ERIE — The Carmelite Order has closed the Carmel of the Holy Family Monastery, located on East Gore Road in Erie, as of Tuesday. It was the only cloistered, contemplative community of women religious in the Diocese of Erie.

“This is not the outcome we had hoped for,” said the Most Rev. Lawrence T. Persico, bishop of Erie. “This truly is a great loss. We have been richly blessed by the prayers and presence of the Carmelites in our diocese.”

The closing comes in response to Cor Orans, new norms for contemplative communities published by the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies

of Apostolic Life in 2018. The norms require that communities with fewer than six

members either close or affiliate with a larger, viable community.

According to the norms, a healthy self-governing body not only must have at least six members to vote for leadership positions, but at least one sister must be devoted to vocation formation. Only three sisters were living at the Carmel of the Holy Family Monastery in recent months.

“We worked with the sisters to explore every possible avenue to keep the community here,” Persico said. “Over the last three years, on their behalf, I have contacted monasteries around the country to see if they might be willing to send sisters to strengthen the community in Erie.” Few monasteries are in a position to do so.

“It would not be fair to put other communities at risk in the name of bolstering our own,” the bishop said. He also noted that in the 63 years the Carmelites have been in the diocese, none of the sisters who entered the community came from the Diocese of Erie.