Spanish convents use social media to recruit new nuns

Dwindling numbers of women joining religious orders has prompted convents to modernise their marketing methods

Stephen Burgen in Barcelona

Monday 16 March 2015 15.50 GMT

Visitors to the Spanish website buscoalgomas.com are greeted by a woman asking if they feel their lives are empty and if they’ve ever considered the religious life. “Don’t run away,” she says. “You may have a vocation without even knowing it.”
The woman is Noemí Saiz, and the website, which translates as “I’m looking for something more”, is used by dozens of Spanish convents to try to recruit nuns. Spain’s religious orders, which are also turning to Facebook, WhatsApp and other social networks as recruitment tools, are facing an uphill struggle: their numbers have slumped from 6,695 in 1966 to barely 250 today.
“The website serves as an intermediary between religious orders and young people,” says Saiz, who spent a year as a nun before deciding she didn’t have what it takes. “Religious institutions need to learn about marketing.”
Convents are learning fast and some have even taken advice on search engine optimisation in order to top Google rankings for terms such as “how to become a nun”.
In 2012 Olga María, the prioress of the barefoot Carmelite convent in Valladolid in north-east Spain, went to Rome to ask for two things: permission to let would-be nuns join the convent for a trial period to see if it suited them and also permission to use social networks to recruit young women.

Since then, the convent has gained more than 200,000 visits to its website, more than 8,000 likes on Facebook, and 461 Twitter followers. It also uses a WhatsApp account to reply to women’s inquiries. The convent has grown from 18 to 30 nuns and the average age has fallen to 35.
“We get 20-30 inquiries a month,” María says, adding that after initial contact there is a certain amount of filtering. Of those who enter the convent for a trial period, about 50% stay, she says.
“They’re young women aged 20 to 30,” she says. “They’re trying to find their place in the world and what attracts them about the convent is the joy and affection they find there.”

Among the new recruits are a boxer who was about to join the army but chose the Carmelites instead, an engineer who gave up a good job to join the convent and a guitarist from a heavy metal band.
Carmen Señor, a nun at the Siervas de Jesús convent in Madrid, describes herself as a “vocational promoter”. “My job is to find out who is suited to an active, married or contemplative life,” she says. “These days, no one goes to a convent, so we have to be on Twitter and Facebook.”
In Mallorca, Xiskya Valladares of iMisión, which seeks to evangelise via social networks, has become famous as the “tweeting nun” and has almost 25,000 followers on Twitter. “We have to be in touch with reality,” she says, “and listen to people who are suffering, both existentially and materially. As Pope Francis says, the shepherd should smell of sheep.”