Dedicated to God (4 page)

The Poor Clare Colettines arrived in the United States with Mother Mary von Elmendorff of Dusseldorf, Germany, to found a new community in
Cleveland, Ohio. In 1916, following repeated requests by the Rockford, Illinois, diocese, nuns from the Cleveland community arrived in Rockford to start a new foundation.
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In 1966, Reverend Loras T. Lane, the bishop of Rockford, wrote to the Rockford Poor Clare Colettines, “It is truly significant that the Bishops of Rockford, whose duty is to sustain and strengthen the faith of those entrusted for their care, have always maintained special interest in, and concern for, the welfare and success of your Monastery, wherein a small number of God’s beloved souls have been called to serve Him in the cloistered atmosphere of prayer and meditation, of penance and sacrifice.”
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For four years, the cloistered nuns occupied a Victorian home as their temporary monastery. In 1920, the bishop purchased a former sanitarium for the growing community. The building provided ample space but needed extensive remodeling. When the 1934 improvements were finally paid for, another bishop “encouraged the sisters to begin saving for a new monastery, as he considered the old building a real firetrap,” the nuns wrote in their own historical account. “Due to the great increase in the cost of labor and building supplies, many years passed before there was any hope of replacing the temporary buildings in use since 1920.”
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In 1962, the Poor Clare Colettines moved into the newly constructed Corpus Christi Monastery.

“Poor Clare nuns live in utter freedom and simplicity,” reads their brochure, entitled
Come Follow Me
.
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It refers to a 1996 address by Pope John Paul II, in which he stated, “We come to understand the identity of the consecrated person, beginning with his or her complete self-offering, as being comparable to a genuine holocaust.” The brochure explains the four vows:

By her vow of poverty the Poor Clare frees herself of all temporal concerns and puts in check the innate desire of man to acquire and possess. She, instead, understands herself to be a steward rather than an owner of God’s manifold gifts. By the vow of chastity the Poor Clare expresses the yearning of a heart unsatisfied by any finite love. She proclaims to the whole world that God is enough by freeing her heart of any single human attachment in order to love God alone and all His creatures in Him. By her vow of obedience the Poor Clare freely renounces her own will, which is the most thorough sacrifice the human heart can make. She makes a holocaust of the very center of her being in order to conform her whole heart and will to that of her Beloved Spouse. By the vow of enclosure the Poor Clare leaves behind life in the world and lives in imitation of Christ’s hidden life at Nazareth. Within the enclosure she is free to listen to the voice of the Bridegroom and offer herself as a victim with Jesus for the salvation of the world.
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The Franciscan friar Benet Fonck of the Order of Friars Minor (OFM) has interacted with the Poor Clare Colettine Order since he joined the Franciscan Order in 1965. Author of
To Cling with All Her Heart to Him: The Spirituality of Saint Clare
, Friar Fonck writes that Poor Clares heed Christ’s command to Saint Francis to rebuild the Church and through their “poverty and prayer and simple proclamation fulfill this mandate in an especially effective and fruitful way.”
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Many women find contemplative cloistered life attractive, Friar Fonck writes, “because many of the monasteries are more conservative with full habits and a strict lifestyle; a good number of contemporary women seem to find a need satisfied with this kind of order and stability. The generation before them were accustomed to a more free-flowing and unstructured way of being a member of the Church. As the pendulum swings, their children have a longing and a need for something more conservative, more structured, and more tradition to satisfy their spiritual needs.”
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The Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford is the type of conservative monastery that Friar Fonck describes: The nuns wear the full habit and they adhere to a strict lifestyle.

