When Patricia Dooley began to wonder a few years back what her life would be like if she were a nun, she did what she'd been doing for years as a newspaper reporter and editor: She hit the Internet.
That's how she found the Congregation of Sisters of Bon Secours. The international Roman Catholic order, which has its U.S. headquarters in Marriottsville, has invested heavily in an online presence, with a stylish Web site, pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, videos on YouTube and a vocations director on Twitter.
"I was very impressed with what I saw," says Dooley, 51. "I really didn't know much about sisters and religious life. So I went online and I read about these sisters and how you got involved and what they did, and that they were nurses and the kinds of work that they did, and the way they lived their lives and the way they believed, and I got onto some of the books that they read. ... And then I called Sister Pat."
The Virginia Beach woman became a candidate for the Sisters of Bon Secours at a welcoming ceremony this month. The path she took - her first contact with the order coming online - is an increasingly common one. As the decades-long decline in new vocations threatens long-established ministries in hospitals, schools, and other organizations, religious communities are moving online in the hope of drawing a new generation of members.
A landmark study of recent vocations in the United States released this month found that 87 percent of religious orders and institutes were using the Internet to attract new candidates, and that 81 percent of their youngest candidates found the online information to have been at least "a little helpful" in helping them discern their call to religious life.
The study, conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University for the National Religious Vocation Conference, concluded that Web-based outreach "has the strongest impact on new membership" among the available media options. "That is, those who reported that they use the Internet ... are more likely to report having new members."
Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference, says the Web has become "an essential tool.
"Given fewer religious," he says, using the church term for the member of an order, "the chances of meeting, say, a priest, brother or a sister - it is not as common as it used to be 30 years ago. If we are to meet the millennial generation, we have got to be there where they are. And that is on the Internet."
