But for those whom God has called to the enclosed contemplative life in the cloister, it is necessary to live that contemplative life in the cloister. When this necessity is forgotten, debated and sometimes even derided and belittled, it needs no folio of proofs to demonstrate what eventuates. This is certainly readily demonstrable in our own country of the United States of America. Where nuns in the contemplative life, as described in Venite Seorsum have, have lost awareness of the religious genius of papal enclosure, they no longer attract others to join them. Young girls do not come.
Communities decline, decrease, and eventually die.
It is vital that we offer young people a clear and uncompromising modus vivendi as the enclosed contemplative nuns whom we have been called by God to be. It is, rather, the intense interior activity of contemplation which calls us not out of our enclosure but deeply into it from which alone is our religious calling answered. We desire to preserve the charism of our own calling, ever deepening our understanding of it. These modern young folk, whom your Holiness so particularly loves, find our ancient way of life an inviting mystery which demands the whole of their modernity to fathom. Our Poor Clare monasteries from the time of our glorious foundress St. Clare, whose eighth centenary of earthly birth your Holiness celebrated with us last year and about which you wrote us a letter, have been autonomous communities, each a distinct family of enclosed contemplatives happily adjoined to one another in federations, each preserving its specific charism and contributing to the larger charism of the whole family of federation.