Things You Should Know Before You Join a Cloistered Community

Brief Overview

• Joining a cloistered community means permanently leaving the world behind in the most literal sense, and depending on the strictness of the enclosure, you may never again attend a family funeral, take a vacation, or walk freely in public for the rest of your life.
• The three solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that you profess are not general ideals but binding, specific, and daily commitments that will govern every dimension of your existence, including what you eat, what you wear, when you sleep, and what you are allowed to do with your own time.
• Communal life in a monastery is genuinely demanding in ways that have nothing to do with prayer or asceticism; living in close quarters with the same small group of women or men for decades, under a common rule and a superior’s authority, will test your patience and your ego in ways that no amount of retreat experience can prepare you for.
• The formation process before final vows typically spans several years across multiple stages, and communities have the right to dismiss you at any stage if they judge that the vocation is not genuine or that you are not suited to their life, which means the commitment you feel is real long before the commitment is formally and permanently reciprocated.
• Many monasteries operate under serious financial pressures, maintain aging communities with few new members, and face real institutional uncertainties about their future, so the community you enter in your twenties may look substantially different by the time you reach your fifties.
• The authentic purpose of cloistered life is not to escape the world’s problems but to intercede for the world through prayer, and the Church teaches that this hidden apostolate has genuine and significant value for the universal Church, even when nobody outside the monastery walls can see or measure it.

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What Cloistered Life Actually Is, and Why the Definition Matters

You need to be precise about what you mean by cloistered life before you start visiting monasteries, because the term covers a wide range of communities with substantially different forms of enclosure, different daily rhythms, different spiritual traditions, and different expectations for candidates. In the broadest sense, a cloistered community is one in which the members live within an enclosed space that is reserved for the community alone and from which they do not ordinarily go out into the world. The Church currently recognizes three distinct types of enclosure for women’s contemplative monasteries, as established by Pope Francis’s 2016 Apostolic Constitution Vultum Dei Quaerere and its 2018 implementing instruction Cor Orans. Papal cloister is the strictest form, in which nuns do not leave the monastery except for serious reasons defined by Rome and carry out no external ministry whatsoever. Constitutional cloister is defined by the norms of each individual order’s rule and constitutions, and it allows for some apostolic or charitable work attached to the monastery, such as a retreat house, that would be impossible under papal enclosure. Monastic cloister, which is associated with communities in the Benedictine tradition, allows for wider forms of hospitality and a greater degree of interaction with guests, while still maintaining the essentially enclosed character of contemplative life. Some orders under papal cloister, such as the Poor Clares, take a fourth explicit vow of enclosure in addition to the three evangelical counsels, making the physical boundaries of the monastery itself a matter of formal vowed commitment. These distinctions are not bureaucratic technicalities; they describe fundamentally different ways of living, and the difference between a Carmelite monastery where you never leave and a Benedictine community where you can greet guests freely and occasionally travel on retreat is significant. Before you begin any serious discernment about a specific community, you need to know which form of enclosure that community practices, what that form requires concretely from you in daily life, and whether that specific form matches what your discernment is actually drawing you toward.

The Catechism’s Teaching on Contemplative Life, and Why It Is More Demanding Than It Sounds

The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the monastic life of nuns devoted entirely to God in prayer and penance as a manifestation of the interior aspect of the mystery of the Church, specifically the personal intimacy with Christ that is hidden from the eyes of men but which is the living heart of the Church’s existence (CCC 921). This language is beautiful and true, but it can also function as a kind of protective coating over realities that are genuinely demanding and that candidates often underestimate. The Catechism also teaches that the three evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty, and obedience are at the heart of the consecrated life and that they represent a total dedication to God that is rooted in baptism but taken to a new depth in religious profession (CCC 915). What this means in practical terms is that when you join a cloistered community and eventually make solemn profession, you are not simply agreeing to a demanding lifestyle; you are making a public, permanent, binding gift of your entire self to God through the mediating structures of the community and its rule. The Church also teaches that this form of life has genuine apostolic value, not despite its hiddenness from the world but because of it (CCC 921). The praying heart of the cloistered community is understood to be a real contribution to the mission of the Church, interceding for the world, sustaining the Church’s prayer, and providing a witness to the absolute priority of God over every other value. That theological conviction is the foundation on which every practical demand of cloistered life rests, and if you do not genuinely share it, no amount of appreciation for liturgical beauty, communal simplicity, or the aesthetics of monastic life will carry you through the decades of ordinary, unglamorous, daily commitment that cloistered profession requires. The theology is not decoration; it is the load-bearing structure of the entire life, and you need to own it personally and honestly before you commit.

