Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States have played a major role in American religion, education, nursing and social work since the early 19th century. In Catholic Europe, convents were heavily endowed over the centuries, and were sponsored by the aristocracy. Religious orders were founded by entrepreneurial women who saw a need and an opportunity, and were staffed by devout women from poor families. The number of Catholic nuns grew exponentially from about 900 in the year 1840, to a maximum of nearly 200,000 in 1965, falling to 56,000 in 2010. According to an article posted on CatholicPhilly.com, the website of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in October 2018, National Religious Retirement Office statistics showed that number as 47,160 in 2016, adding that “about 77 percent of women religious are older than 70.” In March 2022, the NRRO was reporting statistics from 2018, citing the number of professed sisters as 45,100. The network of Catholic institutions provided high status lifetime careers as nuns in parochial schools, hospitals, and orphanages. They were part of an international Catholic network, with considerable movement back and forth from Britain, France, Germany and Canada.
Some American Catholics came to the defense of American sisters when the Vatican initiated an investigation into what it viewed as unorthodox leanings among the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The controversial investigation, which was viewed by many U.S. Catholics as a "vexing and unjust inquisition of the sisters who ran the church's schools, hospitals and charities" was ultimately closed in 2015 in meeting with Pope Francis.
History
The first women religious in what would become the United States, were fourteen French Ursuline nuns who arrived in New Orleans in July 1727, and opened Ursuline Academy, which continues in operation and is the oldest continuously operating school for girls in the United States.
The Sisters of Saint Anne are a Roman Catholic religious institute, founded in 1850 in Vaudreuil, Quebec, Canada, by the Blessed Marie Anne Blondin, S.S.A. The Sisters arrived in the United States in September 1867 at the request of the Bishop of Buffalo, opening a school in Oswego, New York. Between 1840 and 1930 approximately 900,000 Quebec residents, most of them French Canadian left for the United States. Textile manufacturing centers and other industrial towns such as Lewiston, Maine, Fall River, Massachusetts, Woonsocket, Rhode Island and Manchester, New Hampshire attracted significant French-Canadian populations. The Sisters went on to expand throughout northern New York and New England, staffing many schools of French-speaking parishes.