In 2012, the Poor Clare Colettine Order celebrated the eight hundredth anniversary of its founding. But at the same time, the population of religious communities is declining. Over the past four decades, the number of religious sisters in the United States dropped significantly—69 percent; from 179,954 in 1965 to 54,018 in 2012—even as the Catholic population in the country rose. From 1970 to 2010, there was a drop worldwide in the total number of women religious, from 1,004,304 to 721,935, according to the Georgetown University affiliated Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which conducts social scientific studies about the Catholic Church.
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As of 2010, there were twelve Poor Clare Colettine monasteries in the United States, with a total membership of fewer than two hundred cloistered nuns. Twenty nuns currently reside within the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois.

Sister Maria Deo Gratias says that when young women inquire about joining the Corpus Christi Monastery, and ask if they can bring a computer or cell phone into the monastery, she teases them by saying they will have a
cell, but it is not the technology they might be thinking of; they would retire at night to a spartan room.

Until recently, Sister Maria Benedicta was the community’s youngest member, a thirtysomething former college softball pitcher who grew up in Kansas and did not see a religious sister in person or in a movie until the fourth grade. Sister Maria Benedicta has embraced the hidden life. She is “good,” the older nuns say; she is suited to this life. Sister Maria Benedicta is in the midst of a series of transitions, a process of detoxification from the world and integration into community that takes six years before she commits herself to this space for the rest of her life by professing final, solemn vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure.

One afternoon, Sister Maria Benedicta sits and sews with the Mother Abbess. She has completed one year as a postulant and two years as a novice. She hopes to make first vows, a temporary three-year term. The community is scheduled to vote the following day in a yes-no ballot to allow or deny her passage to the next phase. Each member of the community will receive a piece of paper with the word “yes” typed on one side and the word “no” typed on the other; they will circle one word. (In the past, the nuns voted with beans—a white bean indicating “yes” and a dark bean meaning “no”; the new system was put into place to make it easier for the older nuns.)

Sister Maria Benedicta and Mother Miryam spar, verbally. Sister Maria Benedicta mentions the Mother Abbess’s recent message to the religious sisters that they are to be a “yes” community. Sister Maria Benedicta coyly seeks reassurance that she will be accepted by consensus. Mother Miryam demurs, saying something about the virtue of patience and not knowing for certain just yet. In truth, there is little doubt that Sister Maria Benedicta will be accepted by the community. She must know this, and so she turns and addresses me, a mostly silent but conspicuous presence. Sister Maria Benedicta counters the wait-and-see approach and jokingly provokes: Do I have extra space in my house?

I say that I do, indeed, have a spare room and could definitely arrange chores for someone with her carpentry skills. At this point, Mother Miryam tells Sister Maria Benedicta that making backup plans could be construed as less than the requisite seriousness needed to join the community. Both women are still teasing. Still, Sister Maria Benedicta blushes and her tone turns solemn. They discuss the demands and the joys of the cloistered
monastic life. Sister Maria Benedicta makes clear she really does want this life, within these walls.

She, like the nineteen other women in the Corpus Christi Monastery, wants to become a Poor Clare to devote her life to prayer, to intercede on behalf of humanity. She has left the world because of her devotion to it.

Sister Maria Benedicta continues the detailed work of affixing beads to a veil for her biological sister’s upcoming wedding, a ceremony that Sister Maria Benedicta will not attend because she cannot leave the monastery. She falls back on what seems to be second nature; her cheeky analysis amuses Mother Miryam, who is sewing a baptismal gown and bonnet to sell in the gift shop. Sister Maria Benedicta tells Mother Miryam about a conversation that also took place in my presence with her Novice Mistress, Sister Mary Nicolette, earlier that same day in the woodshop. Sister Mary Nicolette, elected by the community to the post, oversees Sister Maria Benedicta’s instruction and guides her toward the Poor Clare ideals. While the two stood near a window, sending a plank through the teeth of a table saw, the afternoon sunlight refracted particles of sawdust, which appeared to glow around Sister Mary Nicolette. I photographed the pair and commented on the beautiful imagery. Then I opened myself up to their teasing by saying, earnestly, that the scene looked almost “mystical” or “magical.” Both Sister Maria Benedicta and Sister Mary Nicolette laughed. They joked that it was “holy dust,” or “mystical dust.”

