"Lots of girls went to the convent. The year I entered, there were 84 girls in my group," said Ma... Changing Habits: More wome

"Lots of girls went to the convent. The year I entered, there were 84 girls in my group," said Manseau, who grew up in a large, Catholic family in Dorchester. Geoghegan entered her New York convent with about 100 young women.

In contrast, most women entering today are in their 30s and 40s, around the same age those sisters left. Women shop around to find the right religious community, making visits and talking to members of the orders, much like choosing a college.

Sister Emily Silvira, 58, waited until she was 37 years old to enter the Monastery of Saint Clare in Andover. And Sister Mary Theresa Mallahan, 41, believes God called her to be a nurse before calling her to be a cloistered nun at age 38, when she moved into the same Andover monastery.

"Sisters are older now when they join. Most orders won't take women who just graduated from high school," Sister Batho said. "It's common now for orders to require that women graduate from college first, or take a few years working before entering. I think it's important for women to have life experiences to make a decision."

Age and life experience certainly can strengthen a woman's commitment, but so, too, may have the church's decision to loosen some of its strict rules.

During the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, religious leaders decided the church should become more modern. Rules and regulations that in some orders dated back centuries were scrutinized. Questions arose about why active sisters couldn't drive cars, were required to live in convents, wear habits and long black dresses, remain silent for a good portion of the day, and were discouraged from speaking of their families.

"The church (after Vatican II) wanted to be more open, and the religious women wanted to be more open and in touch with other people," she added. "Going around in the long habit really set us apart."

Some changes were small. For example, when Sister Clarissa Tanner, 89, of the Monastery of Saint Clare in Andover was visited by her mother roughly 65 years ago, they had to speak through a grated partition. When her father visited in the latter half of the 1960s, they were still separated by a counter, but they were able to speak face to face.

Other changes were bigger. Active sisters in large part took off their habits and learned to drive cars. Today, many live alone in apartments and some maintain the jobs they held before entering religious life, Sister Batho said.

"I think religious life has blossomed," said 75-year-old Sister Josette Parisi, who in 1959 entered the Sisters of Mercy in Windham, N.H. "It's very different than the old days. We're not all doom and gloom; we're very happy, joyful people."

Sister Anne Vaccarest, also of the Sisters of Mercy in Windham, N.H., said the sisters try to come together regularly for days of reflection and informational speeches. But most days, many start and end their day in prayer alone.

"Many sisters live in smaller groups or live alone. For those who are in a retirement home, there would be more regular times when they would gather together for prayer," Sister Vaccarest said.

Sister Parisi now lives alone in an apartment where friends and family visit. It's a drastic change from her first year of training, when she lived in silence at Searles Castle in Windham, N.H., and was prohibited from going home to see her well-missed family members.

"The changes were in response to the maturity of the sisters," Sister Parisi said. "Physically, psychologically, they made everybody happy. There were some antiquated rules. They had a purpose, I'm sure. But I think the sisters became happier and more joyful after Vatican II, and the spiritual lives deepened for many."

"You followed it through for 10, 20 or more years," Manseau said. "Just because people left the community doesn't mean it wasn't a good choice. I never regretted going in."

"There was so much going on," she said. "We had Vietnam and Martin Luther King. In some instances, some sisters wanted to be more involved in those things, but in community we weren't allowed to be."

When Geoghegan discovered the sisters in her order would be allowed to wear alternate clothing, she turned to Marimekko. The Finish design house provided five sketches of dresses with small, pastel flower prints, which Geoghegan hoped the sisters would agree to wear.

Geoghegan felt cinched by rules. While she was allowed to get a master's degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she was forbidden from socializing with fellow students. And when she was allowed to move to Japan to become a potter's apprentice, a rarity, the exposure to another culture became a factor in her eventual departure from the sisterhood.

"I'm not sure I knew who God was in the convent," Geoghegan said. "In Japan, I visited the shrines and looked at the way people honored nature through (the religion) Shinto. I realized that this Earth and natural beauty has more to do with God than I'd ever seen in my practice of rules and regulation."

Perry's decision wasn't about an incident, but rather the strong feeling that she belonged outside the monastery. Leaving wasn't easy or fast, she said. It took three to four years from the time she mentioned her emotional rumblings to her superior. But the women in her community were supportive. They bought her the car, paid for driving lessons, covered her auto insurance for a year and gave her some cash to start her life again.

