It is an unusual real estate offer: A property of more than 136,000 square meters (34 acres), including 11,664 square meters (125,550 square feet) of living space, and 130 rooms. The Benedictine nuns from St. Erentraud’s Abbey near Kellenried in the south of the state of Baden-Württemberg, between Lake Constance and Ulm, are looking for someone to buy their convent. Price: Just under €5 million ($5.9 million).
Sister Eva-Maria confirms the fact on the telephone but apologetically declines to give details. “At the moment, we’re not saying much about it,” she says. The convent has a welcoming and informative website, with one main photo showing far more sisters than the dozen or so living there today. In 2018, there were still 19 nuns at the convent.
The first ones came there in 1924, and the convent was officially founded two years after that. Now, the description of the simple 100-year anniversary celebration in 2024 can be found on the same page as the announcement that the recently renovated guest wing has closed. According to expert estimates, even the sale of the large buildings will not bring in any great profit for the order, as building suitable accommodation for the remaining nuns will be expensive.
A growing trend
The intended sale of the Kellenried convent attracts notice because of its advertisement with a commercial agent who is specialized in such properties. But it is not the only one of its kind. Every year, dozens of monasteries and convents in Germany, both large and small, are being closed down. According to figures from the German Conference of Superiors of Religious Orders (DOK), which represents Catholic orders in Germany, the number of convents in Germany fell from 1,627 to 964 in the 10 years between 2012 and 2022. The number of monasteries fell from 461 to 385 in the same time period.
Traditionally, there have always been more nuns and convents than monks and monasteries in Germany, not least because in the , women are barred from being ordained as deacons, priests or bishops.
In 2004, the country’s female orders had 26,370 members and male orders 5,108, according to the DOK. Ten years later, there were 17,513 women and 4,370 men, and in 2024 just 9,467 women and 3,161 men. The numbers in female orders since the end of the Second World War peaked in 1960, when there were more than 93,000 members.
Several contributing factors
DOK deputy chair Maria Thoma Dikow believes there are various reasons why numbers have plunged. For one, she told DW, the binding force of the church has diminished. She also said that it was now rare to find families with many children, which used to provide quite a few nuns.
And there is another factor she believes is important. “In earlier times, women were barely able to study, and it was hard for them to find a job in private enterprise that carried responsibility,” she said, while in the religious orders they had such opportunities. For 10 years, she herself has been the superior general of the “Heiligenstädter Schulschwestern,” an order that is committed to social care.
Dikow said her order had also been active in Mozambique for a long while. “A lot of young women join there,” she said. “And there, I have the impression that this step is a real chance for young women today to emancipate themselves, to avoid a marriage that is mostly about having lots of children, and instead to have a profession.”
The numbers in women’s orders have dropped in many countries, she said, naming France, Spain, Poland, Canada, the US and Australia, among others. Even though a second pope in succession has now emerged from a religious order, such organizations appear to still be in crisis.
The rapid decline in Germany, which has caused many an order to almost die out, has some consequences for wider society. In recent years, orders have been handing over schools or hospitals that they ran for a long time to dioceses, or even to charitable associations or private organizations.
Particularly in Catholic-dominated rural areas such as the Eifel, Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, numerous convents and monasteries have been given up in the past decades. They include well-known ones like the Trappist Mariawald Abbey in the Eifel, the Franciscan Hardenberg-Neviges monastery northeast of Düsseldorf and the Franciscan monastery in the Westphalian pilgrimage destination of Werl. It should be noted that the trend is being seen even within , which only have a few monastic communities. Today, the proud house of the Kaiserswerth deaconesses in the north of Düsseldorf is a four-star hotel.
The farewell from a familiar convent or monastery is often a painful one for those affected. The Franciscan father Damian Bieger, who lived in the Hardenberg-Neviges monastery, summed it up years ago for the Catholic media outlet katholisch.de: “In Neviges, I got to know the Franciscans. I joined the order there; I was chaplain there; I was a minister there. It hurt horribly.”
‘A liberation as well’
Sister Maria Thoma doesn’t put it quite as drastically. But, she said, the farewell for nuns was often still painful. “Very good, sensitive and time-consuming support is necessary,” she said. But the mother superior said that such steps were sometimes “a liberation as well.” She said she was aware of “very successful examples with sisters who say: We were so happy when we sold our last piece of property. A lot of worries were lifted from our shoulders.” She said that her own convent in Heiligenstadt was ready “to try something new” and had already cleared out one story and rented it to a provider of disabled care.
This example fits well with the ideas of Ulrike Rose, an expert on the preservation of existing buildings, as opposed to the construction of new buildings. Her business specializes in convents.
Rose has worked with the big Benedictine Abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen, which once numbered more than 100 sisters and currently has 33, the convent of the Oberzell Franciscans in Würzburg, as well as other Bavarian convents. It is “so worthwhile thinking about the future of the buildings with the sisters and working toward sustainable solutions,” Rose said.
If it were possible to preserve the basic substance of a convent, it could be of benefit for a whole region, Rose said. Many local people have an affection convents and monasteries whether they were involved with the church or not, she said, before adding that communal residential projects initiated by housing associations, spaces for cultural and educational activities or suitable accommodation for people looking for peace and spiritual support could all be established equally well within part of such a complex.
“Today we are talking about the prize possessions of the orders, the big mother houses, as well as manors or small castles” that people gifted or ceded to orders, Rose said.
‘Openness is needed’
The ability of a convent community to remain in existence despite changed circumstances “does not have anything to do with the age of the sisters but rather with their openness,” Rose said. She said that for many sisters, it was easier to completely give up a complex in order to put an end to a distressing situation than to allow strangers to use a building together with them. The grandeur of certain buildings was often, in fact, a burden, she said. “Importantly, people need to be open to being helped,” Rose said.
Time to work on solutions is also necessary, according to Rose. But, she said, it was often possible to come up with projects that took into account the wishes of the convent and kept the common good in view. “Clever architectural solutions can serve to preserve the living space of the sisters and to distribute the burden of maintenance across several shoulders,” she said.
This article was translated from German.
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