Every Order Is Different, and Choosing the Wrong One Is a Real Possibility

One of the most important things nobody tells candidates at vocation fairs is how profoundly different cloistered communities are from one another, even within the same broad tradition, and how consequential those differences are for the kind of person who will thrive there. There are at least seventeen different orders of cloistered or contemplative nuns in the United States alone, housed across roughly three hundred monasteries, and each order has its own schedule, charism, spiritual tradition, habit, rule, penitential practices, and understanding of what monastic life is for. The Poor Clares wake at half past midnight for Matins and emphasize communal poverty in the tradition of Saint Francis and Saint Clare. The Carmelites, by far the largest cloistered order in the United States with sixty-three monasteries, place their emphasis on mental prayer, solitude, and intimate union with God in the tradition of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. The Benedictines and Cistercians organize their life around the ancient Benedictine motto of ora et labora, pray and work, and often emphasize liturgical chant, hospitality, and the wisdom of Saint Benedict’s Rule. The Dominican nuns situate contemplative life within the Order of Preachers’ commitment to truth and the intellectual tradition. These are not superficial differences in scheduling or habit color; they are genuinely different spiritualities, different ways of understanding prayer, different approaches to silence and community, and different accounts of what God is asking of the cloistered person. Choosing a community whose charism does not match your own spiritual temperament is one of the most common and painful mistakes candidates make, and it tends to become fully apparent only after you have entered and settled into the actual rhythm of life there. Spending significant time at multiple communities before beginning any formal application process, reading the foundational documents and charism statements of each, and talking honestly with women or men who have been living that specific life for decades are not optional luxuries in discernment; they are basic due diligence.

The Formation Process Is Long, Demanding, and the Community Can End It at Any Stage

Most candidates romanticize the formation process before they enter it, imagining it as a period of deepening prayer and gradual integration into a beautiful way of life. That is partly true, and partly a significant underestimate of what formation actually involves. The formation process in a cloistered community typically moves through several distinct stages: a period of initial inquiry or correspondence, a live-in experience called an aspirancy or visiting period, the postulancy which usually lasts between six months and a year, the novitiate which typically runs for one to two years, a period of temporary profession lasting from three to nine years depending on the order, and finally solemn or perpetual profession. Each stage involves genuine evaluation of the candidate by the community and its formation director, and communities have both the right and the responsibility to decline to move a candidate forward if they judge that the vocation is not genuine, that the candidate’s psychological health is not adequate for cloistered life, or that the candidate’s temperament and charism do not fit the community. This means you can invest several years of your life in formation and still not receive the community’s yes at the end of it, and that outcome is not a failure on your part or the community’s; it is the formation process working as it is meant to work. Many communities now require psychological assessment as part of the admissions process, in line with the Church’s instructions for the formation of consecrated persons, and a community that does not take psychological suitability seriously in its admissions is actually not serving its candidates well. During the novitiate, you will be systematically formed in the spirituality, practices, rule, and community life of the order, which is an intensive and demanding process of conversion that touches every area of your personality, your habits, your prayer, and your relationships. Temporary profession is the period during which you live the full life of the community under temporary vows, and it is during this long middle period that the full reality of what you have chosen becomes most clear and that the question of whether to proceed to final vows is genuinely tested.