"Initially, the unknown was so scary that I sometimes felt like saying, 'Forget it. I'll just stay here.' But the fear of the unknown wasn't why I became a nun and it couldn't be the reason to keep me there," Perry said. "I just put one foot in front of the other and relied on God."

Sister Tanner, who joined the sisterhood at 16 years old and today is 89, still believes wholeheartedly she is doing what the Lord intended her to do with her life.

The cloistered, daily routine that Sister Tanner follows and Perry left hasn't changed all that much over the years. The nuns at the Andover monastery spend the majority of their day silently praying. They officially report to the chapel for Morning Offerings at 5:55 a.m.; however, many get up at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., and 3 a.m., to pray on their own.

"I wanted to serve God, and I thought I would do that through nursing. But He wanted more and more," Sister Mallahan said. "Whoever came up with the term 'calling' was extremely accurate, because that's exactly what it is. It's knowing that He chose this for you."

While their activities haven't changed much, the monastery itself has. The women moved across the street into a new, single-floor ranch in 2001, as the old monastery had become too large and difficult to maintain for the shrinking order.

If the nuns hear the rush-hour traffic whizzing by relentlessly outside the building, they don't let on. They spend hour upon hour in silence, praying in their small, yet modern, chapel.

"I was older than most women in my group. Most were 17 or 18. But I felt I wasn't ready at that age. You get a calling, but I wasn't sure," the Gloucester native said.

The current abbess of the Monastery of Saint Clare in Andover, Sister Clarissa Tanner, 89, grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She got the calling to become a cloistered nun at 16 years old.

Sister Tanner's adventurous spirit took her to Bolivia in 1969 to help establish a cloistered community in a mountaintop monastery. During her 11 years in Bolivia, she was elected by her peers to become the abbess. Shortly after she returned to the monastery in Andover, she was elected by her peers here to serve as abbess for six years. She resumed her title roughly a year ago.

In 1990, for her Golden Jubilee celebration of 50 years in the order, she was allowed to go to Alberta, Canada, to visit her younger brother, Francis, 51, whom she had never met. She flew to Alberta, joined by another brother she hadn't seen since she left home. She wasn't too shocked by a changed society, but she was impressed with some technological advances.

"They took me to the movies where you feel like you're right in it," Sister Tanner said of her IMAX theater experience. "You know, you're going down the river right there in the theater."

Tewksbury resident Mary Manseau wasn't too surprised when her son, Peter, asked if he could write a book about her marriage, seeing as she was still an active sister and her husband a priest when they met. But she was a bit uneasy.

"The book is very personal. I was a little nervous only because Peter needed the whole story," said Manseau, 64. "I was sexually abused by a priest. I never told anybody about it until 1995. And the children didn't know."

Despite the experience, Manseau entered the religious life in 1958, leaving her urban home in Dorchester for a convent in Framingham. She moved from convent to convent every few years, attended Regis College in Weston, and fell in love with teaching second- and third-graders.

Upon returning to the Boston area in the mid-1960s, Manseau's love for city life was rekindled. She was able to walk to places, experiencing more freedom than in the suburban convents.

"There was always a possibility of change in assignment. I didn't want to go to another convent that was more restraining, after being able to see more of life in the city," Manseau said. "So I left. It was fine with my mother. I moved back home with her. That was it."

Manseau says her relationship with her husband didn't evolve until after she left the religious life. They wed in 1969, and had their first of three children in 1970.

"It was no different than dating anyone else. We started seeing each (after I left the sisterhood), and one thing led to another," Manseau said. "We couldn't get married in the church, obviously, but we had several priests at the wedding."

In many ways, Sister Josette Parisi, 75, is ahead of her time. While many of her contemporaries rushed into religious communities at 17 and 18 years old, she waited until she was 28. Before that, she worked a handful of business-related jobs for 12 years. She had a driver's license and a car, but lived at home to help her mother take care of her four younger siblings while her father, a commercial fisherman in Gloucester, was busy with work. Then she made the decision to join the Sisters of Mercy in Windham, N.H.

She went into teaching after attending the now-closed Mount St. Mary College in Hooksett, N.H. She taught high school business classes for a few years before teaching at Marrion Court College in Swampscott. Eventually, she earned the title of college president in 1977, which she maintained for nine years.

She later was administrative assistant for the Board of Selectmen in Swampscott. Since 1991 she has had a managerial role at Searles Castle in Windham, owned by the Sisters of Mercy. She said she feels extraordinarily close to her order's founder, Catherine McAuley. Born in 1778, McAuley acquired a substantial inheritance in 1824. She used the money to build a home in Dublin, Ireland, where McAuley and several other females gave educational, religious and social aid to poor or homeless women and children.

