A review of Susan Flansburg's Feels Like Home: Finding Your Way to Catholic Sisterhood 

By Sister Beth Murphy, OP

Though I’ve been quite aware of the shortage of Catholic sisters in the United States for some time, an experience last year took me by surprise. Our vocation director Sister Denise Glazik and I were at my alma mater—Eastern Illinois University—for a Busy Persons Retreat at the Newman Center where my religious vocation was nurtured 40 years earlier. It was Catholic Sisters Week, and I had a brilliant idea: We’d invite the students to create selfies for social media with posters that included a shout-out to their favorite Catholic sisters. 

“I’m not sure that will work,” Sister Denise calmly remarked. “I don’t think the students have much contact with sisters.” She was correct. An informal poll that day uncovered two students among 30 or so who had a relationship with a Catholic sister. Two. 

THAT is why I’m so happy to see Susan Flansburg’s book, Feels Like Home: A Single Catholic Woman’s Guide to Religious Life in the U.S. The volume is slim enough to fit in a purse, and inexpensive enough that every parish, campus ministry center, convent, spiritual director, religious community and diocesan vocation office should have a dozen of them on the shelf, ready to share with women in the midst of discerning their life’s vocation.  

Dare I say, parents may want to have a copy on hand, too. It will help familiarize you with the process of discerning religious life, introduce you to apostolic, missionary, monastic, and cloistered communities, and prepare you for that golden moment when you talk with your own child about possibilities for a way of life the world may need now more than ever. Read Sister Beth’s whole review!