LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — A happy, party noise filled Annunciation Chapel on the last day of August, a breezy day that felt more spring than end of summer.

Inside the little church next to the headquarters of the Sisters of Charity, people stood in the aisles and among the pews, talking, laughing and hugging one another. Most of the people were women, and many of those were nuns. Friends and family from Denver to Boston had come for Rejane Cytacki's special day.

Rejane, in a new dress and a smile that would stay on her face through the cookies-and-punch reception afterward, worked the crowd. The Notre Dame graduate, 35 years old, was here to take the next step toward becoming a Sister of Charity.

For this special Mass celebrating Rejane's first vows, the music and singing nearly lifted the chapel roof off.

At a lectern at the front of the church, Rejane stood with Sister Sue Miller, community director, and Sister Nancy Bauman, who works with the order's fledgling nuns. Rejane professed three vows.

Poverty. Chastity. Obedience.

When she finished, she stood in front of the altar with the two older nuns, and the congregation erupted into boisterous applause.

Rejane is the only woman in the past four years to start down the path toward life with the Sisters of Charity, a community of 297 Catholic religious women. The community settled in Leavenworth more than 150 years ago.

But on this weekend, the celebrating was just getting started.

The next day, Jennifer Gordon, a 33-year-old graduate of Duke University, would take her perpetual vows and become a sister for life.

Women still become nuns?

Yes, they do.

They are prayerful, community-minded, well-educated women like Rejane, working on her second master's degree, and Jennifer, who has an MBA.

Nuns used to be a lot more visible. When they ran parish schools, Sisters of Charity lived in parish convents. But those days are gone, as are most of the convents that long ago were converted into classrooms and parish offices.

Today, Sisters of Charity live in the communities, some overseas, that they serve. In fact, only 66 of them live at the motherhouse in Leavenworth.

The majority of them live with as many as five other nuns in houses where they share household chores, such as cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping. They pray and go to church together, too.

Everything is communal, even the money.