The Carmelite Monastery on Pleasant Street is closing after 74 years of providing a home for nuns to live the cloistered religious life, part of a pattern that has seen the number of nuns in the United States decline by some 85% since the 1960s.
The monastery is part of the nine-century-old Carmelite order, named after Mount Carmel in Israel where it was founded, and operates under the Boston Carmel in Roxbury, Mass. It moved to Pleasant Street, opposite Concord Hospital, from its original Concord home in 1952.
Up to two-dozen nuns have lived there since, largely separated from city life to practice what the order’s website describes as “an interior journey lived in and through prayer” for a “loving relationship with Christ.”
In recent years the population has declined, and only four or five nuns have been cloistered there most recently, most them elderly. This led to the decision to close the monastery and move the sisters to other Carmelite institutions.
“Over the past five years, dedicated efforts were undertaken to revive the diminishing community, alas to no measurable success,” is how the Diocese of Manchester described the situation in a press release.
The Carmelite order is not alone in this situation. In 1965, there were 180,000 Catholic sisters in the United States living and working in a variety of situations, but according to the National Religious Retirement Office, by 2019, there were just 31,350 nuns in this country, a decline of some 85%.
Throughout the world the Carmelite order says it has 72 communities of cloistered nuns as well as a number of other institutions, including lay members and about 2,200 Carmelite friars living on five continents.
The Concord monastery, a handsome low building, sits on 39 acres at the intersection of Pleasant Street and Langley Parkway. Except for the monastery itself the land is undeveloped, although bisected by power lines. Except for the portion near the two roads, the property is zoned open space residential, like most of Concord.
The property is owned by the Carmelite Communities Associated and has an assessed value, including buildings, of almost $600,000.
The Carmel was established in 1946 after the Boston Carmel reached its quota of 22 nuns. The site’s official history says Sister Margaret Mary wrote to her father, Mr. Alfred Champney in Concord, who donated the family home on Bridge Street. Bishop Brady celebrated the first Mass there in June of 1946.
The Carmel outgrew its original home and built the current monastery in 1952, moving in with 18 sisters. The chapel was consecrated in 1963.
The Carmelite Monastery is known to many for the ringing of its bells as a call to prayer.
