The old red brick convent rises two big ghost-floors above the larger, L-shaped main level. It is not a romantic building in the classic, sprawling sense of what the word “convent” might connote, like the Sisters of St. Joseph’s giant Mt. Saint Mary Convent in Wichita, or the Poor Clares’ walled and flamboyant nineteenth-century complex on Henry Clay Avenue in New Orleans.
Instead, this convent is almost deliberately modest, unprepossessing. Its style is a strange hybrid: red-brick squarish Junior High School with a vague hint of 1930s curvilinear edges on its facade. You could drive by on 43rd Avenue below—as many folks often do, looking for a shortcut to Rhode Island Avenue—and not even notice it.
Although it still technically functions as a convent, the building’s chief role these days is as a child care center attached to the parish and parochial school, and it is where my two-year-old daughter and I climb the hilly steps each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.
Roaming the long wood-floored hall is a small, barking dog, whose owner is the sister who’s the director of the center, and that lends a homelike quality to a place that could be merely sterile and institutional. My little girl, who loves dogs, giggles and fans out her fingers.
And each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as I escort Anna Maria to the Butterflies room, I glance down the hall at the graceful staircase stretching to the next floor, and the next, and I wonder exactly what there is to see upstairs, and think about how the building holds the ghost of its former self.
Because today, though the convent was designed to house some 20—who knows?—40 young women, there are only two nuns in residence. Sister A has one whole floor; Sister B has hers. The center’s assistant director, doubtlessly wondering why I was so interested in the topic, told me that the floors had once been a warren of tiny rooms, nothing more than prayer closets, really, and that walls had been knocked down to make the space more hospitable for fewer residents.
It is a pattern repeated again and again around me: The northeast quadrant of Washington, DC, I’m told, has more Catholic institutions than any place outside the Vatican; many of the monasteries and convents are limping along, half-empty, while others have been converted wholesale into other uses: I drive by one massive former monastery that has been transformed into a hairstyling and barbering school, whose students often stand outside smoking cigarettes, wearing bright cartoon-covered medical scrubs.
The standard story behind the decline of these institutions, from certain kinds of critics, is that the Sixties came along, the Second Vatican Council came along, the Sexual Revolution came along., and that the old world of mid-century monasticism was an outmoded relic unequal to conducting the church’s social mission.
(Remember the silent home-movie montage at the beginning of the film Dead Man Walking, of a fictional young Sister Helen Prejean, making her vows in a wedding dress and veil, then the cut to her later life in a New Orleans housing-project apartment, the long habit gone, wearing street clothes?)
Certain other critics, meanwhile, like to lay the decline of these vocations to their loss of their mystical Christian center, their sense of being in-the-world-but-not-of-it. Those long habits meant something, they say. (And remember in the movie, Sister Helen/Susan Sarandon put that long habit back on at the film’s climax.)
These other critics are quick to point out that other convents and monasteries have no problem attracting vocations at all, and are filled with young monastics. Last year my son’s school was next door to an order of Argentine brothers, every single one under thirty, always shuffling back and forth cheerfully in their long black cassocks.
In the end, though, I think the story of monasticism’s decline is primarily an economic one: As ethnic Catholics grew more and more assimilated, as the country grew more and more affluent, there wasn’t as pressing a need to give a child or two to the Church to secure their education, or the family’s stability—especially if there were far fewer children.
The Sexual Revolution itself was itself, in many ways, a product of and emblematic of American affluence, of the endless belief in limitless choice, made possible by credit, transportation, and technologies of contraception.
But it is far harder today to envision an affluent future for the country. Sure, there is that top 10%, 1% that we all keep hearing about, to whom the dizzying gains of our financialized economy keep accruing—those who, as Don Peck’s recent Atlantic article “Can the Middle Class be Saved?” noted, can live their lives between the Four Seasons in New York and the Four Seasons in Hong Kong.
But for the rest of us, something’s not working. Scratch the surface of the so-called “real America,” and you will find ant trails of lost jobs, disability, of fifty-five year-olds with barely any retirement savings.
Just in my immediate circle of friends, on the supposedly “elite” coasts, are far too many who are one missed paycheck from losing the house or, at least heading to the food bank. A childhood friend who’s a law professor and a single mom with four children said that if even she lost her job, she’d be out on the street with nowhere to live.
To say nothing of the affluent but merely lonely—here in Washington, every night single men and women come home from 16-hour days to rooms resplendent with possessions but purged from companions, where they eat carryout dinners from Whole Foods in air-conditioned silence.
I’m thinking of these empty convents. Maybe we can all move in: take care of the unbabysitted toddlers, put those listless teen boys to work mowing the lawns. Somebody can weed the garden.
“But I’m an atheist,” said a union organizer friend. Okay, then, atheists and theists together, “suffering together” as the root definition of compassion would have it, living into more deeply—incarnating—the mystery of being human.