Benedictine Sisters of FL

Holy Name Monastery
Founded 1889

Global Sisters Report

Witness & Grace Conversations: A Special Program by Global Sisters Report and EarthBeat

by Leave a Comment

How Catholic Sisters are Helping to Save the Earth

— and You Can Too


Presented by Sr. Sheila Kinsey and Sr. Melinda Roper

 

The webinar below took place on April 13th, but you can watch the recording. 

Just click on the link below and it will take you to the recording.

Catholic Sisters have long been involved in efforts to protect the environment, address climate change and care for creation. Sr. Sheila Kinsey shared a global view from her vantage point in Rome on how sisters around the world are effecting positive change. Sr. Melinda Roper shared the grassroots efforts of her teamwork with local communities in the particularly sensitive eco-environment of Darién, Panama.

This special hour-long conversation was moderated by EarthBeat Editor Barbara Fraser and GSR Editor Gail DeGeorge, and these sisters brought insights and information on the some of the pressing needs of our planet, how sisters are making a difference – and you can too. 

Watch Recording

(click on the link above to watch recording of webinar)

 

Continue Reading

Honor the ‘mothers’ of early Christianity during Women’s History Month

by Leave a Comment

~Article by Sr. Christine Schenk for the Global Sisters Report,

a project of National Catholic Reporter

Women’s History Month is a great time to celebrate the “mothers” of our Christian church. Until recently, few realized that early female believers shaped our church’s future no less than their better-known brothers (aka the “fathers of the church”).

On Feb. 14, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI made the rather remarkable statement that ” without the generous contribution of many women, the history of Christianity would have developed very differently,” and that the female presence was not “in any way secondary.”

Some early church mothers are relatively well-known while others are all but forgotten. Early writings and funerary inscriptions testify that women served as prophets, evangelists, missionaries, teachers, deacons, presbyters, enrolled widows, and heads of house churches and monasteries.

Marcella, Paula, Melania the Elder, Melania the Younger and Macrina exercised considerable authority in ancient Christianity. Marcella founded a sort of urban monastery and study group in in Rome that greatly benefited — and benefited from — Jerome’s biblical erudition. When Jerome left for Jerusalem in 385, Rome’s priests began to seek out Marcella for help in understanding the biblical texts.

Paula financed and oversaw the building of two monasteries in Bethlehem, one for women and one for men. This is where, thanks to Paula’s financial support, Jerome completed his translation of the Greek Bible into Latin. Jerome tells us that Paula’s expertise in Hebrew exceeded his own.

Melania the Elder publicly reconciled 400 schismatic monks in Asia Minor, and her spiritual wisdom and authority led to the repentance of the renowned monastic writer Evagrius.

Melania the Younger publicly countered Nestorianism at the court in Constantinople, and Macrina’s authority as a spiritual director had a profound influence on her theologian brothers, Basil and Gregory, who went on to craft the doctrine of the Trinity.

In her fourth-century travel journal, Egeria ecstatically greets her “very dear friend,” the deaconess Marthana in Seleucia (Turkey), who governed (regebat) a double monastery of women and men at the shrine of St. Thecla. Here we see a rare fourth-century example of a female deacon exercising governing authority over Christian men as well as women. Macrina also seems to have governed both men and women at her monastery in Cappadocia.

Egeria meticulously chronicled the liturgical practices in Jerusalem during Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide and Pentecost. Her diary is valuable to scholars since it provides documentation of liturgical practices in Jerusalem in the fourth century.

Proba is another prominent — albeit nearly invisible — church mother. A wealthy, well-educated wife and mother of sons, Proba adapted a popular poetic form — the Virgilian cento — to highlight the heroism of Jesus and attract aristocratic young men to the faith. Her literary and biblical authority created a remarkably effective cross-cultural evangelizing tool that would influence Christian men and women for generations.

Tabitha of Joppa and Grapte of Rome are two important but barely known church mothers from the first and second centuries.

Widows played an important role in early Christian expansion. They supported the church’s mission as financial patrons and converted others to the Jesus movement. The support of wealthy widows for poorer widows and orphans was a powerful evangelizing witness in a culture that regularly exposed unwanted babies to die.

In Acts 9:36-43, we read of Tabitha, “a disciple” who led a house church in Joppa, just 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem. She fell ill and died, leaving “all the widows … weeping and showing tunics and other clothing she had made for them” (Acts 9:39). Luke shows Peter hastening to Joppa where, after he prays over her, Tabitha is raised from the dead.

Because she is the only woman given the grammatically feminine title of “disciple” (mathetria) in the entire New Testament, some commentators suggest Tabitha was one of the women in Jesus’s Galilean discipleship. Peter may have known her well.

