When Sister Christiana entered the Poor Clare Colettine monastery in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1993, her parents were concerned. The Poor Clares have not worn shoes since 1406, the year their 1212 order was reformed, not even socks. They wake every day at half past midnight to pray matins, and then again at 5:00 a.m. for lauds. In addition to chastity, obedience, and poverty, they vow to stay enclosed within the monastery walls for the rest of their lives.

“Does this mean she will not be able to come to me on my deathbed?” her father had asked the Mother Abbess, after learning the strict rules of enclosure. She would not. Poor Clares never leave the monastery once they’ve taken their perpetual vows, not even for funerals. The Abbess was reassuring. When you are on your deathbed, every nun here will be praying for you.

The words of the Mother Abbess brought comfort.

“It changed his perspective, to envision a whole monastery praying for him,” Sister Christiana said in a recent phone interview. “It flips what you’re losing to what you are gaining.”

Later, her father would tell her that he understood: nuns magnify God’s power in the world, he said, by giving themselves completely to him in prayer, enabling God to do more for more people.

It was a sentiment wholly out of vogue in the 1990s, but one that has found surprising resonance among a new generation of Catholic women.

Nearly every story about American Catholic nuns begins with a few statistics: In 1966, there were 181,421 Catholic women religious in the United States, as nuns and sisters are called. (Well, technically, only the cloistered and contemplative are nuns, while active women religious are sisters, but the terms are often used interchangeably.) In 2006, there were 67,000. In 2017, there were 45,605. Even considering the sharp, unprecedented growth of monastic life in the 1940s and 1950s, that’s a reduction of over 75 percent.

The story that follows these statistics is usually simple: our modern, secular age has no ear for monastic callings. The life of a cloistered nun, with her endless prayers and heavy woolen headdress, is squarely in the past, and the allure of being an active sister, who ran hospitals and schools and fought for civil rights, belongs to a time when women had few other opportunities to work outside the home. Today, women who want to serve the world can be social workers, nurses, teachers, or directors of non-profits, all without the restrictions of consecrated life. The nun has outlived her purpose.

“I figured if I was going do something crazy for our Lord I may as well go all in.” —Sister Rosalie Agnes

But this story overlooks a far more interesting development: not all religious orders are losing numbers, and not all at the same rate. In the past fifteen years, the most traditional, cloistered orders have found themselves awash in interest. New monasteries are being built; more land is being bought. Ancient forms of religious life, such as those for canonical hermits and consecrated virgins, are once more on the rise. Though it is true that most sisters today are active, the orders attracting younger members are contemplative: they pray the full office, wear traditional habits, and seek lives of worship and devotion away from the world, renouncing family, comfort, and travel – the type of monasticism that has existed in the church for two thousand years.

“It’s radical, and we know it is radical. When young women want to embrace the contemplative life nowadays, they’re looking for radical change,” Sister Bernadette, twenty-six, told me on a chilly day in late November as we walked the grounds of her Carmelite monastery in Fairfield, Pennsylvania. (To honor their hidden life, the Fairfield Carmelites asked me to use pseudonyms.) “When I decided I wanted to be a nun, it was so that I could learn how to love Jesus the best, and the best place to do that is obviously a Carmelite monastery, because they’re the most intense.”

The monastery in Fairfield is certainly intense. It was established in 2018 on undeveloped land; its eight sisters’ goal is to live without electricity or running water. Everything has been built from the ground up. The oratory is heated with metal air ducts connected to a Roman-style hypocaust that burns under heat-retaining granite stones. Nuns get water via hand pumps connected to filtered cisterns of water. Until they could get a roof on the barn, everyone slept in trailers. The community has grown rapidly and has established two new monasteries to meet demand. Every year, more women arrive, drawn specifically by the construction site, the promise of radical devotion, and the sacrifices it requires.

“I figured if I was going do something crazy for our Lord I may as well go all in,” said Sister Rosalie Agnes, twenty-three, who arrived at Fairfield in 2020. A former hairdresser from North Carolina, her first night involved hours of laying brick in the dark with other sisters, building the foundation for what will eventually be the refectory. “So why not have no running water, no electricity, living in a stone building, sleeping on straw. I wanted the real thing, as real as I could possibly get in this society.”

“These women want something heroic. To live here is a sacrifice; it is saying no to the world and all its pleasures.” —Sister Misericordia

This desire for something real is pervasive among the nearly two dozen nuns I interviewed across religious orders. They don’t want something easy, catered to their needs; every algorithm they’ve encountered has done the same. They want to live in a world shaped by something higher than their own instincts and interests. The rigors of cloistered life – waking at 5:00 a.m., regular fasting, forgoing novels and trips to the beach and chats with friends – are exciting, when they promise a purposeful life in return.

