By Steve Weatherbe

LAST MONTH, the Quebec-founded 160-year old Sisters of St. Ann sold six hectares of valuable land overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the University of Victoria, which lies a kilometre to the south.

Significantly, they sold it for a few million dollars less than market value.

Long a fixture in British Columbia community life, the sisters are aging, dwindling and one-by-one divesting themselves of their assets, just as Catholic women’s orders are across Canada and the U.S.

When necessary, the sisters have sold their lands to the highest bidder, as they did with the downtown Victoria site of the hospital the order built 100 years ago.

“We were in an actuarial deficit,” admitted Sister Marie Zarowny, president of the B.C. branch  – meaning that a decade ago, it looked like they might not have enough money to pay for their retirement and  subsequent health care.

Since then their nest egg has grown, and the sisters have given away some properties and sold others, like  their Queenswood Centre, at less than they could possibly have made.

“A few million less,” admitted Sr. Marie happily. “We have a long commitment to education and we negotiated a price that made sense to the university.”

Queenswood serves as a residence for 20 sisters who have retired, and also as a conference centre. It has a chapel and swimming pool, and sits on parklike grounds.

The residents can stay till 2013, when they will be moved into existing retirement and care homes run by the Vancouver Island Health Authority. Sr. Marie emphasized that they will be allowed to preserve their original commitment to community life and spirituality.

Previously, the order donated its Little Flower Academy to an independent foundation that is keeping the prestigious girls school running.

St. Ann’s Academy in downtown Victoria educated the daughters of  Vancouver Island’s middle classes for decades, but was turned over to the provincial government some 20 years ago. It now serves as an office building.

The site of a former school for First Nations girls outside Duncan has become a non-profit foundation for rehabilitation.

The B.C. province of the Sisters of St. Ann ran schools – for both settlers and natives – and hospitals, from Alaska to Montana in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Sisters of St. Ann have seen their numbers dwindle, as part of the general collapse of Catholic orders – which have been cut in half since the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s.

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“We are divesting ourselves of these properties in a way that is consistent with our mission to provide education and health care,” said Sr. Marie.

The order has endowed a scholarship for nurses and teachers, and also given money to Mount St. Mary Hospital, an extended care facility on part of the site where they once ran a hospital. Now some sisters could go to Mount St. Mary.

Many Catholics in Victoria are saddened to see such visible – and well-used – manifestations of the church’s presence disappear, admitted Sr. Marie.

“A lot of people are very sad. But we have been thinking about this for longer. We feel we’ve served our purpose. We’re going with the movement of the Spirit. We responded to the needs of people at a certain time. Now we are not appealing to young people. The Spirit is not calling them to our way of life in the same way.”

Once their own members’ futures are secured, the order plans to use any remaining funds for social justice, education, health, the environment and spiritual growth.

Would that spiritual growth always be specifically Christian?

Sr. Marie responded carefully: “We see all spiritual growth as Christian.”

One piece of land the order has retained is on an ocean-fronting acreage called Glenairley Centre – west of Victoria, near Sooke. Once a recreational centre for sisters from many orders, it has been leased to a group who use it, as their website said, “to celebrate our interconnectedness with nature, the universe and each other.”

Queenswood has also been used to promote non-Christian spiritual practices such as Reiki and enneagrams, both condemned by the U.S. Catholic bishops.

Some commentators, such as Ann Carey, author of Sisters in Crisis: the Tragic Unraveling of Women’s Religious Communities, connect the decline of Catholic women’s orders with their leadership’s alleged preoccupation with issues such as personal growth and women’s equality – both in the church, and society in general.

But American sociologist Helen Rose Ebaugh has argued that as women made advances in other areas of employment, the appeal of women-only religious orders offering opportunities for advancement and responsibility declined.

Some orders, however, are thriving.

The Sisters of St. Ann are growing in Chile, West Africa and Haiti, Sr. Marie reported, though the Haiti mission has suffered the loss of its residences and buildings because of the recent earthquake. There are 44 Haitians in the order,

April 2010