Since no male relative is anywhere in evidence, Tabitha was probably a widow herself. Biblical scholars suggest she was a leader of a congregation of widows at Joppa and a foremother of the “order of widows” prominent in the church into the third century.

And then there is Grapte of Rome. In the second century, the author of an important Christian book, The Shepherd of Hermas, writes that Hermas had a vision in which he was told to write “two little books and send one to Grapte and one to Clement.” Grapte must “instruct the widows and the orphans,” and Clement is to send the other book “to all the foreign cities.” Hermas is also asked to read the book “to this city [Rome] along with the elders that preside over the Church.”

Clement is remembered in church history as a leader and communicator for the other house church leaders of Rome. Since Rome did not embrace a monarchical episcopacy as quickly as other urban communities, Clement’s letter was sent to Corinth on behalf of all the house churches of Rome, not on his own behalf.

The Roman church was not led by a monarchical bishop at this time but by what scholar Peter Lampe has called a “plurality of presbyters.” It is notable that the Shepherd of Hermas sharply reprimands Rome’s diakonoi (male deacons?) who “despoil the living of widows and orphans,” in contrast to Grapte who cares for and ministers to them. As Lampe sees it, Grapte “was entrusted with this work by all the communities of Rome.”

Both Grapte and Clement are identified as leaders whose responsibilities involve all the faith communities at Rome. While Clement is remembered in church history, Grapte is not.

Many early writings attest that for early Christians, care of widows and orphans was an ethical priority. What is less obvious is that this ministry was often, if not usually, carried out by women. A pattern emerges in which we find wealthier widows caring for other widows and, like Tabitha, welcoming them into their households. This pattern persists well into the fifth century.

Communities of widows, including the “widows called virgins” — named by Ignatius of Antioch in his second-century letter to the Smyrnaeans — became centers of evangelization and hubs of female leadership.

It is nothing short of inspiring that these “mothers of the church” exercised authority at a time when the “fathers of the church” forbade women to speak or teach publicly, preferred that women stay at home and judged women more susceptible to heresy than men.

Yet Christian women did not keep silent or remain enclosed. They spoke up about important ecclesial issues, served the marginalized, taught both men and women, and witnessed freely about the Christ with whom they had thrown in their lot. They are great role models for the women and men of today.

Mothers of the church, presente!

Continue Reading

One Year Later

by Leave a Comment

Our hearts and prayers go out to the many monasteries and convents that have lost Sisters due to the pandemic.  While the Benedictine Sisters of Florida have suffered financial loss, we have been immensely blessed.  None of the Sisters have become ill with the virus nor suffered any serious illness during the pandemic.

With the coronavirus, we are faced with the fragility of life.  Our day will come to meet our Lord and Savior which should be a reminder to be ready.

 

One year later, it’s impossible to know how much we have lost to COVID-19

 ~Article by Dan Stockman for the Global Sisters Report, a project of National Catholic Reporter

 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began a year ago, I read The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry about the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The book tells how, when the number of infections exploded in Philadelphia, the first major city in the United States hit by the deadly flu, 2,000 nuns from all over the country came to nurse the sick. Hospitals were overwhelmed, so sisters set up clinics anywhere there was space. As a result, 23 of them died from their close contact with the infected.

It occurred to me that hundreds of women religious must have died in that terrible outbreak. There would have been deaths not just among those caring for the sick, but in convents across the country. After all, an estimated 50 million people died worldwide from what became known as “Spanish flu,” and an estimated 675,000 of those deaths were in the United States.

But I could not find any organization that kept track of how many sisters died in that pandemic, let alone told their stories. Hundreds of sisters killed in the United States, and we have no comprehensive record of it beyond those 23. It is an incalculable loss made incomprehensible as it is lost to history.

As I was reading and pondering this in March 2020, convents were going into lockdown, trying to keep sisters safe from the virus that has ravaged their age group. Visitors were barred, travel was canceled, events were postponed.

But it wasn’t enough.

The most insidious part of the COVID-19 virus, of course, is its long incubation period: One can be infected and infect others for up to 14 days before having any symptoms. Some apparently healthy people were, in fact, contagious, and the virus worked its way into convents, retirement homes and assisted-living facilities, where it exploded among the vulnerable population.

As sisters began to die, it quickly became clear that once again, no one was keeping comprehensive track of the religious we were losing. Their ministries, the people they touched, the mountains they moved: All of those stories are in danger of being lost.

I have tried to track them as best I can through Google Alerts and the reader tributes submitted to Global Sisters Report. At least once a week, it seems, there is another sister lost, and sometimes, there are horrible strings of them — a slow-motion story of pain and grief. Occasionally, there are shocking bursts of them all at once.

