Pennsylvania Nuns, Sisters Bring ‘Moral Authority…in Spades' To Anti-ICE Actions

By Tory Basile, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

December 15, 2025

On a Friday morning in late November, around 50 people huddled on the sidewalk outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office on Sidney Street, careful not to step on the federal agency’s grass.

Some wore clerical collars and ministers’ stoles. Many were older, with gray hair sticking out from under winter hats. After songs and speeches, the crowd turned to face the building for a minute of silent prayer.

The Sisters of St. Joseph, Pax Christi and Casa San Jose have been hosting prayer vigils outside Pittsburgh’s ICE facility every Friday morning since August. They invited religious leaders from different faiths across the city, and plan to continue their weekly demonstrations for as long as they can.

“It has grown into such a supportive community, a very hopeful moment for me in my week,” said Sister Janice Vanderneck of the Sisters of St. Joseph.

On this particular Friday, Vanderneck prayed for her longtime friend who was arrested by ICE agents just a week before. He’s a hard worker, she said, who went to church. His kids are American citizens who attended Catholic schools.

The crowd prayed for the people who may be detained inside the Pittsburgh facility as they await transport to a nearby jail or to ICE’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County. They prayed for the ICE officers, too.

“We’re praying for our country to experience a transformation,” Vanderneck said.

Sisters and nuns don’t have the kind of political authority that bishops or priests hold within the church. But local sisters said their unique position comes with more freedom to protest, and they’ve found that their presence is a powerful endorsement.

“We have no authority — just moral authority, and that we have in spades,” Vanderneck said.

Catholic sisters have long held influence in Pittsburgh communities, having built many of its hospitals, schools and other institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Today, nuns and sisters are a dwindling force, but President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has prompted many to speak out and weigh how the politics of the church and the state intersect with their changing ministries.

Vanderneck walked up a concrete path toward an unmarked back door. She knocked, and when her colleagues welcomed her inside she greeted them with “gracias” and “buenos días.”

Vanderneck is the founder of Casa San Jose, a local Latino immigrant support organization. One November morning, she strode into a windowless room, where a handful of people chattered in Spanish and English and waved at her. After Trump’s return to office, she said the staff moved operations from their Beechview home base to an undisclosed location for fear that ICE agents would target their patrons.

The 75-year-old belongs to the Sisters of St. Joseph, an international congregation of vowed Catholic women with a community in Baden. Through her ministry as a sister, Vanderneck began working with Latino immigrants in Pittsburgh in 2003. She said she quickly learned what life was like for undocumented people facing a lack of resources and attempting to navigate a “wasteland of identity.”

She founded Casa San Jose in 2013 because, as a Spanish speaker, local Latino immigrants often sought her help. At first, it was only Vanderneck and one volunteer working out of a Lutheran church basement. Now, the organization has become an influential immigrant support network, serving families across Pittsburgh.

In January, Casa San Jose began offering new services for those immigrant families as the Trump administration called for mass deportations, spurring ICE raids that have led even documented people to be detained.

“They’re rounding up people that have status or even citizenship,” Vanderneck said. “They’re rounding up people based on what we should not believe in, what we say we don’t believe in in this country — and that is profiling people because of how they look or what they sound like.”

A representative for ICE denied Vanderneck’s claims that the agency profiles detainees based on their appearance, and said ICE only targets individuals who are “illegally in the U.S.”

“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are reckless and categorically FALSE,” an ICE spokesperson wrote in response to questions from Public Source, referring to the Department of Homeland Security. “ICE law enforcement officers are already facing a more than 1,170% increase in assaults against them. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — NOT their skin color, race or ethnicity.”

Casa San Jose created a rapid response team of volunteers who show up to ICE raids, record officer actions and get the names of people who are detained. They’ve raised money for bail bonds and held clinics to help parents draw up paperwork protecting their children, should they be arrested and separated.

Many Catholics feel their faith compels them to care about immigration issues as part of Catholic Social Teaching. Vanderneck cited a 2003 pastoral letter, a joint statement from the Catholic bishops of the U.S. and Mexico, called “Strangers No Longer.” She said the letter inspired her and other Catholics to view immigration reform as a moral issue, not just a political one.

On Nov. 12, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement urging the American public to “recognize the fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants.” The next day, Pittsburgh’s Bishop Mark Eckman released his own statement echoing the USCCB.

Still, there’s division among Catholics about the line between faith and politics.

Vanderneck recently spoke to a local parish about Casa San Jose’s work. While she talked, she watched a man’s face turn red. Later, he told a group of parishioners he was stunned she could advocate for the protection of people who entered the country illegally.

“He represents a large number of Catholics,” Vanderneck said. “I know that, and we know that. The bishops even know that when they speak out … they’re going to get pushback. And they do.”

Other Pittsburgh women’s congregations have been involved in advocacy, too. The Sisters of Mercy, a congregation with deep history in Pittsburgh, attended a No Kings protest in October on Fifth Avenue. The sisters, many of whom are in their 80s, packed their signs in a trunk and drove from their convent at Carlow University.

Sister Cynthia Serjak said she doesn’t think of the church itself as a political instrument.

