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."
In that spirit, his organization has sponsored an online outreach of its own: a matchmaking site. As Bednarczyk describes it, "We took the secular concept of Love Match or eHarmony.com and applied that to religious life." Men and women considering taking vows may log on to voca tionmatch.com, answer questions about the types of community, prayer and ministry that they are looking for, and get a list of potential fits. Some 7,000 have done so over the past year.
That's more than a tenfold increase in queries from the old paper-based method. The National Religious Vocation Conference still publishes an annual guide to religious communities with cards that can be returned to request more information. But the most cards it has ever received in a year was 600, according to Patrice Tuohy, executive editor of the VISION Catholic Vocation Guide.
According to Tuohy, 91 percent of Love Match users say they are seriously considering religious life, and 5 percent who filled out profiles last year report they have now entered religious life. "There's no question in my mind that the rise of the use of the Internet has been a huge benefit to religious communities," she says, noting that information is much more accessible online.
At the Sisters of Bon Secours, Sister Pat Dowling, the national vocations director, has seen the impact of Web outreach. When she became the order's chief recruiter eight years ago, she says, "if we got 60 inquirers during the year, you know, I thought that was pretty good." But as the sisters' online presence has grown, so has interest in joining: The number of queries jumped from 199 in 2007 to 263 last year, and Dowling expects another increase this year.
The sisters, who number about 40 in the United States, operate a national network of hospitals, including Bon Secours Baltimore Health System. The order has welcomed eight new candidates in the past five years - nearly enough, Dowling says, to sustain membership at the current level. She credits several factors, including political, economic and social upheaval, a younger generation grown accustomed to community work through school service project requirements, and having a full-time vocations director. She sees her online efforts as another factor.
"You can't sit behind a desk waiting for someone to come to you," she says. "You need to find ways and be creative in telling people who you are and what this life is about. ... People can't choose what they don't know about."
Dowling sends out messages on Facebook and Twitter - calling attention to media coverage about a Vatican probe into U.S. women's orders, for example, or directing surfers to a Web site at which they can hear President Barack Obama's recent conference call with faith leaders on health care reform. Or posing this recent "Question of the day: If you were sitting on your porch chatting w/God sitting across from you, what is the one question you would ask God?"
"It's like Six Degrees of Separation, because one person leads to another, and to another and to another," Dowling says. "We have individuals, young women, who have joined our groups, and it's always kind of a marvel to me. It's like, well, how did you find us?"
Dooley attended Catholic school as a child but did not consider religious life until a few years ago.
"Just through a deepening prayer life and more involvement in my church, I felt a drawing toward something more," she says. "That just didn't go away for me, so I began to explore what that was."
A journalist for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, she began her search online and was quickly overwhelmed by the wealth of information. A vocations director on the West Coast advised her to look in her own backyard, and Bon Secours operates hospitals in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Va. She found the order, began reading its Web site, and then called Dowling.
While the Internet provided a point of entry, Dooley says, it was the weekend visits she made to the U.S. headquarters in Marriottsville and the conversations she had with the sisters that helped her to discern her calling to the religious life. She now plans to spend the next three months in orientation, beginning a formation process that could take six years to a decade.
"My feeling was that I would continue to take steps toward this until I felt that I was no longer to continue forward," she says. "And I never felt that I was no longer to continue forward, and so here I am."
Dowling says the Internet is a helpful tool, in its place.
"It certainly does not replace the personal touch, because in the end, that's ultimately why somebody would enter," she says. "It's the personal invitation, the personal interest in the development of a relationship and getting to know a community and whether it's the right fit or not. They have to feel comfortable with this group and all the technology is not going to give you an answer. Certainly in the end, it's all about whether the person has a call or not."
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