On April 9, 2020, there were reports that four sisters at the Our Lady of the Angels Convent in Greenfield, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, had tested positive for the virus and another had died. Four days later came another death. Then a third, until eventually, six sisters had died at the convent, which specializes in memory care and is shared by the School Sisters of St. Francis and the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

Then came the awful news that four Maryknoll Sisters had died, then a Sister of Charity of Nazareth, a Sister of Mercy, and on and on and on, week after week, month after month.

Among them was Sr. Annelda Holtkamp of the School Sisters of St. Francis in Milwaukee, who was 102. She ministered for decades as a homemaker at convents in Illinois, Nebraska and Wisconsin, serving her fellow sisters until she retired at age 87.

Sr. Raquela Mesa-Acosta from Colombia died while ministering to the Hispanic community in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In her early years in the Congregation of Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate and St. Catherine of Siena, she served as a personal assistant to the order’s founder, St. Laura Montoya.

Sr. Georgianna Glose, a Sister of St. Dominic of Amityville, New York, spent 51 years serving people kept poor in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. She also helped sound the alarm on sexual abuse by priests within the Catholic Church. I met her in 2017 while working on a story about Sr. Sally Butler, with whom she lived, and she was outgoing, gregarious and passionate about her ministry.

Sr. Irene Loretta Cassady was beloved at the schools where she taught in Philadelphia. One student said she helped save his life when he was in a coma from a rare blood disorder: She held him in her arms while a priest said last rites. Another time, she insisted on visiting a student in the hospital even though she was in a wheelchair after a severe back injury. She died after nearly 70 years in the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

How many others, though, will we never even know about?

I suspect we all question life and death and God’s plan and what it all means when there is a death close to us. But watching these reports come in week after week, the litany of lives ended too early, left me a little numb.

Then I saw the pain up close and in person.

The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Felix of Cantalice, or Felician Sisters, in Livonia, Michigan, lost 12 sisters from April 10 to May 10, 2020, and a 13th on June 27, 2020. Making the Felicians’ anguish even worse: They could not observe their usual traditions when a sister dies. In fact, they largely couldn’t leave their rooms at all, in an effort to stop the spread of the virus, and spent months in something like solitary confinement.

They were in shock. They had been through profound trauma and had almost no way to express it — until I reached out and asked whether they might be interested in telling their story to GSR. Once they were out of quarantine, I visited them, spending a day doing masked interviews conducted at least 10 feet apart. I was probably the first guest at the convent in months.

They had suffered such incalculable loss, but they wanted to tell their story. They wanted the world to know about these women, who had been teachers, a librarian, an organist, a nurse. They found some comfort in telling their story and even more comfort from the reaction: gifts, notes, love and condolences from around the world.

I had to enter their pain to write about it, but I took comfort that their story was told and that it brought them some measure of healing. You cannot share in someone’s grief and not be changed.

The reports of sisters dying continued through the summer, fall and winter. And my efforts to track them are completely inadequate: The Google Alerts and reader tributes only find the late sisters that someone wrote a news story about or sent in to GSR. If there is only an obituary, the sister’s death won’t show up in a news search; a search of obituaries would miss any that do not include the words “COVID” or “coronavirus,” which is most of them. My sifting of sister deaths overseas is even worse, as it only includes English-speaking countries or English-language coverage.

This poor accounting has found 95 sisters lost to COVID-19 in the United States, but the true number must be at least triple that. The deaths I know about outside the United States number only 155. I hate to even think about what the real number — and scope of the loss — is.

One community I talked to explained they have a standard practice when a sister dies: An obituary is published, and she is added to the list of deceased sisters on the website. They do that whether the sister was well-known with significant public achievements or whether she had a ministry of prayer. To issue a press release or allow a news story about only some sisters who died simply because of what caused their death wouldn’t be right, they told me.

I understand that. But the greater church needs to know the extent of our loss. We have no full concept of what this pandemic has cost us. We cannot fully mourn these sisters if we don’t know they’re gone.

We’re supposed to learn from history, yet we are repeating it. I can only imagine someone 100 years from now wondering what the toll was among those who dedicated their lives to serving God and his people and finding that no one counted them.

Perhaps this is a job for researchers rather than reporters, or each country’s umbrella organizations for religious. I don’t have the answers, only the questions that need to be asked.

This reaping is already tragic. We owe it to those who died to be able to tell future generations what we lost.

 

Continue Reading

Another Global Sisters Report

by Leave a Comment

Global Sisters Report is an international publication.

We share with you a couple of quotes particular

to life during this year of Covid.

 

Gifts for this Covid Christmas – the conscious circle of humanity

by Nancy Sylvester

Contemplate This – We are being asked to imagine ourselves joining hands and becoming a circle around our planet and through space and time. Conscious of who we are at our best, we take part in a mutual exchange of wisdom and protection.