The Daily Schedule Is Non-Negotiable, and It Will Reshape You Whether You Like It or Not

Before you romanticize the monastery, sit with the actual daily schedule of the specific community you are considering, because it is both more demanding and more structurally fixed than most candidates anticipate. Cloistered communities organize their entire day around the Liturgy of the Hours, which is the Church’s official daily prayer consisting of psalms, hymns, canticles, and scripture readings spread across multiple prayer times from the early morning through the end of the day. Different communities observe different numbers of hours and at different times of day. Poor Clare communities may wake at midnight or half past midnight for Matins, then rise again at five in the morning for Lauds. Other communities begin at four or five in the morning and pray together at set intervals throughout the day. The times are not approximate or flexible; they are fixed by the community’s rule and observed communally regardless of how tired you are, how sick you feel, or how much unfinished work you have on your desk. In addition to the Liturgy of the Hours, communities celebrate daily Mass together, observe periods of formal meditation or mental prayer, and carry out periods of manual work that vary by order and monastery. Benedictine and Cistercian communities follow the ancient motto ora et labora, organizing the day in a balance of prayer, work, and lectio divina, which is the slow, meditative reading of scripture. Some communities include significant periods of agricultural labor, cooking, baking, or handicrafts through which the monastery supports itself financially. The rigidity of the schedule is not arbitrary; it is the structural container that makes the common life possible and that gives the contemplative life its characteristic rhythm and discipline. But it also means that your individual preferences about when you pray, when you sleep, when you work, and what you eat are permanently subordinated to the community’s rule, and that subordination begins on the first day and continues until the last.

Obedience Is the Vow Nobody Is Fully Ready For

Of the three evangelical counsels, poverty and chastity often receive the most attention in vocation conversations, but most experienced religious will tell you that obedience is the vow that proves most demanding in lived experience, most formative in practice, and most surprising to the person who thought they understood it before they entered. In a cloistered community, obedience is not simply a general disposition of willingness to serve; it is a specific, structured, daily submission of your will to the authority of your abbess or prioress, who represents Christ in the community according to the Church’s understanding of the vowed life (CCC 915). This means that the superior assigns your work, regulates your schedule, governs your contacts with the outside world, makes decisions about your living situation within the community, and holds the authority to direct your life in ways that your own preferences and judgments may not always agree with. Before the Second Vatican Council, the structures of obedience in many communities were extremely detailed and sometimes infantilizing; superiors had to be consulted before a sister could borrow an extra pen, and kneeling to ask permission for ordinary items was standard practice. Post-conciliar reforms substantially changed the specific forms of obedience in many communities, giving superiors more discretion and giving members more personal responsibility, but the fundamental reality of a structured authority relationship remains at the heart of every form of religious obedience. The challenge that catches most candidates off guard is not the dramatic acts of obedience but the small, daily, cumulative experience of having your will regularly redirected by another person’s authority. You are assigned to work in the kitchen when you would prefer to be in the scriptorium. Your room assignment is changed. Your request to spend additional time in prayer is redirected toward community work. The abbess’s decision about a community matter differs from your own judgment. Persevering through these ordinary, unspectacular experiences of deferred will, without bitterness and without the quiet internal resistance that can poison a community life, is the real interior work of the vow of obedience, and nothing quite prepares you for it except living it.

Poverty in a Monastery Is Not What You Think It Is

Many candidates arrive at a monastery with a romanticized image of poverty as simplicity, clean lines, and freedom from material clutter, and that picture is partly accurate. But the full reality of poverty in cloistered life includes dimensions that are rarely discussed in vocation literature. When you profess solemn vows in a cloistered community, you give up the right to own anything personally. Everything you use, from your habit to your cell’s furniture to the books in the library, belongs to the community, not to you. You do not choose what you wear, what you eat, what tools you work with, or how the community’s material resources are allocated; all of those decisions belong to the superior and, at a broader level, to the community’s governing structures. This is a genuine interior freedom for people who have genuinely integrated the vow, and many long-professed religious describe poverty as one of the most liberating aspects of their life. But the path to that integration is not always smooth, and the early years of living without personal property, without the ability to buy a book you want or a food item that comforts you, without the small daily acts of material self-determination that most people take entirely for granted, can produce a form of interior resistance that takes time and honest prayer to address. Beyond the individual experience of poverty, cloistered communities also live the institutional reality of collective poverty, which means the community itself often operates with very limited material resources. Many monasteries support themselves through the sale of goods such as bread, jam, beer, candles, or altar bread, or through the generosity of benefactors, or both, and the financial situation of many communities is fragile. The community you enter may face genuine material austerity, aging infrastructure, and financial stress that affects daily life in concrete ways, and you need to be honest with yourself about whether you can live within those constraints gracefully over the long term.