It is hard to imagine what it is like to be cloistered, to see no people except fellow sisters. The Carmelite nuns in Fairfield see family only four days a year, always from behind a double-grille wall. They take communion through a wooden turn and give confession through a grate opening at their ankles. The sisters I meet are externs, formerly cloistered nuns now tasked to greet visitors and organize the sacristy for daily mass, requiring they leave the boundaries of the enclosure. For this degree of worldly access, they sleep, eat, and pray separately from the fully cloistered nuns within. They tell me the true sacrifice is to live on the outside, though they do not complain. Inside they could be fully themselves. There is work, of course, much of it hard manual farm labor. But there is one purpose, one focus. Outside, they must play the part of good religious sister for others. Inside there is no gaze except God’s gaze.

“Among this generation is a desire to do big things for God,” said Sister Mara Grace, reflecting on the hundreds of conversations she’s had with young Catholic women as the vocational director at the convent of Nashville Dominicans. “Gen Z has big questions. They want to live life that is authentic, and tried and true.”

In 2006, the Nashville Dominicans had two hundred sisters. Today, they have 318 sisters, ranging in age from eighteen to ninety-six. Though active and not cloistered (the sisters work outside the convent after completing years of religious formation), they wear a full traditional habit, live in community, and chant the daily Divine Office, bucking post-Vatican II trends toward deregulation. The community receives five hundred inquiries a year, half from women under the age of eighteen. Every year five to fifteen women take perpetual vows, after a demanding process that requires eight years of living in the convent.

There are at least seventeen different orders of cloistered or contemplative nuns in the United States, spanning three hundred monasteries and housing about four thousand nuns. Every order is distinct: the austere Poor Clares are proudly communal, while Carmelites, by far the largest with sixty-three monasteries, emphasize solitude and mental prayer. Benedictines are musical. Each order has its own schedule, habit, norms, and history. Some wake every day at 3:30 a.m. for the morning office, and others at 4:30 a.m., 5:00 a.m., or 6:00 a.m. Some pray in the middle of the night. Their habits can be white, brown, gray, black, red, or even pink. Some, like the historically welcoming Order of the Visitation, are diminishing and others, such as the unbending Norbertines, are opening in the United States for the first time.

Just outside Fresno, in northern California, the hard-to-find Norbertine monastery has grown from five nuns in 2005 to over fifty women in 2024, on five hundred acres of remote land. Established in 1120, the cloistered branch of Norbertines values silence, manual labor, and strict seclusion. They are the only monastery to return none of my calls or emails, as family members of nuns inside warned me they might do. They do not advertise and seek no attention. Women arrive through word of mouth. As one mother of a nun put it to me, “They are the place you go when you want to truly live like the original hermits of God.”

This type of seclusion is not the only way, and many young women are drawn to communities with greater worldly engagement. The Benedictine monastery in Gower, Missouri, which prays the Latin office (many of the monasteries that are growing use the Latin Mass, like other symbols of tradition), has started three new monasteries in the past five years to meet demand. Benedictines are contemplative, not cloistered, meaning nuns can greet outsiders without a separation barrier and even visit family or travel on religious retreat, but their days are regulated by prayer and monastic work.

“We just keep getting more applications every year,” Sister Misericordia, who entered in 2006, told a Catholic newspaper in May 2024. “These women want something heroic. To live here is a sacrifice; it is saying no to the world and all its pleasures. To give that up is huge, but these women desire the divine husband and are willing to give everything to be with him.”

It is a trend that might have shocked Catholic officials in the 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council revolutionized the role of Catholic nuns. For the first time since 1298, the nuns were allowed to leave the convent. (Orders of charity work were only considered religious congregations, and members did not take solemn vows.) Monasteries were encouraged to simplify the habits the nuns wore, expand the types of foods they were allowed to eat, and reduce penitential practices, such as wearing hair shirts or flogging themselves. In addition to practical changes, the Council also gave monastic life a new theological foundation. Instead of being uniquely holy and worthy of salvation, the status of the nun became equal to that of a layperson who had simply chosen a worthy vocation, as noble as marriage, but not more. Holiness was now available to everyone. The goal of the Council was to “open up the windows and let fresh air” into the church. For many, the reforms were long overdue.

Until 1965, nuns needed to ask permission from their superiors for everything from borrowing an extra pen to getting a new bar of soap, often in a humbling process that involved kneeling on the floor (known to this day as “permissions”). Obedience was paramount. Special friendships of any kind were forbidden – they infringed on one’s ability to belong uniquely to Jesus – and so silence reigned even during recreational hours, to prevent personal discussions.

Cloistered life feels so exciting, even rebellious, to a generation cynical about the future.

Though often painted as medieval, the vast majority of these restrictions had been codified during Vatican I, in 1870, which tried to get ahead of modernizing impulses brought on by the Enlightenment. Vatican II returned authority to the monasteries, allowing superiors to adjust daily life to reflect changing norms and the needs of the women inside. As a result, instead of gradual change over the century, a torrent of reforms flooded monasteries all at once. Scores of orders chose to discard their habits, those veils and wimples that marked the nun, and wear respectable, polished clothing instead. After all, the original habits were often nothing more than modest, simple versions of clothing worn by women in the century the order was founded. Many orders disbanded communal living, sending sisters to live on their own in apartments. There was a wave of optimism for the future, buoyed by the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s. Women’s liberation and the fight for civil rights gave many people hope that they could build a better future, if only they would throw off the evils of the past.

