Until a year and a half ago, Kimberly Ann Clouse thought she knew happiness.

At 22, she spent her time working at Traco in Cranberry, volunteering at St. Joseph Parish in Oakland Township and enjoying a vibrant social life with her friends. The 1999 graduate of Butler Area High School was optimistic and certainly not considering drastically altering her life.

Then, encouraged by a nun at her parish, she attended a retreat with the Sisters of St. Francis of Millvale.

There, she heard a call she had never expected.

"After I met the sisters, I felt at home, and I felt that this is where I was supposed to be," Clouse said. "I had never thought about the religious life, but I knew then that God wanted me to join the sisterhood. Now I have found something that makes me truly happy, and I'm so fortunate for it."

Last month, she was officially welcomed as a candidate in the Franciscan order, becoming an example of what church officials are calling a renewed interest in the religious life among women.

Clouse is about one-third of the way through the process of becoming a religious, having made it past a year of discernment, during which she met with the order's vocations director, worked and prayed with the sisters, and underwent a screening process that involves a psychological evaluation. Her candidacy will last up to two years, after which she will become a canonical novice and officially carry the title of "sister." After a year or two in the novitiate, sisters take their temporary vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience and take anywhere from three to six years to decide to make their final vows.

Clouse is joined by about 31 other candidates in the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese who are in various stages of their journey. That number is up from 26 in the year 2000. Before then, the numbers were lower, according to the diocese. Vocations directors from local congregations also report that the number of inquiries made into the religious life is higher.

"Everything goes in cycles. We all experienced a drop in the number of women after the peak in the '60s," said Sister Maria Fest, business director for the Sisters of Divine Providence. "Now there seems to be more women examining their spirituality and who are looking into our lifestyle."

The rise is being hailed, and many religious communities have taken it as a mandate to step up recruitment efforts.

After a recent visit to Texas A&M University, Sister Louise Marie, director of vocational ministry of the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Province of the Felician Sisters in Coraopolis, realized the power of proactive "invitation," as she calls it.

"The Catholic campus ministry at Texas A&M has a very involved vocations program, and while I was there, I talked to nine young women in five days who were seriously considering the sisterhood. That's more than I've talked to in the last five years in the Pittsburgh area," she said. "Those numbers have to do with the leaders there showing how dynamic the religious life can be."

Inspired by a campus program that took young women to visit congregations in different states over a period of several weeks, Sister Louise developed what she calls "The Nun Run" through the Pittsburgh Religious Vocations Council. More dignified than it sounds, "The Nun Run" on Aug. 15 and 22 will take women between the ages of 18 and 30 to five religious communities over the course of a day -- the Sisters of Mercy in Oakland, the Sisters of Divine Providence in McCandless, the Benedictines of Ross, the Millvale Franciscans and the Felician Sisters.

"We just want to impart a better understanding of what religious life in today's world is, which will naturally lead to more interest," Sister Louise said.

Clouse agreed that a more active approach to vocations is beneficial, but she added that the congregations' presence in churches and the community and, surprisingly, on the Internet is the best way to motivate others to follow.

"Being out there and being a witness and focus in the community is so important, and in today's day and age, so is having a nice Web site," she said. "You can find everything online, from pictures of the sisters to the order's mission. You can tell just by looking at the Web site what the community is about."

While congregations work on modernizing their image by becoming Internet-saavy, they also are placing an emphasis on discernment retreats as a way to introduce women to religious life -- and possibly dispel images of nuns portrayed on television and in movies such as "Sister Act." The majority of local orders offer women of all ages and backgrounds some type of single-day or extended retreat that centers on prayer and fellowship.

"Many times in the public media, members of religious congregations have been caricatured, and honestly, I have never seen any women in a full traditional habit looking as ridiculous as those who have been portrayed in some of the ads I've seen," said Sister Judith Nero, vocations director for the Benedictine Sisters of Pittsburgh. "Introducing women to what living in a religious community is really like is so important because society in general is so uninformed."

The advancing age of the sisters in the Pittsburgh area has been noted in the media, but the women themselves appear largely unconcerned with the fact that the average age of nuns here has hit 68, as reported by the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese's Department of Consecrated Life.

"I'm not at all worried about the fact that many of the sisters are much older than I am," Clouse said. "Actually, I don't know if I can keep up with them. There are sisters three times my age that could run three circles around me, they have so much energy and spirit."

"What a lot of people don't realize is that the large numbers that came before Vatican II and after the Depression were really an anomaly, and that historically, very few were called," said Sister Kathy Adamski, pre-entrance coordinator for the Sisters of St. Francis of Millvale. "So the focus and concern shouldn't be on higher ages and small numbers of candidates."

Whether it's because of new vocations efforts or the natural ebb and flow of interest, the climb in the number of new candidates entering religious communities appears to be holding its own.

As part of this new generation of young sisters, far removed from the influence of "The Flying Nun," Clouse has no illusions about the path she has chosen.

"During my discernment, I was given some words of wisdom from Sister Bernadette, who was visiting from North Carolina," she recalled. "She said to me, 'Married life isn't peaches and cream. Single life isn't peaches and cream. And I'm here to tell you, religious life is not peaches and cream. But what matters is that you're happy here.' I'm going in under no false pretexts, but I know that I'm going to be happy, and that's what matters."