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These are some of the findings of “The German-Austrian Cloister Study” conducted by Marc Luy of the Vienna Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The research project to study health, aging, and life expectancy investigated the factors of health and longevity that revealed the so-called “successful aging” — that is, a long and healthy life.
The research has drawn fresh attention in Europe this month after Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast marked his 100th birthday on July 12, as CNA Deutsch, the German-language sister service of EWTN News, reported.
It started in 1997 with a focus on the members of menʼs and womenʼs religious orders, as they have a very similar life and are easy to study. They resemble one another in daily regime, nutrition, living conditions, faith, and many other aspects that influence health and longevity, the study explains.
Around 16,600 order members participated (more than 9,000 nuns, with the rest monks) in Germany and Austria — with a few members living in Switzerland and Italy. The investigation included anonymous self-conducted questionnaires sent to more than 1,100 of the religious but went back as far as 1890 to consult the archives of numerous religious communities, which are helpful in providing data. Somewhat surprising results emerged.
About one year of difference in life expectancy between the two sexes is attributed to biological factors, according to the study. The bigger sex differences in life expectancy in the population are caused by non-biologically caused mortality of men and not by the low mortality of women, as is often believed.
The research also questioned the well-known saying that “women are sicker, but men die quicker.”
Luy set out two hypotheses at the start of the project. The first is that “the overall reversal in sex morbidity and sex mortality differentials occurs because conditions that figure importantly in morbidity are not very important in mortality, and vice versa.” The second is that it is “very likely that longevity is directly related to the absolute number of life years in ill health,” which means that “women show higher morbidity rates not because they are female but because they are the sex with higher life expectancy.”
Men in religious orders live on average about five years longer than men outside the cloister, and monastic life seems to reduce some of the risks that shorten life. Such communities provide an ordered daily routine and a structured schedule for work, eating, and prayer, long-term relationships, shared purpose, and the like. Therefore, one has ideal conditions for well-being both mentally and physically.
What is more, in a monastic community, people take care of one another, and physical or mental decline is usually recognized sooner. Likewise, chronic stress is reduced and prayer helps with emotional stability.
The main person behind the project, German social scientist Luy, who has been working in Austria since 2008, told EWTN News that it would be “interesting” to include religious orders from other countries. However, “this is a matter of resources,” he said.
“Nonetheless, I would not expect different results than those we have obtained from several orders in Germany and Austria,” he added.
Yet “being a monk or a nun does not necessarily mean living an easy and peaceful life,” Slovak religious Sister Cecília Kasanová told EWTN News.
The Dominican sister has been living for six years in the Monastery of St. Dominic and Sixtus of Our Lady of the Rosary in Rome, which safeguards the ancient Marian icon known as the “Advocata,” carried across Rome by St. Dominic.
Although she admitted that a balanced lifestyle can influence longevity, “famous long-lived monks or nuns went through suffering, war, persecution because of their religious beliefs, or imprisonment.” Sister Cecília said she thinks it is “amazing” that those monks and nuns “had the strength to persevere and not give up.”
She acknowledged the good of a day proportionally divided into moments of silence: personal prayer, study, work, daily Mass, regular confession, and common meals. There are moments, too, when they talk, such as community meetings and celebrations, as well as time to relax and to receive visitors at the entrance.
Furthermore, consecrated life in a community of nuns may improve the life of visitors, Sister Cecília observed. It is “a great gift for me personally, for the Church and for the world,” as “we live exclusively for the Lord” and pray for those who come. Those faithful “often feel better because they are listened to, accepted, knowing that they are not alone in what they are experiencing, because we accompany them with prayer,” she stressed.
A monastic life thus shows that we should “put God first,” as he “gives meaning to everything we do and to who we are. He is our God and at the same time a faithful friend,” the Slovak nun said.
In a letter dated July 16 and published by the Vatican on July 22, Pope Leo XIV wrote to mark the 70th anniversary of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in the United States. He encouraged them to consider community life “as a place of sanctification and a source of inspiration, witness, and strength in your apostolate.”
According to the pontiff, who is a member of the Augustinian order himself, “it is precisely through sharing everything in common, including material goods, spiritual experiences, apostolic ideals, and charitable service that the hidden presence of the risen Lord is made manifest among you.”
