By Nuala Kenny OC, MD | Canada

“Invest in women: Accelerate progress”. That’s this year’s theme for International Women’s Day, the annual UN-sponsored event that takes place on March 8. The theme focuses on gender equality, war, soaring poverty and the climate crisis. And for some time now, the Church in North America has also been observing March 8 as the first day of Catholic Sisters Week, a way of honoring the lives and ministries of our vowed religious women.

I’m participating in this year’s events — as a Sister of Charity of Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada) for nearly 60 years — from my room in our retirement facility. I gaze across the road to the large field where our Motherhouse stood. It has been sold and awaits construction of a housing project. I look down the hill to the university we founded 150 years ago, the first such to be dedicated to the higher education of women in the British Empire. It has been transferred to a lay Board of Governors.

Leadership in my religious congregation is well aware that the sisters’ apostolic life, as we have known it, is coming to completion in the post-Christendom West. Our median age is 86. We have just 180 members in the United States and Canada today, a mere fraction of the 1400 we numbered at our peak. But even in the face of changing physical, emotional and spiritual capacities, we commit to living out our charism of charity to the last breath.

Read more at: https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/a-womens-day-shout-out-for-our-catholic-sisters/19313