Communal Life Will Be Your Biggest Spiritual Test, and It Will Not Be What You Expected

The most consistently underestimated challenge of cloistered life is not the prayer schedule, not the enclosure, and not the poverty. It is the communal life itself, specifically the experience of living day after day, year after year, with the same small group of people, under the same rule, in the same physical space, with no option to take a break by going somewhere else. Cloistered communities are small, typically ranging from fewer than ten members to perhaps twenty or thirty in a larger monastery, and the entire membership shares meals, prayer, work, and recreation in close proximity. You will know your sisters’ or brothers’ habits, irritants, moods, and personality limitations thoroughly and quickly, and they will know yours just as well. The monastic tradition has always recognized communal life as one of the primary schools of virtue, and Saint Benedict’s Rule is realistic about the friction that arises in community, prescribing patience, mutual service, and the recognition of Christ in the members of the community as the fundamental responses to those inevitable tensions. But knowing this theologically is different from living it practically when the same community member’s habit of being late to choir for the third consecutive month has become a genuine internal irritation that your prayer is struggling to address. In communities practicing stricter enclosure, the usual safety valves that people in ordinary life use to manage relational friction, such as spending time alone, seeing different friends, changing environments, or simply having more space, are not available in the same way. The interior work of letting go of resentment, practicing genuine fraternal charity toward people you find genuinely difficult, and remaining open to being corrected yourself by the community and by your superior is not a theoretical spiritual challenge; it is a daily, specific, and sometimes grinding practical demand. Communities that have a genuinely healthy culture of fraternal charity, honest and boundaried communication, and good leadership from an abbess or prior who is psychologically mature and spiritually grounded handle these tensions much better than communities where dysfunction has been allowed to take root and calcify over years.

The Enclosure Is Real, and the Losses It Requires Are Permanent

Candidates often intellectually accept the idea of enclosure during discernment without fully reckoning with what it means in the specific, concrete dimensions of their own lives. In communities practicing papal enclosure, once you make final profession, you do not leave the monastery except for very serious reasons such as a significant medical need. You do not attend your parents’ funerals. You do not go to your siblings’ weddings or meet their children as they grow up. You do not take vacations, attend conferences, or have the kind of spontaneous freedom of movement that is a basic feature of ordinary adult life. Poor Clare communities are explicit about this; their rule of enclosure means that sisters do not leave once they have made perpetual profession, not even for family emergencies or deaths. When one candidate asked the Mother Abbess of a Poor Clare monastery whether she would be unable to come to her father’s deathbed, the answer was direct and honest. She would not, but the entire community would pray for him at that moment, which is not a comfortable substitution but a real one rooted in the theology of communal intercession. In communities practicing monastic cloister in the Benedictine tradition, there is somewhat more flexibility; nuns may travel on retreat, have greater interaction with guests, and maintain more regular contact with family. But even in these communities, the basic structure of your life is defined by the enclosure, and the freedom of movement you currently take for granted is no longer yours in the same way. The grief that comes with these losses is real and should be acknowledged honestly, not spiritualized away. Many women who enter cloistered life describe a period of genuine mourning for the family life, friendships, and personal freedoms they have surrendered, and communities that allow space for that grief to be acknowledged and processed honestly are healthier than those that treat any expression of loss as a sign of weak faith.

