heads the preschool program.

Heneghan and Peacock have successfully made the transition from traditional to contemporary. Black serge has given way to modest lay attire. Their congregation, founded by Mother Catherine McAuley, has recently merged with other branches, forming a 7,500-member group now called the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas. Both sisters said that they have more loyalty to their congregation than they do to the church, a view shared by many other religious, male and female.

Indeed, an International Congress of Young Religious (under 35) held in Rome in late September and early October of 1997 witnessed 804 participants from 80 countries on five continents declare that "Apathy is frozen anger," and that if it "is to thaw in a creative and prophetic way, we need to talk with radical honesty to one another."

In a polite but firm manner, the men and women delegates to the young religious meeting could be described as "pushing back." In fact, some delegates made no secret of the hurt experienced by the concelebrated masses at the congress. (It may explain, too, why some vowed religious attend Mass only occasionally.)

It is clear that religious want to move beyond a pluralism that merely tolerates differences. Religious recognize that their vocation and their congregations are not an essential part of the structure of the church. They are outside the mainstream of church priorities. However, they bring a corporate spirituality and an apostolic creativity that is essential to the infusion of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

They provide vital CPR throughout the church.