Catholics generous to religious

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

The Benedictine Sisters of Chicago have been in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the far North Side for a century this year.

Several of the more than 50 sisters who live at the St. Scholastica Monastery there have been alive almost as long, said Sister Jane Smith, the monastery’s prioress.

One of them, Sister Mary Alice Setnicar, 94, graces the cover of the Retirement Fund for Religious annual report for 2005.

The report was released in advance of this year’s collection Dec. 9-10.

According to the report, in 2005, 13 of the sisters were over 90. The entire congregation of 62 sisters had only 15 members working in full-time compensated ministry; 40 members were older than 70.

With Social Security and the basic grant of $42,369 the congregation received from the retirement fund, the sisters were looking at a per-person income of about $3,000, Smith said, leaving the congregation to raise about $500,000 more each year just to cover the cost of supporting themselves.

“People always thought the church supported us,” Smith said. “But we’ve always been on our own.”

It wasn’t so hard when there were always plenty of younger sisters to work and bring in income, as well as to see to the needs of the monastery and the congregation’s older sisters.

But now that the median age for the congregation is 74, the cost of care has skyrocketed.

The sisters have benefited from the retirement fund, receiving grants totaling $1.46 million since 1989. Nearly $300,000 was for needed capital projects, such as installing an elevator and new windows.

Precious Blood Sister Andrée Fries, executive director of the National Retired Religious Office, said of the 687 religious institutes who share information with the office, about one in five can pay less than 20 percent of retirement costs for their members.

The fund, now in its 19th year, has raised nearly $500 million—a greater response than any other annual appeal in U.S. Catholic Church history. Since the first collection in 1988, the Archdiocese of Chicago has always been its largest donor. Since 1998, Catholics from the Archdiocese of Chicago have donated $22.6 million to the religious sisters, brothers and priests who taught them as students, cared for them in hospitals and ministered to them in parishes.

It was that service that led to the generosity of Chicago Catholics, who have seen the efforts of sisters, brothers and religious priests, Fries said.

Originally, when the bishops’ conference approved the collection, it was for a 10-year period starting in 1988. It has since been extended twice, with the current mandate running through 2017.

Fries said that when the collection was first proposed, none of the groups that sponsor the National Religious Retirement Office—the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—and the USCCB—had any real idea of the extent of the liability that was out there. They didn’t even have an accurate count of how many religious institutes there were, she said.

A Mercer Human Resources Consulting Report based on 2003 information showed that the religious institutes reporting had $9.1 billion in investments to pay for retirement costs, but they still had $8.7 billion in unfunded liabilities. The report projected that the religious institutes will run through their investments by 2023 and then have more than $20 billion in unfunded liabilities.

But Fries and Smith remain optimistic that with the help of faithful Catholics, religious congregations will be able to meet their obligations to their elderly members, they said.

“We don’t want to be all doom-and-gloom,” Fries said. “But we need people to understand the seriousness of the situation.”