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We live in a competitive world, that is the technically advanced nations. Stress is a paramount condition that wears most of us down, weakening our physical ability to resist diseases. A kind of flash in the pan life.
Researcher Luy identifies all the mental physical benefits of living in a non competitive, long term relationship with a community that “takes care of each other”. The other Luy identified factor is prayer.
Although this dimension of monastic life requires greater understanding. Which is the strength of interior conviction of reality, what matters such as the virtues, above all love for the other. The monk knows God is the supreme truth and the supreme good. He has no anxious need for anything else.
I hope no one tries to make the case that having children significantly lowers your survival.
You wrote “I hope no one tries to make the case that having children significantly lowers your survival.”
Given the high mortality rate for childbirth in the USA, compared to other countries, they could very well do so. It’s scandalous!
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/publications/health-matters/why-childbirth-is-still-dangerous-in-americaand-what-we-can-do-about-it
It’s true that expectant mothers of certain ethnicities can have a higher number of health risks due to chronic and inherited disease. And I’d agree about the quality of care troubles.
But when an article goes on to cite “Abortion Restrictions ” as a factor…Seriously? Sure, if you eliminate a child in the womb you’ll definitely avoid childbirth and its dangers. But you can face other risks instead.
Please see my reply to The Pitchfork Rebel.
Yes ma’am, thank you. I see your reply but I’m not sure how that might connect to my comments?
The number of replies in a thread is limited, so I am replying to you here. I was profoundly shocked that you and The Pitchfork Rebel wrote off women who die in childbirth as something to be expected. I am involved with a wellknown crisis pregnancy center (I hope that The Pichfork Rebel reads this comment!), and I don’t think that the people there would see the deaths of such women in the same way that you and TPR do. If I am mistaken, I apologize, and I hope that you will join me in mourning their deaths.
“Every man’s death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind.” John Donne
Miss Anne Marie, I support a pregnancy help center also and a shelter for homeless expectant mothers. Comment boxes are not an ideal way to have conversations. I believe most of us who read and comment here are sincerely pro life and want what’s best for mothers and their children.
Catholics can legitimately disagree on how healthcare is managed and who provides that but we can all agree in charity that we want the very best outcome for mothers and children.
I guess you missed my point. But since you did, I’ll explain it to you.
Those in religious life have no children. Those NOT IN RELIGIOUS LIFE are likely to be having children. Yet this significant factor is not mentioned among all the plausible explanations given for longevity among religious. Now do you understand?
I got your point, don’t worry. But I find it scandalous that the pro-life movement apparently cares very little that the USA is the richest country in the world and yet has a mortality rate for mothers in childbirth that is higher than several third world countries and scandalously higher than all the first world countries. One way to counter abortion is to make it safer for women to carry and give birth to children. That will block one of Planned Parenthood’s advertising gimmicks.
Why would we assume the pro-life community cares very little? That community’s made up of many individuals & quite a few I know do care & do help expectant mothers in need. My own dentist donates his services to homeless expectant mothers. Dental infections can be a dangerous thing anytime & more so during pregnancy.
It’s not just the USA. A 2006 study published in the American Journal of Human Biology tracked 116 years of births–from 1886 to 2002–in four regions of Poland and found that women lost an astonishing 95 weeks of life for each child they carried.
Aggregate national wealth has little bearing on maternal health, other than you have some idea that it can stop individuals from engaging in self-injurious behaviors such as casual sex, smoking, obesity, substance abuse or any other risky behavior.
One of the biggest risks to the mother is age. The CDC reports that maternal mortality is positively correlated with age. Rates increased with maternal age. Rates in 2021 were 20.4 deaths per 100,000 live births for women under age 25, 31.3 for those aged 25–39, and 138.5 for those aged 40 and over (Figure 2 and Table). The rate for women aged 40 and over was 6.8 times higher than the rate for women under age 25.
This does not take break down the higher risk associated with the FIRST pregnancy. Any woman pregnant for the first time after age 35 is automatically diagnosed with “supervision of elderly primigravida”.
Culturally we are encouraging women to wait longer and longer to have children-no amount of money in the world makes you younger, but somehow you seem to think (other people’s) wealth is magic.