Sister Maria Benedicta suggested that Sister Mary Nicolette should be canonized because the glow proved she is a saint. At this point in Sister Maria Benedicta’s retelling, Mother Miryam quips that it is a good thing a photograph documented the event, as that might be the closest Sister Mary Nicolette gets to becoming a saint. Sister Maria Benedicta laughs.

Cloistered monastic nuns submit to a radical life, a hard life, but they rarely allow themselves—or anyone else who enters these walls—to be too pleased with herself or her own progress.

Here, Sister Maria Benedicta is striving for perfection. Here, women who have departed contemporary American culture at various stages over the last century move together in a routine yet timeless space, focused on eternity as they synchronize to the cycle of prayers, manual labor, prayers, sleep, prayers.

They pull weeds and sew veils. This work frees their minds to contemplate God and pray for others.

One day after sewing with Mother Miryam, Sister Maria Benedicta learns that she has, indeed, been accepted by the community and can thus advance and make temporary vows as a Poor Clare Colettine nun. She and her community will continue to discern for the next three years until she can make final vows whether she truly is called to this vocation, in this place.

In a somber, reflective moment, during a one-on-one interview, Sister Maria Benedicta shares her most basic desire. “It’s not just that I want to get to heaven,” she says. “I want everyone else to get there, too. And it is very urgent. It’s life or death, for eternity.”

In this pursuit, she wants nothing less than to change the world, anonymously, by living virtue.

Called
Sister Mary Monica of the Holy Eucharist

I started when I entered: I was counting the first week and I was making percentages. My nickname was Sister Calculata because I was counting and counting and counting. I didn’t do this out in the world; I never had something to look forward to as much as this, or something that I thought was really important.

It has been a drain for me, for fifteen years to desire to be our Lord’s spouse and to not be able to do so, to long so much for this and to have the longing unfulfilled. Finally, by the Church, I am His spouse and that’s a wonderful thing.

When I was real little, I thought about having the call to be a nun. And I decided against it because I really was more interested in the things of the world. I really think it was a call inside from God. I had this feeling that I was never meant to marry—a man anyway. I had this conviction that I was not meant to marry. And it was very strong. I think God was trying to tell me, but I did shut the door. I shut the door. I will admit I really deeply regret that. I really do because I really feel like I said “no” to God. I trust that He makes good out of that, but I will admit that I admire the sisters here that were courageous enough, and self-giving and selfless enough, to give themselves to Jesus right away and not get caught up in what they wanted and the things of the world. I very much admire the sisters here who did that and anyone who did that. But I didn’t. And I ended up forgetting about it. I don’t think that I ever told anybody about it, but there was one day where I decided no. I was particularly fond of horses. We had a horse farm and the reason we had it was because of me.

I was on our farm and there was one day I was in the barn, and I was just having this real strong feeling inside to be a nun. And, at that point,
I actually reversed the decision. I was cleaning the barn, and I had that feeling about being a nun and I just said, “Okay, Lord, I will give up everything,” and I meant it. Even when I was a child, I knew. I knew that if you were asked to give up everything, at that time you should say, “Yes, alright, Lord, I’ll give up everything.”

I was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. I made the choice at that time that I would give up everything. I didn’t understand the spiritual part, but the material part, I understood what it meant. It meant giving up the farm and the horses and the dogs and everything else. So I made the promise. And I really knew very little, very little, about my faith, to speak of. I’d been working on it, I think, at that time, but I didn’t know that much. I hadn’t seen that much of sisters, and I didn’t know properly what a nun is because sisters are the ones outside that are active, and nuns are usually the ones in the cloister.

We had quite a few horses, and so it really ended up being five years before I got off the farm after I told my parents that I needed to be a nun. I said, “I need to be a nun and I can’t wait two years.” Oh, that was good! It was five years before I could finish with the farm.