Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2008 / Many retired religious stay busy and active
Many retired religious stay busy and active
by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published December 5, 2008
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Robert Delaney | The Michigan Catholic
Sr. Dorothy Diederichs, IHM, coordinates the annual mission appeal for the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which maintains missions in Uganda, South Africa, Mexico and Puerto Rico. |
Monroe — IHM Sr. Dorothy Diederichs, who will turn 80 this month, hasn't let advancing years slow her down much.
Like many other older women and men in vowed religious communities who still have their health, she remains active in various ministries, long after most people would just be taking it easy and enjoying a well-deserved retirement.
For one thing, Sr. Diederichs manages the mission appeals activities of her community, the Monroe-based Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
"We still maintain missions in South Africa and Uganda, and in Mexico and Puerto Rico," she explains.
To support her fellow IHM sisters involved in those missions, Sr. Diederichs works with the Society for the Propagation of the Faith or diocesan Missionary Cooperation Plans for support. She also arranges for sisters who have been involved in foreign missions to speak at parishes, and as a veteran herself of 22 years in mission work, also does some of those parish appeals.
Sr. Diederichs is also involved in providing pastoral care for the older members of her community at the IHM Motherhouse. "I visit the sisters, mostly in the health care center, where we have typically 120 to 130 sisters," she says.
And she is involved in the IHMs' peace and justice activities, serving on their Haiti Commission, which arranges for some of the sisters to go down to the Caribbean nation each year to do volunteer work.
"Our foundress, Sr. Theresa Maxis, was Haitian, so we have a special interest in helping Haiti," she says.
But even that isn't everything. "You just keep trying to find ways and means to help where you can. We keep busy," Sr. Diederichs says.
Collection for retired religious
When: Dec. 13-14 in most churches
Benefits: Retirement Fund for Religious
Why: Declining numbers mean fewer active members supporting retired and infirm sisters, brothers and religious order priests.
Scope of problem: About 58 percent of women and men religious are past age 70; 7 percent are past age 90. Some never enrolled in Social Security; even those who did only receive an average of $4,402 a year, a little more than one-third what most retirees get (due to low lifetime earnings).
Further complication: Rising health care costs have worsened the situation. |
One of those other ways is to assist fellow IHM Sr. Evelyn Booms coordinate the annual appeal for the Retirement Fund for Religious in the Archdiocese of Detroit, an annual nationwide collection taken in most Catholic churches on the weekend of Dec. 13-14 this year.
The IHMs are one of the Michigan religious congregations that benefits from the retirement fund.
"Our median age (meaning half are older, half are younger) as a congregation is 75," she says. And she adds that, of the 200 sisters who reside at the motherhouse, the median age is 84.
Historically one of the largest communities of women religious serving in the Archdiocese of Detroit, the IHMs now number 464 sisters altogether. Of those, only 24 sisters are aged 59 or younger.
Sr. Diederichs, who grew up in St. Gregory the Great Parish on Detroit's west side, entered the IHMs in 1947, taking the religious name Sr. Mary Seton. She went back to her baptismal name in the late 1960s.
In 1965, she was among the first group of IHM sisters who accompanied two Detroit priests to Recife, Brazil, to staff the parish of Our Lady of Loudes. Cardinal John Dearden – Detroit's archbishop from 1959 to 1980, agreed to accept responsibility for the parish at the request of Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara (1909-99), archbishop of Olinda and Recife.
"Dom Helder was out to visit us at least once a month in the early years of our Recife mission," Sr. Diederichs says about the man who was one of the most prominent voices for Latin America's poor in that era and an inspiration to many.
"We were involved in the experimental part of liberation theology, in building base Christian communities," she recalls. Sr. Diederichs returned to Michigan after 10 years, but went back to Brazil for another 12-year stint in 1986. "When I went back, we were involved in community-building and scriptural and social justice study groups in the rural sugar cane communities outside of Cabo, Brazil," she says.
The work had a special focus on women, as they were especially oppressed, Sr. Diederichs explains. And although the IHMs pulled out of that mission, due to declining numbers, in 2005, she says the work goes on, led by some of the local women the sisters trained.
In the early years after her return from Brazil in 1998, Sr. Diederichs worked with the MOSES organization, an ecumenical community group in Detroit and close-in suburbs and tutored at Marygrove College.
"Because of my experience with the poor, I have a deeper awareness of God's presence in so many ways. Since I came back, where people are suffering unjustly, I have to be involved in the call to justice-seeking and peace-making," she adds.
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