You aren’t concerned, you are indignant. Concern implies some sort of concrete action. if you were concerned, you’d encouraging earlier motherhood, instead of making an illogical correlation between national wealth and health outcomes.
Have you encouraged a young woman who might be postponing starting a family to subordinate professional concerns to her health instead of the reverse? Not only does earlier pregnancies result in better health for the mother and child, but it reduces the likelihood of breast and uterine cancers later.
On the other hand thanks for giving us yet another example of the left’s divinization of money. You’ve aptly demonstrated obstinate ignorance here, no need to continue. In the contest for CWR VI, there’s another candidate with a devastating lead.
You are right in saying that contemplative nuns don’t bear children. But we are not uninterested in those wonderful women who do. My community runs the Contemplatives For Life who pray for expectant mothers and other persons who are struggling in various ways. Would you like to support our ministry?
https://flemingtoncarmel.org/contemplatives-for-life
Motherhood is always going to entail risk. The injunction “I walked through the valley of death to give you life” given by some mothers-including my own-to recalcitrant children is accurate.
Bluntly, you need better sources to support your antinatalism. Attempting to explain any morbidity or mortality phenomenon with amorphisms such as “outdated healthcare structures” and restrictions on abortion (a guaranteed death) while citing the case of a woman with a rare condition is incoherent. The pink fist in the background photograph is the first clue that it is an unserious rant. So much for the included quote: “The attempt to politicize this subject by painting it as black and white ultimately covers up its complexities and nuances..”
That is to be expected. Author Sydney Burrows is a “digital content strategist” and “professional dancer” with a “Bachelor’s degree focused [or unfocused] in English, Dance, and Business..” No background in medicine or public health.
I was Medicaid Auditor whose focus was predominately maternity care audits. Pennsylvania’s program capitated (paid a fixed fee) for MA eligible maternity care to managed care organizations and was designed to reimburse for pregnancies that lasted past the first trimester (which is not a medical term, but nobody in what was then called the Department of Public Welfare bothered to ask if it was) as a live birth in order to encourage early pre-natal care.
We had full access to physical and behavioral health records in order to attempt to examine the validity of billings. We rapidly learned the codes and terminology.
What I observed consistently in reviewing thousands of cases was the following. High rates of issues arising from poor dietary choices, obesity, substance abuse, sexually transmitted disease and a general personal disregard for physical and moral health. Ironically, the article touches on hypertensive disorders-which are significantly correlated with obesity. So let’s promote “Lizzo” as a role model!
One incredibly frustrated bioinformatics nurse told us “you boys need to get out of your suburban bubble, our patients aren’t looking at the stick color and scheduling an appointment with the OB-GYN, we’re dealing with every inner city pathology you can imagine” and then proceeded to tell us about a fourteen year old who entered the ER with blood running down her leg, oblivious to even the possibility of pregnancy, despite admitting to intercourse. There was a reason we divided the state into Philadelphia and Allegheny counties and the other 65.
I remember the case of a teenager refusing grief counseling because “I’ll be pregnant again next year, I can handle (sic) high school and a baby” and forty-one year old who miscarried her seventh child. Her six living children had three different surnames, and two boys had the same first name.
In short, there are individual behaviors are contributing to unnecessary deaths, the same way many diabetics die due to the disregard of their condition. The failure to consider such behaviors as causative factors renders the essay beyond useless in any sort of substantive discourse about the issue.
Former personal lines ins agent. Insured’s husband died at the local, rural hospital. Came into the insurance office later and while there complains about “they didn’t do anything for him.” I wanted to say, “do you think it had anything to do with the 2 packs of cigarettes each day for the last 35 years?” but you hold your tongue to keep the account, and it’s irrelevant for the most part to non health insurance.
I would respect your reply more if you showed some concern for the women who do die in childbirth. “Blessed are they who mourn” it is they who are comforted, not those who justify the statistics.
You don’t want “concern” (which of course means conspicuous, but useless public laments agreeing with your uneducated conclusion that there is some nefarious societal neglect), you want people to agree with your uneducated rant. Your brand of concern won’t avert a single maternal fatality, and you clearly don’t care about the death that occurs in abortion.
It’s kind of obvious this is a sock puppet, Nicole.
