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1962, the Poor Clare Colettines moved into the newly constructed Corpus Christi Monastery.
    “Poor Clare nuns live in utter freedom and simplicity,” reads their brochure, entitled Come Follow Me . 10 It refers to a 1996 address by Pope John Paul II, in which he stated, “We come to understand the identity of the consecrated person, beginning with his or her complete self-offering, as being comparable to a genuine holocaust.” The brochure explains the four vows:
By her vow of poverty the Poor Clare frees herself of all temporal concerns and puts in check the innate desire of man to acquire and possess. She, instead, understands herself to be a steward rather than an owner of God’s manifold gifts. By the vow of chastity the Poor Clare expresses the yearning of a heart unsatisfied by any finite love. She proclaims to the whole world that God is enough by freeing her heart of any single human attachment in order to love God alone and all His creatures in Him. By her vow of obedience the Poor Clare freely renounces her own will, which is the most thorough sacrifice the human heart can make. She makes a holocaust of the very center of her being in order to conform her whole heart and will to that of her Beloved Spouse. By the vow of enclosure the Poor Clare leaves behind life in the world and lives in imitation of Christ’s hidden life at Nazareth. Within the enclosure she is free to listen to the voice of the Bridegroom and offer herself as a victim with Jesus for the salvation of the world. 11
    The Franciscan friar Benet Fonck of the Order of Friars Minor (OFM) has interacted with the Poor Clare Colettine Order since he joined the Franciscan Order in 1965. Author of To Cling with All Her Heart to Him: The Spirituality of Saint Clare , Friar Fonck writes that Poor Clares heed Christ’s command to Saint Francis to rebuild the Church and through their “poverty and prayer and simple proclamation fulfill this mandate in an especially effective and fruitful way.” 12 Many women find contemplative cloistered life attractive, Friar Fonck writes, “because many of the monasteries are more conservative with full habits and a strict lifestyle; a good number of contemporary women seem to find a need satisfied with this kind of order and stability. The generation before them were accustomed to a more free-flowing and unstructured way of being a member of the Church. As the pendulum swings, their children have a longing and a need for something more conservative, more structured, and more tradition to satisfy their spiritual needs.” 13 The Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford is the type of conservative monastery that Friar Fonck describes: The nuns wear the full habit and they adhere to a strict lifestyle.
    In 2012, the Poor Clare Colettine Order celebrated the eight hundredth anniversary of its founding. But at the same time, the population of religious communities is declining. Over the past four decades, the number of religious sisters in the United States dropped significantly—69 percent; from 179,954 in 1965 to 54,018 in 2012—even as the Catholic population in the country rose. From 1970 to 2010, there was a drop worldwide in the total number of women religious, from 1,004,304 to 721,935, according to the Georgetown University affiliated Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which conducts social scientific studies about the Catholic Church. 14 As of 2010, there were twelve Poor Clare Colettine monasteries in the United States, with a total membership of fewer than two hundred cloistered nuns. Twenty nuns currently reside within the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois.
    Sister Maria Deo Gratias says that when young women inquire about joining the Corpus Christi Monastery, and ask if they can bring a computer or cell phone into the monastery, she teases them by saying they will have acell, but it is not the technology they might be thinking of; they would retire at night to a spartan room.
    Until