Your Family Will Struggle With This in Ways You Cannot Fully Anticipate

One of the most consistently underestimated dimensions of discerning a cloistered vocation is the impact it will have on your family, and specifically the gap between what your family might intellectually support and what they emotionally experience when the reality becomes concrete. Your parents may be devout Catholics who genuinely believe in religious vocations and who publicly express joy at your calling, while privately grieving the loss of the ordinary future they imagined for you. Your siblings may struggle with the reality that you will not be available for family milestones in the way that matters most to them. If you are an only child, or one of a very small family, the weight of what your entering a cloistered community means for your aging parents is a real and serious consideration that deserves honest attention in discernment, not dismissal as an obstacle to overcome. The Church does not require families to be enthusiastic about a contemplative vocation, only that they not obstruct what is genuinely a divine calling. Cloistered communities limit family visits, and the specific restrictions vary significantly by order and by the strictness of the enclosure. In some strictly enclosed communities, family visits happen through a double grille, a metal screen that physically separates the nun from her visitors, and they occur only a few times per year. In communities with monastic cloister, interactions with family may be warmer and more frequent, though still structured and limited. The hardest version of this reality is the parent who comes to understand, during a visit, that the separation is not temporary or occasional but is now the permanent structure of their relationship with their child for the rest of their lives. Most experienced abbesses and formation directors will tell you that the way candidates handle the truth of what their enclosure will mean for their families is one of the clearest indicators of whether the vocation is genuinely free and mature or whether unresolved family dynamics are playing a role in the discernment that has not been adequately examined.

The Financial Reality of Most Monasteries Is Neither Secure nor Simple

Candidates rarely think about the financial dimension of monastic life before they enter, and some are genuinely surprised to learn that cloistered monasteries are not financially sustained by the diocese or the universal Church. Monasteries support themselves through their own work, whether that means baking altar bread, producing artisan goods, operating a retreat house, farming, brewing, or a combination of activities, and through the gifts of benefactors who support contemplative communities they value. Many cloistered communities operate with limited financial reserves, aging physical infrastructure, and a membership profile that includes more older women than younger ones in communities that have not been growing. When you enter a monastery, you enter its financial reality along with its spiritual life, and that reality in many cases includes genuine material austerity, deferred maintenance on aging buildings, and the kind of institutional fragility that comes from small communities without large endowments. The 2018 Vatican instruction Cor Orans addressed this reality by establishing requirements for monasteries to demonstrate a degree of institutional viability, including adequate numbers of members and material sustainability, before being recognized as stable foundations, and by establishing federations of monasteries that can provide mutual support between communities that would otherwise be isolated and vulnerable. This institutional context matters for candidates because the monastery you enter in your twenties is the one you will be living in as its membership and resources change over the decades of your life there. A community that is financially stressed, geographically isolated, and struggling to maintain itself with a small and aging membership presents a genuinely different set of long-term realities than a growing, well-resourced community that is actively receiving new members and expanding. Asking honest, specific questions about a community’s financial situation, its membership trajectory, and its participation in its order’s federation is not worldly pragmatism that conflicts with the spirit of poverty; it is basic responsible discernment.

Silence Is a Tool, Not a Punishment, but Learning That Takes Time

Almost every person who enters a cloistered community for the first time is struck by the silence, and almost every person who has lived in one for more than a few years will tell you that the actual experience of silence is very different from what they anticipated. Before entering, candidates tend to imagine the silence as peaceful, calming, and spiritually productive, a welcome relief from the noise and distraction of the world. And it is all of those things, but it is also much more demanding than that romantic image suggests. When you live in substantial silence over a long period of time, the interior noise that you have habitually managed by filling your life with external stimulation has nowhere to go except into your own awareness. Unresolved emotional experiences surface. Old fears and resentments that you had managed rather than resolved become more insistent. The silence strips away the external framework of busyness, productivity, and social performance that most people in ordinary life use as a substitute for genuine interior attention, and it places you directly in front of yourself in ways that can be uncomfortable, disorienting, and sometimes genuinely difficult. This is why the monastic tradition has always understood the interior life as requiring formation, not just good intentions. A skilled novice director helps the novice learn to work with the silence productively, using it as a context for genuine prayer and lectio divina rather than as an occasion for unhealthy rumination. Communities that practice a vow of silence, or structured periods of the great silence from Compline through the morning, have specific norms about when and how members may speak, and learning to live within those norms requires genuine adjustment that most candidates underestimate. The silence also applies to your relationship with information about the wider world; cloistered communities typically have very limited access to news, media, and outside information, and adjusting to that restriction in an era of pervasive connectivity is a more significant interior shift than most candidates anticipate.