I got ya on that one because my ex wife could have died from H.E.L.L.P syndrome, but for the ER nurse who told her “even though your pain has gone away we’d better check your BP before I let you go.” Next in the ER all night and the next morning an emergency C-section saved both lives.
As Mr. Pitchfork notes, the risk goes up with older women, espc the first time.
the point of my comment really was directly unrelated, but a serious, serious issue espc in the US is how people take care of themselves – and worse, who many blame the results on!
I posted a comment above about our ministry Contemplatives For Life. We pray for those who are expecting a child, those who have lost a child, as well as those who are struggling in other ways. We print out the cards that you can see on our website and we mail them for free, but since we are cloistered we can’t go out and distribute them to people. Would you like to help us in this ministry? We have the Sisters of Life who distribute some cards, but we would be very grateful to more people, especially those in pro-life ministry, to hand them out. We look forward to hearing from you and others here on the Catholic World Report!
https://flemingtoncarmel.org/contemplatives-for-life
I can’t reply directed to your latest reply to me, but it is terribly funny!You don’t know anything about me and you say that my “brand of concern won’t avery a single maternal fatality and I clealy don’t care about the death that occurs in abortion”. I will definitely share this with my pro-life colleagues! For all you know, I may be the one who helps the nuns organize that Contemplatives For Life thing!
Oh come now dear. You’ve revealed a lot about yourself in just a few incontinent, incoherent posts, the most important being that you emote, rather than reason and that you are sanctimonious.
Ranting online that something is a “scandal” because of some irrelevant exogeneous statistic isn’t productive. It won’t get one woman to quit smoking, lose weight, eat properly, put down the smokes or drugs or see a doctor promptly after missing her monthly cycle. Not one.
You cited an article that claimed abortion restrictions were a causative factor in maternal death. That, absent a disclaimer is an endorsement.
Giving birth to a human is the single riskiest thing a woman can do. Men have no equivalent save perhaps combat. Women who carry children should receive combat pay. At least the equivalent healthcare of a combat soldier with housing and disability pay for life if she is wounded in the process.
Do you prefer this article? The USA still has the highest maternal mortality rate of developed countries and I think that is deplorable.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2020/nov/maternal-mortality-maternity-care-us-compared-10-countries
An imprecise article with perhaps language difficulties thrown in, as it seems to say a gap exists between monks and nuns outside the cloister while it disappears inside the cloister, when monks and nuns are definitionally all cloistered.
And cannot really tell if it compares cloistered religious verus non-cloistered religious or if cloistered contrasted to general population of men and women….which would matter in the findings as modern religious generally have far better healthcare than the population at large, which would muchly boost life expectancy on average.
However, I do expect the balanced lifestyle of cloistered religious of work, prayer, and regulated life to the rythms of creation, to show marked improvement in longevity over the general population.
Monks and nuns in the monasteries and cloisters are known to live longer than other fellow pilgrims on journey. They all follow a time-table given to them by their holy founders who in their time were blessed with a special charism.
Indeed moments of silence, personal prayer, spiritual reading, study, bread labor, daily Mass, regular confession, recitation of the Rosary, singing hymns together, and common meals cooked and served with love and reverence do help. In matters of food and drink, they exercise control of the palate. Tantum Quantum is the rule.
Recreation, dress code, humility, simplicity, generosity, magnanimity, and utmost obedience to the superior and to the bell are priceless opportunities that add rhythm, life and years to the lifespan of monks and nuns.
Does testerone have something to do with lifespans? I notice the intact male livestock don’t seem to live as long as the females.
Perhaps the stress caused by the hormone mentally and physically?
Feeding and caring for a brood of kids can be stressful; some can handle it better than others it seems.
I think that the difference in longevity between monks and nuns is due more to the difference in activity. Cloistered nuns, like us Discalced Carmelites, are totally dedicated to contemplation. We cannot engage in ministry outside of our monastery. That is true of the cloistered Dominicans, the Poor Clares, the cloistered Benedictines and similar institutes. The monks and friars have no such restriction, so they nearly always have some outside ministry like a parish or teaching. So their life is somewhat more like that of diocesan priests.
Sister writes about monastic communities that are “are totally dedicated to contemplation.”
Then, how is it that you have an active presence on this website?