In the decade that followed, thousands of nuns left the convents and monasteries – more than four thousand in 1970 alone.

For some, there was not enough reform, after a century of promise and progress. Women still had no formal power in the church. For others, the loss of traditional life was too great to bear. Nuns were asked to review the rituals, rules, and restrictions that governed their lives. Some welcomed the prospect, but others felt unequal to such a weighty task. What gave their lives meaning if not living an unquestioned, ancient way of life?

By the 1970s, active orders such as the Sisters of Mercy had become the public face of consecrated life, if one thought about nuns at all. Like Catholic priests, active sisters live consecrated lives under vows but still buy groceries, drive cars, listen to music, and live in the world. The shift to private homes and everyday clothing felt emblematic of a new era, where women could serve God as they were, and without the requirement to live under supervision.

By the 1990s, however, the enthusiasm of the 1960s had given way to conservatism, and debates around monastic life dropped from public life. Since nuns were no longer recognizable on the street, many assumed they had gone the way of hatpins and telegrams. To this day, people are surprised to learn there are still monasteries in the United States, active or cloistered.

This is perhaps one reason cloistered life feels so exciting, even rebellious, to a generation cynical about the future. It is a rejection of the world, a way to pull one’s investments from society and bet everything on God, the ultimate act of defiance. The cloister can seem like a forgotten solution to modern problems, hidden away in the history of the church. This ancient history also gives it legitimacy, and the assurance that its meaning will outlive any modern notions of right and wrong.

“In the past fifteen years, there has been a culture of discernment developing,” said Sister Jacinta, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and dropped out of New York University in 2010 to join the Nashville Dominicans. Her postulant class was twenty-seven women, of whom thirteen took perpetual vows eight years later. “If you’re a young faithful Catholic, the question of vocation and discernment comes up naturally today.”

Indeed, organizations and groups for women discerning monastic life have proliferated. Finding information on monasteries used to be difficult, especially for smaller and lesser-known orders, such as the Passionists or the Pink Sisters. Today, such information is all over the internet, and many monasteries have a website, sometimes even a contact form. Discernment booths are prevalent at Catholic college conferences.

The intensity of cloistered life is seen as freedom from a world often bereft of meaning or true, deep faith.

Earlier generations of nuns struggled with a feeling that they were sitting on the sidelines of history, sequestered away in their monasteries as important societal changes brewed. In the wake of women’s liberation, many young Catholic women saw cloistered life as redolent of the past, part and parcel of a world that confined women to the home and hid them from society. These are not burdens that most Catholic women carry today. Instead, the intensity of cloistered life is seen as freedom from a world often bereft of meaning or true, deep faith. The monastery is freedom. If once austerity was imposed on nuns, today it is freely chosen.

“I feel so much more free now than I ever did in the world, even though we don’t go anywhere,” Sister Rosalie Agnes told me. “Carmel is so big spiritually that you don’t need all the rest of the world, because you have so much just right in front of you.”

Monastic trends have always oscillated between expansion and reform. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, monastic life grew until it became lax with numbers, prompting the papal restrictions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The mendicant orders brought concern about enclosure and education levels among monks, bringing openness and then backlash. From the Benedictines came the Camaldolese, and then the Cistercians, from whom came the more stringent Trappists. Many orders have a “Reformed” branch, pointing to a time when a group of monks or nuns decided they needed to return to the original, most austere ways. Today, the Reformed branches outpace the original ones. Always there is someone to go off to the forest and say, “I want it starker, harder, realer.” And then more people join them, the community grows more permissive as it grows wider, and the process starts anew.

This doesn’t mean there are no hurdles. Nothing is more traditional than the monastic vocation in Catholic life, yet conservative religious culture in America is particularly centered on family, and values women who are mothers. Choosing a life without the possibility of marriage and motherhood is hard to champion. American Catholics also tend to have smaller families than the historically larger Catholic families where a daughter could go off to the convent and leave her remaining eight siblings to care for her parents. For many only children, the vocational calling can be a knife to the heart, as they know how painful it will be for their parents.

There is also the American focus on productivity and efficiency. Here, the mysteries of the cloister become all the more compelling – even divine. Brother Paul Quenon, a monk in the Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky, titled his 2018 memoir In Praise of the Useless Life. M. Basil Pennington, a cloistered monk writing from his Massachusetts monastery in 1992, described monasticism as “a luxurious life … [in which] men and women with an abundance of gifts and talents which could well be employed for the good of the church and the poor sit in the idleness of contemplation.” Thomas Merton, the prolific Trappist monk who died in 1968, evoked the concept when defending the extreme ways of sixth-century Byzantine ascetics, who lived on tall pillars. “We treat their lives as absurd and grotesque,” Merton wrote in his journals. “But this is not the full truth. It was a witness to the divine transcendency. Precisely its uselessness is what made this witness powerful.”

The nuns who continue to answer such a call are a powerful witness, and it is a call that will never cease crying out.