Female cloistered communities in Malta’s five monasteries have dwindled by an average 62% over the last 30 years, according to a study on cultural heritage management.

The drop is based on statistics collected between 1992 and 2022 and suggests an “elevated” rate of decline for these traditional forms of religious life, according to researcher Daniela Apap Bologna.

An international phenomenon, the decline is unfolding at varying speeds in different countries, with the study referring to a 39% drop in female cloistered communities over the same 30-year period in Italy.

The Maltese research peers into four of the five female contemplative monasteries and considers them “living religious heritage at risk” due to diminishing vocations.

These include St Ursula’s and St Catherine’s in Valletta, St Scholastica in Vittoriosa, St Margaret’s in Cospicua and St Peter’s in Mdina – all still inhabited and functioning to varying degrees.

Apap Bologna aimed to raise awareness and a level of urgency within the international field of cultural heritage management to treat these monuments as living heritage.

Her MA dissertation points out that unless the downward trend is reversed by the natural intake of community members, secularisation will take its course and the phenomenon could lead to their closure.

The sharpest decline was experienced in St Peter’s Monastery, which went from 32 nuns in 1967 down to two – and now one single nun since 2022; while St Ursula had retained the highest number at 11, down from 26 over 50 years ago, until two years ago. That number has since dropped to nine nuns.

The cohort at St Scholastica halved to 10; St Margaret’s dropped from 21 to eight; and St Catherine’s decreased sharply from 32 to three.

According to the study, St Ursula’s also had an ideal age distribution among its members, with the youngest cloistered nuns averaging 65 years of age.

Lost forever

The diminishing communities within the monasteries, mostly architectural monuments of high heritage value, could also have implications on the “spaces of significance” they inhabit, Apap Bologna said, adding that the survival of this form of living heritage relied on a steady intake of new members.

Her study, ‘Female Cloistered Monasteries in Malta: Issues and Challenges in Safeguarding Living Religious Heritage in the Event of Secularisation’, aimed to anticipate the discussion on the abandonment of these sites and focus on pre-emptive measures to preserve the intangible heritage.

“The intention was to understand these monuments through the stories and memories of their guardians, the nuns who still inhabit them and use them in a traditional way, before they may be abandoned,” Apap Bologna said.

“The interviews aimed to preserve their memory for posterity and yielded site-specific information that would have gone unrecorded should the community cease to exist.”

Monasteries have two types of heritage, Apap Bologna explained in her study. The intangible is made up of the community of nuns that live a traditional way of life, which is disappearing due to secularisation and cannot be controlled, while the tangible includes the monumental spaces and artefacts of these communities.

“The decline in Maltese female monastic communities is increasingly becoming a tangible matter,” the author stressed, adding that these monasteries are a perfect example of the “inseparability of the tangible and intangible elements associated with religious heritage”.

The tangible, which will remain after the communities are gone, can be protected through inventories to curb loss and theft, architectural surveys and care of archives, Apap Bologna listed.

But the intangible, which includes the personal narratives of these nuns, will be lost forever unless systematically recorded, she warned.

“Although the lives of communities in monasteries are very similar, through this research I concluded that the personal anecdotes and customs developed in these spaces contain idiosyncrasies particular to their environments,” she pointed out.

The sudden loss of the ‘living’ component of religious heritage sites puts at risk its architecture, works of art, libraries and archives, ethnography, furnishings, as well as its long-standing traditions, rituals and narratives.

“All these elements contribute to the monument’s identity, and if closure is not preceded by a systematic management of its tangible and intangible assets, there is the risk of dispersal through loss and malpractice,” Apap Bologna warned.

One single postulant nun

The study showed the extent of the risk and urgency these living heritage monuments are facing.

According to the classification of use, St Peter’s ranked the lowest, followed by St Margaret and St Scholastica, which had medium use, and finally, St Ursula with the highest.

So far, the closure of a female monastic site in Gozo was reported in 2021, while St Catherine’s remaining residents had resorted to looking overseas to recruit foreign nuns.

The sole-surviving Mother Abess of St Peter’s Monastery recently also told Times of Malta that the Benedictine Order was looking to its counterpart in Umbria to send over Filippino nuns to keep the community going.

With the lack of vocations being the main cause for decline, the process leading to closure can be gradual, especially if the monasteries still retain financial autonomy and their communities can employ staff to maintain the premises, Aapa Bologna maintained.

But in the event of closure, the concerns would shift to the adaptive reuse of these monastic complexes.

Cloistered communities may be responding to their crisis by resorting to social media, creating websites and participating in documentaries to provide information about life in the monastery to prospective candidates.

But these measures have yielded minimal to negligible results, Apap Bologna pointed out.

But it is not all doom and gloom, she continued. The research showed the monasteries with young nuns and a higher number of community members were still functioning well, with St Ursula and St Scholastica, which still maintain a traditional way of life and observe enclosure, being perfect examples.

St Margaret’s Monastery now also has one postulant nun, a potential candidate, aged 35.

A section of St Peter’s Monastery now houses a museum, while St Catherine’s has also opened its lower floors – proactive ways to generate income and also give the public an understanding of a vanishing traditional way of life.