In 1991, when Sister Mary Catharine entered the Summit monastery, she was 22 and the next youngest sister was 39. Back home in Massachusetts, where she was still known as Sharon Perry and working as a pharmacy technician, there was no one she knew who was even contemplating a contemplative life.

Raised Catholic, Sister Mary Catharine had spent two years as a teacher in an active order in her home state; she was stunned to be called to a cloistered community in Summit, N.J. “Of all places,” she said. “It was the ’80s, this non-time. Lots of big sleeves and hair.” But after a visit to the Summit monastery, Sister Mary Catharine couldn’t shake the pull of the place.

Now, she is mentoring six women under the age of 30; this summer, she welcomed four aspirants, three of them in their 20s. “You now have a whole generation that’s been given so much,” Sister Mary Catharine said, pondering the recent flurry of inquiries to the monastery.

“With all the technology, I think they’re just saturated,” she said of the curious. “And they see this life as really radical and they have a desire for it. Maybe their families are fractured and they see our life as really stable. Of course, people come to it from all different places. One of the friars told me his novice master decided to become a friar because friars had their own bedrooms and he hated sharing a room with his brothers at home. That is why he came, but it’s not why he stayed. If God is calling, you can’t be happy doing anything else.”

It was YouTube that figured into the discernment process of another novice.

Sister Maria Teresa, who took her final vows here last year, was a junior at Drew University majoring in religious studies and biology when she felt the call to some sort of service. Cloistered life was not on her list of life choices, though she was considering a religious vocation in an active order.

After praying for guidance one day in her dorm room, she put on her head phones to listen her favorite song, “Only Hope,” by Mandy Moore on YouTube (the theme to the Nicholas Sparks romantic comedy, “A Walk to Remember”). Instead of the familiar lyrics, she heard the phrase, “Will you marry me?” and understood, she said, that she had to give herself more radically to God.