'The Nuns Who Left Brooklyn' -- How many religious details did this Times story need?

The headline of this New York Times story was totally “religion story” — “The Nuns Who Left Brooklyn.”

Thus, I heard from people who wanted to know what your GetReligionistas thought of this religion story.

The content of this news feature was, quite frankly, totally “metro desk” (people who have worked in newsrooms will understand that term). This is, let me stress, not a complaint. The Times story is packed with relevant, even colorful local news details about a sad situation that developed in Brooklyn.

Also, religion-beat pros will not that it is hard to do a story about the details in the lives of cloistered Catholic women religious, since they are not going to sit down for interviews and talk about the details of their lives and beliefs. The story has some crucial details provided by others that tell readers some of what they need to know.

Would I have appreciated a few more details about this order and where it fits into the current drama of Catholic monastic life in America? Sure. Was that an essential part of this particular story? I’ll admit that the answer to that is: “Not really.” Hold that thought. Meanwhile, here is the overture:

The 10 Carmelite nuns of Cypress Hills, cloistered in Brooklyn for almost 20 years, decided to leave New York City after much contemplation.
As much as they tried, the sisters of the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St. Joseph, devotees of silence and prayer who rarely left the confines of the cloister, could no longer ignore what was going on outside. The loud celebrations in an adjacent park became a bit too much. And when a beloved lay volunteer was murdered, the sisters were shaken deeply.
The last straw came in 2020, that first pandemic summer, with the explosion of late-night partying on their street involving cars with powerful speakers, said Mother Ana Maria, who spoke on behalf of the monastery, which used to be on Highland Boulevard.
“Our walls shook and our windows shattered,” she said. The sisters wondered whether the blaring music well past midnight was aimed directly at them.

Shattered windows? That’s some loud partying. That leads to a poignant detail, care of the mother superior who spoke for the nuns.

Mother Ana Maria, who, along with her sisters, begins each day at 5 a.m. The nuns pushed their beds away from the walls of their cells — the small rooms where they slept — but still felt unsafe, she said.

There’s been a lot of press in recent years about the newer more conservative type of American nun and how influxes of 20-something women joining fairly new religious communities.

That is, the new breed of nun isn't joining up with some of the traditional orders. They are inventing their own or joining communities that have taken old, old traditions and pulled them into the modern world, trusting that they are still relevant and will appeal to the young.

Here’s a story of a quintet of young women who are doing just that, care of the team at The Buffalo News:

Nuns have long been the bedrock of the Catholic Church in Western New York. At the height of their numbers in the late 1960s, more than 3,500 sisters ministered in the region, teaching and healing hundreds of thousands of people in schools and hospitals. Hundreds of sisters remain active in the area today, but most are well into their 60s and 70s, and their communities have long passed the stage of being able to replenish themselves with fresh-faced recruits. Most communities of women religious in the area haven’t welcomed a new nun in decades. Some have given up on looking for candidates.

Yet, on the Lake Erie shoreline in Derby, a Catholic retreat house now teems with the youthful exuberance of Martin and four other women, all in their 20s and hoping to become nuns together in what could be the first religious community built from scratch in the Buffalo diocese.

That's a nice punch statement in a summary paragraph. Now, here are some additional details.