Two Sisters or Charity, Sister Patricia Ann Wittberg, SC (Cinncinati) and Sister Ellen O’Connell, SC (New York) the executive director for the North American Conference of Associates and Religious are quoted extensively in an article about growth of religious associates.”….A 2002 study put the number of religious order associates at nearly 30,000, an increase of almost threefold since 1995. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which conducted the study with the North American Conference of Associates and Religious, publishers of an associate newsletter, found that female associates outnumbered male associates seven to one.
“It’s a very big movement,” said Sister Patricia Ann Wittberg, an associate professor of sociology at Indianapolis University-Purdue University-Indianapolis and the author of “The Rise and Fall of Catholic Religious Orders.” “There is now often a small core of vowed men or women and a huge population of associates. The trend has been moving so fast that Rome has not caught up with it and hasn’t been issuing rules and regulations.”
Sister Wittberg’s order, the Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati, is so gratified by the growth in associates that it posts associate testimonials prominently on its Web site along with photographs from associate events like ice cream socials, and even keeps a public running count of associates – and those in the pipeline. The order recently counted 128 associates and 17 in the process of becoming associates. They have about 500 sisters worldwide.
Some of the lay people who become associates are, like Mrs. Terry, dropouts from religious orders. Others thought about entering the priesthood but considered the pledges of celibacy or poverty too difficult. Whatever their history, associates want a connection with a religious order that goes deeper than anything they can get informally, while stopping short of entering it.
“It’s not something like, ‘Well, I have friends among the religious therefore I am part of them,’ ” said Sister Ellen O’Connell, the executive director for the North American Conference of Associates and Religious in the Bronx.
Sister O’Connell said associates had started to ascend to leadership positions within orders, often bringing to bear their outside-world expertise in areas like budgeting.
In the case of Mrs. Terry, who lives in Washington, D.C., her two children and husband are also associates. Mrs. Terry describes the relationship as close to seamless, the family traveling to be with groups of associates, as well as keeping in touch with vowed members by e-mail when they cannot see them.
Sister O’Connell said that, especially early on, there sometimes was tension between associates and members of orders. “As with anything new, there was a lot of standing and staring at each other and questions of identity,” she said. There was also some bad feeling, she said, that associates were being offered the “easy way in.”
Most of such feeling, Sister O’Connell said, has been supplanted by the success that both sides have seen in the relationship and the realization “that you can live the mission from within a marriage and each group can support the other.”
Sister Wittberg, however, is quick to caution that the steep growth in associates should not be mistaken for automatic long-term health of religious orders.
“Associates will last only as long as the central vowed group does,” she said. “The presence of associates does not release the vowed core from replacing itself. It would be like a wheel without the hub.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/national/08religion.html