"We have some property that because it's God's land, we want good sponsorship of it and want to keep it in good condition. So somebody has to do it. I feel very close to (McAuley) because she did the same," said Sister Parisi of overseeing Searles Castle.

"I used to read about Catherine McAuley in grammar school and she had a real hold on me. She helped young people find jobs, which is similar to what I did as a teacher. I've enjoyed teaching and working in business. Every experience I've had was wonderful."

Sister Parisi lives alone in Pelham, N.H., in low-income, elderly housing, and will celebrate her 47th year in the religious order this September.

Quincy resident Marika Geoghegan, 67, believes she entered sisterhood for the wrong reasons. While she grew up in an affluent home in New Orleans and earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts by the age of 22, alcoholism and abuse were prominent in her family. Only the sisters who taught Geoghegan in private school displayed virtues of true kindness and compassion.

"I knew I wanted to be a loving person. I thought I would learn how to be one if I followed the rules. I wasn't sure what I was getting into, but I knew I was getting out of my family," Geoghegan said.

Geoghegan resented the rules of the sisterhood, though her superiors allowed her to get a master's degree in fine arts, as well as move to Japan as a potter's apprentice for one year.

In Japan, Geoghegan examined other religions. She also started drinking, which continued when she returned to the United States. The sisters vowed to a life of poverty, so she had no money to buy alcohol. Instead, she'd sneak it from the convent's cupboards. Geoghegan's sisters didn't recognize that she had a drinking problem, and simply believed she had behavioral issues. The sisters Geoghegan lived with in the South End in the late 1970s told their superior she was disruptive, having nightmares, and impossible to live with.

"That night at the dinner table, it was the first I had heard of it. The Reverend Mother was crying. I was sitting there in shock. ... They gave me three weeks to get out. They didn't kick me out of the religious order, but out of the house," Geoghegan said.

Geoghegan eventually decided to leave the sisterhood altogether. Today, her home in Quincy is filled with colors and textures. She's still an artist and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, she's been sober for the past 11 years.

Patricia Perry still recalls the pangs of teenage heartache when her parents forbid her to enter a boarding school run by sisters her freshman year of high school. Perry grew up in a very religious home in Amesbury, emulating her aunt's religious vocation in the sisterhood.

"I just always wanted to be a nun. That doesn't mean I didn't like boys or didn't go to the football games. I just always wanted to do this," Perry said.

It wasn't long before Perry started on her religious path. She entered the St. Chretienne Academy in Salem, Mass., at 17 years old, and at 20, opted to live in Mount Saint Mary's Abbey, a cloistered monastery in Wrentham.

"I thought, 'If I'm going to be a nun, I'm going all the way,'" Perry said. "To go into the monastery, you need to be convinced of two things: one, that there is something more than life on planet Earth — that there is an afterlife; and two, that you, me, and everyone else is connected. I dedicated my life for you and for everybody else. I was living there for all of humanity."

Daily life in the monastery was divided between manual labor and prayer. A daily bell woke the sisters at 3 a.m. They rotated who milked the cows at that early hour, but everyone participated in community prayer.

"The only time I left was to vote, give blood, or go to the doctor," Perry said. "This way of life forced you to go slow, to seek a deeper peace, to see every person's goodness."

The nuns began making caramels in 1956 as a means of supporting their religious community, branding the candy line "Trappistine Quality Candy," and adding more varieties as they gained experience.

Perry has continued to work in the candy business since leaving the monastery in 1994, as a supervisor at Winfrey's Fudge and Chocolates in Rowley for 12 years, then at her husband, Jim's, insistence, as her own business, Carriagetown Chocolates in downtown Amesbury. Perry proudly sells candy made by her former cloistered sisters.

"I was loved unconditionally," Perry said of her years in the sisterhood. "If I could live my life over again, I would change nothing. To this day, I still treasure those years."

lives in a cloistered community. She generally remains silent, devotes numerous hours every day to prayer, and rarely leaves her monastery's property. There are roughly 110 nuns in Massachusetts13 of whom reside at the Monastery of Saint Clare in Andover.

is a member of an active religious community. She can live in a convent or alone in an apartment, maintain a job in varying sectors, but must give all her financial assets to her order of sisters. There are roughly 2,050 sisters in Massachusetts.

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