It's payback time.

What the sisters did

America "is the most democratic country in the world, and it is at the same time. . . the country in which the Roman Catholic religion makes most progress." So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. He was indeed prescient. In the fourth quarter of the twentieth century the Catholic church is still thriving and growing in numbers and its people are ranked among the best-educated and prosperous of all American groups.

We must acknowledge that the growth of the church in America and the success of its people are largely owed to the vision, energy, devotion, and self-sacrifice of America's priests and religious who gave the church its institutions. Think of the role they played in our history: Priests and male religious came first to this continent as missionaries. As the missionary age passed and European settlers flocked to North America as settlers, the religious stayed to be pastors and educators. They established parishes and founded the first Catholic college for men - Georgetown. They nurtured small academies in the wilderness that grew into internationally known universities like Saint John's and Notre Dame. Eventually their secondary schools and colleges dotted the country from coast to coast and from the Mexican border to Canada.

At the same time, women religious were answering the call of our new country. In the first years of the republic the aristocratic convert Mother Elizabeth Seton founded the first free schools for small children. Soon thereafter, as I wrote for the American Council on Education in 1989, the ancestors of today's women religious poured out of the towns and villages of France, Italy, and Germany and came to America, intent on educating girls and women, intent on the mission of the church. What they accomplished was prodigious. A recent article in a major news magazine summed up their accomplishment: they built the most far-flung and accessible system of higher education for women the world has ever known. They took the daughters of frontiersmen and immigrants and lifted them from one level to another and, in so doing, transformed families and communities. Convent education in either the French or German model was important in the "civilizing" of frontier after frontier and was sought by leading settlers for their daughters whether they were Catholic or not. Convent education helped shape the country, and from many of these convents sprang the strong colleges later founded by women religious.

And we American Catholics took this all for granted! The religious had always been there for us. We assumed they always would be. It was therefore with real shock that in 1986 we read in the Wall Street Journal that many elderly religious were living below the poverty line and were, in effect, welfare clients. How could this be? Few of us had recognized that drastic change had affected the basic assumption underlying the financial structure of religious orders: that the work of the younger members would undergird the needs of the aging members. This was no longer so.

The exodus from religious life in the years after Vatican II emptied many communities of members at the height of their productive lives. Vocations declined and there were few new members to replace those who had gone. Like Americans in general, religious were living longer.

The impoverishment of the religious was not news to the religious themselves. They had struggled with the growing problem since the 1960s. In the 1970s, when they were allowed into the Social Security system, many members of congregations began to apply for benefits. But, for the most part, the Social Security payments they qualified for were pitiably small. They had subsisted on small stipends from the parishes in which they staffed parochial schools, or on stipends from the institutions their orders sponsored - hospitals, private schools, and colleges. The difference between the stipends they lived on and the professional salaries to which they were entitled was donated to the institutions and accepted by financial bodies as a "living endowment." They had, quite literally, donated their lives for the health and education of the Catholic people. They did not ask for help, and they were reduced to accepting Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid like other poor citizens.

By the 1980s, church authorities began to realize that the poverty of elderly religious was not a problem in this or that diocese but was a national problem. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the Council of the Major Superiors of Women, and the Conference of the Major Superiors of Men joined to survey the problem and find possible solutions. In 1983 a preliminary study was completed at Fordham University. In 1986 the National Religious Retirement Office was founded to help religious congregations cope with the problem, and surveys by Arthur Andersen were commissioned.

It was discovered that the median age for women religious was sixty-eight and for men sixty-one. As suspected, religious were found to live longer than the general population. And the retirement liability for past service went into the billions of dollars!

Two things resulted from the first survey. Church officials found through polling that Catholics would be glad to respond to a national collection for retired religious, and they established a national collection for the retirement fund in 1988. At the same time religious communities made every effort to cut costs and raise additional money. They sold property, altered existing structures for more economical use, and developed intercommunity efforts for cost-efficient care of elderly members. Small and isolated communities merged with larger ones of the same tradition.

In the eight years that the collection for retired religious has been taken, it has become the most popular of the ongoing collections of the United States bishops. In 1995, when a great blizzard struck the eastern United States on the weekend of the collection and prevented many people from going to church, the collection still exceeded all expectations.

This is heartening news. It means that the Catholic people have a very clear sense of how unique and far-reaching the work of religious has been in American society and how it has affected them. They are more than willing to help the precious remnant who even now in retirement do what they can to help each other, to mentor and tutor, to visit the isolated old and sick, and to free the all-too-few young of their communities for new ministries - especially ministries to the poor. May this year's collection be larger than ever!

Postscript: I went to Minnesota to be a reader at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centennial Celebration [see Commonweal, October 11] and to give a speech. After participating in one reading session, I mistook an open basement door in an unfamiliar house for a hallway and pitched headfirst down the whole flight of stairs - ending up with a gash on my forehead (fifty stitches!), two hairline fractures, black eyes, and a mass of bruises. But I was lucky not to be killed, and I had wonderful care in the emergency room and the hospital where I was kept for observation. (If you're going to fall down, do it in Minnesota!) Everything is healing. Friends and family have rallied to keep me comfortable and fed - and it's only four more weeks until the walking cast comes off!