Decision for Happiness, the true story of a young nun

[Jacob]

I am familiar with it.  I wrote the first version of the IHM article at Wikipedia based off that interview and an article that used to be available at E. Michael Jones' site about the IHMs along with a lot of archived Time Magazine stories about the sisters from the sixties.

I wish Coulson or Rogers had written a book on the subject.  A few interviews and articles on the Web don't do the tragedy justice.

Well, you seem to be a writer, and there seems to be a book that needs writing, and you seem to have the subject knowledge...I'm just saying...

Seriously, I would love to read a well-researched book on that subject. That's exactly the kind of thing that interests me, a macro big-picture look at something of transcendental importance that really hasn't gotten the justice it deserves.

Agreed that there should be a book!  But, thank you, but I'm not the one to write it.  I'm deaf and books like this take a ton of interviews.  Most of those folks are dead anyway or too old to be found on the Web by the likes of me.  So it goes.

[FamilyRosary]

More nuns! This time from the Diocese of Pittsburgh, early 1960's.

This one seems to dig in a little deeper than the others. I wish I had discovered it first.

[Maximilian]

Here is another video in the same genre:

[Maximilian]

When you see so many postulants, so many novices, you can't help wondering, "Where are all these women now?"

There are the small handful of old, liberal nuns still hanging around such as we see in the modern reaction video put out by the Sisters of St. Agnes. But all the thousands of young women who appeared to have a vocation in the time just before Vatican II, what has happened to them all? So many convents, each of them with large annual classes of entrants, thousands of devoted young women prepared to live a life of sacrifice, can it really all have vanished into thin air?

[FamilyRosary]

You might enjoy this video from 2014 by a local Pittsburgh TV affiliate. They go to several area convents to interview the remaining nuns and see what they're doing now. The debate over more traditional versus more liberal orders also enters in.

The most depressing thing for me is when questioned about the tremendous loss of vocations since the 1960's, they all say basically the same thing: We just have to be patient, God is in charge, the vocations will return any day now.

If ten years after Vatican II they would have been saying this it would be understandable; after all, Catholics were taught to be patient and obedient.  Twenty years later it would have been foolish but forgivable; nobody likes to admit they're wrong and have wasted two decades on the wrong course. But fifty years later? Now we're deep into stubbornness, self-denial, and lack of contact with reality.