Twenty years ago, in 1988, the Catholic bishops of the United States recognized that the many religious institutes, as “orders” are now called, were facing a crisis. Declining numbers of young monks and brothers, nuns and sisters, meant declining incomes for the institutes of consecrated life (cloistered monks and nuns) and secular institutes (religious brothers and sisters working in the world), who were responsible for the life-long care of their increasingly elderly members. So the bishops established the National Religious Retirement Office and implemented an annual collection to support retired religious in their years of greatest need.

Religious institutes are congregations of the faithful who dedicate their lives to God and his people, making vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

The vow of poverty means that the individual members of the institute do not own their own property, but rather contribute the fruits of their labors to the community, which in turn provides the basic necessities of life for its members. Institutes of consecrated life dedicated to contemplative prayer, such as the Carmelites, do earn some money by distributing altar breads and making ecclesiastical vestments, but by and large they have always relied on donations to keep body and soul together. Secular institutes, such as the Religious Sisters of Mercy, founded and staffed Catholic hospitals and schools all over the country. The religious who administered these institutions and served as nurses and teachers received modest stipends, which provided the income for the institutes. The younger members of these communities personally looked after the elderly and infirm among them, with the help of generous Catholic (and some non-Catholic) physicians, who donated their services. Until fairly recently, religious under vows of poverty were not included in the Social Security system. Even after many institutes enrolled in Social Security, the modest stipends paid to religious resulted in fairly low payments into the system and correspondingly low benefits to be paid out of it. As a result, the National Religious Retirement Office (NRRO) reports that “the average Social Security benefit for religious women and men is approximately one-third that paid to the average U.S. beneficiary”— just $4,402 per year, while the average U.S. beneficiary receives $12,948 annually.

A number of factors converged to provoke the crisis identified in 1988. One was a sharp decline in the numbers of religious men and women. For a variety of historical reasons, including the renewed emphasis on the role of the laity in the Church’s life and ministry at and after the Second Vatican Council, many religious returned to the lay state. Fewer and fewer young Catholics entered the institutes.

While 50 years ago, 9,694 religious brothers and 164,575 religious sisters served the Church in the United States, through work and prayer, in 2008 there are only 5,040 brothers and 64,032 sisters in this country. Over the same half century, the Catholic population grew from 36,023,927 (out of a total population of 159,924,530) to 67,117,016 (out of a total population of 305,248,229).

At the same time, thanks to improvements in modern medicine, life expectancy increased dramatically, as did the cost of health care. According to the NRRO, “about 58% of women and men religious are past age 70; 7% are past age 90.” As a result, the number of retired and infirm members of these institutes continued to escalate, while the numbers of younger members, whose work brought in income and who were expected to care for the elderly, declined.

For all these reasons, the bishops’ established the Retirement Fund for Religious. During the first 20 years of the fund’s existence, the American Catholic faithful have contributed $550 million—an average of $27.5 million each year. Last year, the Savannah diocesan family contributed $129,535.84 to the fund, an increase of 10% over the previous year). The collection has been a great help to these retired men and women, but as they continue to age, their need grows greater. So our help to them should increase.

And there’s the rub. The economic downturn has begun to affect all sectors of the economy, not least those institutions, such as the Church, that rely on voluntary charitable contributions. It would be a great shame if the general belt-tightening currently going on should hurt the much-needed efforts to support the elderly religious men and women who have devoted their lives to the spiritual well-being, physical health and educational development of many generations of Americans, both Catholics and others.

As we Catholics of the Savannah Diocese face tough budgetary decisions this Christmas—whether or not to travel, how many and what kinds of gifts to purchase, how to cut back on unnecessary expenses, let’s continue to consider the growing needs of our retired religious brothers and sisters. Their needs and their devoted service deserve the placement of the Retirement Fund for Religious at the very top of our list of worthwhile expenditures. While other Christmas expenses may have to go down this year, the Retirement Fund for Religious should continue to go up.

—DKC