“Although I think it’s caught up in a lot of difficult stuff right now,” she said. “But I think we’re not afraid to speak about that.”

Serjak joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1966 when she was 18. In those days, she said, nuns and sisters typically didn’t stray from tradition — or the opinions of a bishop. But times have changed, Serjak said.

“Thank God the Sisters of Mercy have always been open to what’s happening in the world,” Serjak said. “We’re so oriented to tending to those who get pushed to the margins that we have to pay attention, we have to get involved.”

Pittsburgh’s Catholic diocese lists 24 women’s religious communities. Some have local roots dating back hundreds of years.

In 1843, seven women immigrated from Ireland to establish the first Sisters of Mercy convent in the U.S. After five weeks at sea and 60 hours crossing the Allegheny Mountains in a stagecoach, the women arrived in Pittsburgh to find a growing industrial hub with a population plagued by illness, poverty and little access to education.

Catholic sisters built many of the city’s first schools, like Saint Mary’s Academy, established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1844. At their peak in the 1960s, there were more than 13,000 Catholic schools, many staffed by nuns, nationwide.

And in 1847, the Sisters of Mercy opened the world’s first Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh. Nuns and sisters established what is now Carlow University in 1929, and La Roche University in 1963, and they are also active at Duquesne University, founded by a male religious order, the Holy Ghost Fathers.

Sister Mary Pellegrino of the Sisters of St. Joseph said for the most part, religious women aren’t working in classrooms or founding hospitals and colleges anymore.

“Those institutions are built,” she said.

Maintaining those institutions became more difficult as sisters aged and their numbers dwindled. The population of Catholic nuns and sisters in the U.S. reached an all-time high in 1965, peaking around 180,000, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Since then, that number has shrunk to fewer than 40,000 in 2022.

Why are fewer young women pursuing religious life today? Some sisters credited the rise in career opportunities and other freedoms for women over the last half century. Others said fewer women became nuns after the sweeping church reforms of Vatican II, when lay people, including women, were given more opportunities to lead within the church.

Vanderneck said she thinks the U.S. has become particularly secular and glorifies independence and financial success above all else. Pellegrino agreed, and said because sisters spend their lives in community, owning nothing and sharing everything, their existence clashes with American capitalist values.

“I actually see religious life right now as more counter-cultural than I have ever seen it,” Pellegrino said.

Nuns and sisters today have had to alter their ministries since taking their vows. Pellegrino said sisters have increasingly found that their influence lies not in their institutions but in their “social capital.” For a significant portion of U.S. women’s congregations today, modern ministry is about bringing “a moral voice into the public square,” she said.

The average age of nuns and sisters in the U.S. is reportedly 80, and fewer than 1% are younger than 30. In 2023, CARA reported that 81% of American sisters are 70 or older.

Nuns and sisters in Pittsburgh mirror those demographics. Six local orders responded to interview requests, and none had (or knew of) members younger than 30 in the Pittsburgh area. Serjak told Public Source that, of the 30 women living in her Downtown convent, one is in her 60s, three are in their 70s and the remaining women are in their 80s or 90s. One member will be 100 in January. Pellegrino, 62, said she’s among the youngest in her community.

The absence of young members has nuns and sisters grappling with what the next generation will look like.

In October, Serjak attended a meeting of Sisters of Mercy from across the country, where, amid discussions of their future, they talked about selling property they can’t maintain because “there just aren’t as many of us anymore.”

Many older sisters today, like Serjak and Sister Sheila Carney, joined the vocation as young women, or even teenagers, and have spent practically their entire lives with the women in their religious orders.

But without younger women to care for them, it becomes more difficult for sisters to age together and in place. Serjak said when sisters are moved into nursing homes or hospitals, staff tend to defer to a woman’s blood relatives to make medical decisions, despite her fellow sisters having durable power of attorney. Normally, if a sister is dying, Serjak said they like to be with her, pray and sing over her in her final moments. People outside of the vocation aren’t used to that, she said.

“Our life, which we have always controlled entirely, is now beginning to be not necessarily controlled, but pretty much affected by other people who don’t necessarily understand who we are,” Serjak said. “So when you look at the statistics, I don’t have any guarantee where I’m going to be or who’s going to be taking care of me should I need care. And that feels scary.”

Pellegrino works with a consulting practice that helps aging religious communities prepare for their futures by building nursing homes or planning for their ministries.

She noted that, while aging sisters might feel grief and fear about their futures, she thinks the concern that religious life will cease to exist is off base. She pointed out that today’s nun population is comparable to the numbers in the early 20th century, before the surge during the ‘60s that still lives in the American consciousness.

Religious life isn’t experiencing a death, she said, but an evolution. She’s watched modern women’s congregations become smaller and more focused on relationships and social justice. But Pellegrino said she can’t speak to what could unfold beyond that.

“There’s something going away, but there’s also something emerging,” she said.

Regardless of what religious life looks like going forward, Serjak and Carney, 80, believe the core mission of their congregation — mercy — will live on. For now, they’ll continue to pray, protest and advocate for compassion.

“We understand that God is in this mess, and we have a confidence that in the end, things will work out — maybe not for us, but after us,” Serjak said. “So you do what you can while you can.”

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