The Question of Psychological Suitability Is Not an Insult to Your Faith

In the decades following the Second Vatican Council and particularly in the wake of the abuse crisis, the Church has moved toward a much more intentional approach to psychological assessment in the formation of consecrated persons, and this shift is genuinely good news for candidates and communities alike. Most well-run cloistered communities now include some form of psychological evaluation as part of their admissions process, and this is not a bureaucratic obstacle or a sign of skepticism about your faith; it is an expression of the community’s responsibility to its members and to the vocation itself. The reality is that some people who are drawn to cloistered life are drawn to it for reasons that have more to do with avoiding the relational demands of ordinary life, escaping personal history, or managing anxiety and depression through the structure of the monastery than with a genuine call to contemplative prayer and communal life. A cloistered monastery is not a good therapeutic environment for someone whose primary need is intensive psychological treatment, and communities that have learned this the hard way are the ones most likely to take psychological assessment seriously. This does not mean that psychologically complex people cannot have genuine vocations to contemplative life; the saints of the monastic tradition include people who struggled significantly with their interior lives, including John of the Cross who wrote about the dark night of the soul, Therese of Lisieux who described long periods of spiritual aridity, and Thomas Merton who was remarkably candid about his interior conflicts. The question is not whether you have psychological complexity but whether you have the basic health, self-awareness, and relational capacity needed to live the communal life in a way that contributes to rather than destabilizes the community. Going into the psychological assessment with honesty and without defensiveness is the most productive thing you can do both for your own discernment and for the community’s ability to make a good decision.

Leaving Is Possible but Not Simple, and the Process Has Real Weight

One of the things candidates should understand clearly before they enter is what the process of leaving looks like at each stage of formation, because understanding this process is part of making a free and informed commitment at each stage. Before final profession, leaving a cloistered community is legally and procedurally possible, and in the earlier stages of formation it requires relatively straightforward action. A candidate in the postulancy or novitiate may leave or be asked to leave without the formal canonical process required for someone who has made solemn vows. The temporary vows period is precisely that, temporary, meaning that both you and the community retain the freedom not to proceed to final commitment. This structure is intentional; it builds in genuine discernment at each stage and prevents people from making an irrevocable commitment before they have genuinely tested the life and the life has tested them. Final or solemn vows are a different matter, and leaving after final profession is a serious canonical process that requires a formal request to the Holy See and the bishop’s involvement. The Church does not grant such dispensations as a matter of routine, and the process of seeking release from final vows is demanding, lengthy, and treated with appropriate gravity by the Church’s authorities. This is not designed to trap people but to maintain the integrity of the commitment they made freely and publicly. Candidates considering final profession should understand that the Church means what it says about the permanence of solemn vows, and that the serious weight of that permanence is precisely why the years of temporary profession preceding it are so important as a period of genuine testing and discernment. Entering any stage of formation without understanding the canonical weight of the commitments you are approaching is not the kind of freedom that authentic religious consent requires.

The Witness of the Cloistered Life Has Genuine Significance for the Church

Having been honest about all of the demands and difficulties of cloistered life, it is equally important to be honest about what the Church genuinely believes this life is for and why it matters in a way that is not reducible to personal fulfillment or spiritual aesthetics. The Catechism teaches that cloistered nuns manifest the interior aspect of the mystery of the Church and offer a wholly spiritual apostolate to the Church through prayer, penance, and the hidden witness of their lives (CCC 921). This is not a consolation prize for people who are not doing the more visible work of active ministry; it is a genuine theological account of why contemplative life has been part of the Church from its earliest centuries and why the Church continues to value and support it. Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans reminds us that the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8:27), and the monastic tradition has always understood the community’s ceaseless prayer as a participation in that intercession. The Catechism also connects the evangelical counsels to the eschatological witness of consecrated life, which is the witness that this world is not our final home, that the coming Kingdom of God is real, and that human beings are made for a union with God that goes beyond anything this world can offer (CCC 916). A cloistered community living that witness faithfully, even in hiddenness and without public recognition, is a genuinely significant sign to the Church and to the world. The improbable revival of traditional cloistered communities among younger Catholic women in recent years, with new monasteries being built and growing communities reporting steady streams of serious candidates, suggests that this witness continues to speak to something deep in the human and Catholic imagination. That revival is worth taking seriously as a sign of the Spirit’s continued activity in this ancient form of life.

Choosing the Right Community Is More Important Than Choosing the Right Vocation

This may be the single most practical piece of honest counsel you can receive before beginning the formal application process for a cloistered community. Many candidates identify the contemplative vocation as their calling and then treat the choice of community as a secondary or administrative matter, assuming that all cloistered communities are more or less equivalent expressions of the same basic reality. They are not. The spiritual tradition, charism, communal culture, leadership style, formation program, and everyday texture of different cloistered communities differ substantially, and a person who would genuinely thrive and persevere in a Carmelite monastery with its emphasis on mental prayer and solitude might struggle significantly in a Benedictine community built around liturgical chant, manual labor, and a culture of hospitality. The personality of a community’s leadership, specifically the abbess or prioress and formation director, shapes the interior culture of the community in ways that are difficult to assess from the outside but that are critically important to the health of the people living within it. An abbess who is psychologically mature, spiritually grounded, genuinely interested in the formation of her sisters as whole persons, and honest about the community’s limitations is a very different superior from one who manages community dysfunction through denial, controls information, or uses her authority to manage rather than form the people in her care. The Benedictine Rule’s instruction that an abbot or abbess must be more concerned for souls than for anything else is ancient wisdom that reflects a real and recurring challenge in monastic governance. Before you commit to a specific community, spend significant time there on multiple occasions and in different seasons of the year, talk honestly with women who have been living in that community for many years, ask direct questions about the formation program and the community’s culture of accountability, and bring what you observe and experience to prayer and to honest conversation with a skilled spiritual director who knows you well. The right community for you is the one whose charism matches the way God has actually made you, not the one that sounds most impressive or appears most ideally contemplative in its marketing materials.

Making the Decision With Full Information Is the Only Way to Make It Well

If you have accompanied this article to its final section, you now have a clearer picture of cloistered life than most candidates do when they begin serious discernment, and that clarity is itself a form of respect for the vocation you are considering. The Church does not ask for impulsive or uninformed generosity; she asks for the free, mature, and fully informed consent that authentic religious profession requires. Saint Benedict’s Rule is characteristically honest about this, instructing that a candidate should be shown all the hard and rough things that lead to God before making any binding commitment, so that if they persevere they do so with full knowledge of what they have chosen. That ancient wisdom is not a deterrent but a foundation; candidates who enter cloistered life knowing its genuine demands honestly reported and having tested their response to those demands through real experience are the ones most likely to persevere with genuine joy and integrity. The signs of a genuine vocation to contemplative life include a real, active, and nourishing personal prayer life that already centers and sustains you before you enter, a temperament that finds genuine meaning and not merely discomfort in silence and interiority, a genuine love for communal life and not merely tolerance of it, the psychological maturity to live under authority without chronic resentment, and the honest support of a spiritual director and confessor who know you well and affirm what they see. If you have those foundations, take them seriously, test them further through extended time in the community you are drawn to, continue in honest spiritual direction, and allow the discernment to move at the pace it requires rather than the pace your enthusiasm recommends. Cloistered life is demanding, genuinely significant, and for the person called to it by God, genuinely sustaining in ways that no other form of life provides. Going in with clear eyes does not diminish the gift; it is the only way to give it honestly.