 

COVID-19 – darkness covers the earth – like glitter 

by Nancy Linenkugel

COVID-19 is teensy particles that go all over and spread, just like glitter. An anonymous description I read is this: “Picture us around a table, making individual crafts. One of us is using glitter. How many projects have glitter?” (They all do, since glitter spreads. Everywhere.)

Continue Reading

Global Sisters Report

by Leave a Comment

The Benedictine Sisters of Florida are among several Orders that participated in the Global Sisters Report article (an international publication) regarding life during Covid-19.

Shut up at home by pandemic,

Sisters find world is still with them

by Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans

After months of emergency shutdowns, staged reopenings and, in some cases, reversals, sisters are finding ways to cope with the inevitable COVID-19 anxiety, brought on by months under virtual lock and key.

No, they aren’t congregating in gyms, bellying up to the bar or having unmasked beach bonfires. Surprised?

Instead they are sewing masks for frontline responders. Scheduling extra prayer time for those suffering from the ravages of the virus. Ringing the monastery bell to remind townspeople to pray in a pandemic-stricken state.

But women in orders are also finding lockdown escapes that would sound familiar to the rest of us. They include in-house movie nights, long walks, check-in calls with friends and acquaintances, the occasional sweet treat and even popular novels.

Their “steady as she goes” approach does not mean that they have been left untouched. As GSR chronicled, some religious communities, such as the Felicians, have had numerous deaths. Elderly members reside in nursing homes where visitors, including fellow sisters, are restricted or banned outright.

In the meantime, women religious are finding ways to connect with others and have fun at the same time, even while maintaining the recommended social distance.

When nuns are looking for outlets, said Sr. Anne Lythgoe, a member of the Columbus, Ohio-based Dominican Sisters of Peace leadership team, they gravitate toward doing more of what they like to do already, whether that is gardening or listening to classical music.

“You go to things that give you life,” she said. Lythgoe, a potter, has been spending more time in her artist’s studio.

Members of her community have also been making masks, as well as providing food assistance, said Lythgoe. Though the pandemic has been “overwhelming, and everyone has had to adjust to a new way of living,” she added that sisters, like everybody else, find a sense of balance by looking outside themselves.

In Los Angeles County, the Daughters of St. Paul (already known as the “media nuns”) moved to “adapt our ministry right away,” said Sr. Rose Pacatte. It did not take long before the seven sisters in her house began to livestream their holy hour and participate in online Masses with consecrated hosts provided by priest friends in neighboring parishes.

“I felt like I was praying in union with the larger church,” said Pacatte, adding that washing her hands has become a ritual and a moment for prayerful reflection.

She would say two Hail Marys for the intentions of those asking for prayer, Pacatte wrote in an email. “Sometimes it was about 50 Hail Marys,” she recalled. “Now, when I pray the Hail Marys as I wash my hands, it’s so people will wear masks, be non-violent in their work for racial justice, and for wisdom for our leaders.”

Perhaps it’s the pandemic effect, but Pacatte said she is now a rosary enthusiast. “I was never a big rosary person, but it became my prayer of comfort.” She has also launched a prayer group on Facebook for Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

With the help of Holy Cross Family Ministries, which donated thousands of the devotional items, the Culver City, California-based Pauline sisters launched a drive-through rosary giveaway from their bookstore parking lot for 10 days in May.

At the suggestion of the Pauline mission advancement director, Sr. Tracey Dugas, sisters in the order have picked up the phone, checking in with local connections. Though Dugas left the fine points to the sisters, in Culver City, “we printed out the info of our bookstore patrons, lay cooperators and benefactors and divided the pages among us,” said Pacatte in an email. Sometimes the conversations would be so lengthy that she would make it through just eight of the names on her list, she said.

But the sisters also found time to watch movies like “Emma” twice a week, go for walks in the neighborhood, and make raspberry lemonade cake “to die for, from scratch,” Pacatte added.

Contacted in Chicago, Dugas said that, despite the trauma of the past months, which included the looting of their local bookstore, “a lot of grace came from this time and people grew in communion with one another.”

Sisters changed their schedules so that they could eat lunch together. “Each sister took on things that relaxed them.”

For Dugas, that was the art of lettering (she’s got almost 6,000 followers on Instagram, where her moniker is @sistah_tee_letters). Others took on long-deferred projects from to-do lists, like moving furniture or cleaning up files.

Navigating the twists and turns of a work life lived largely online — she works with two computers on her desk — hasn’t been easy for Sr. Marguerite O’Beirne, a member of the Order of St. Francis in Aston, Pennsylvania, where she serves as the vice president for mission and ministry at Neumann University. “I never thought I would live that long,” joked O’Beirne, about the dual computers, commenting that she grew up in Ireland without a phone.

The sisters in her order, both active and retired, sent out welcoming notes to approximately a thousand students arriving in the fall, she said. In Palmer Method handwriting, of course.

Staff in a local hospital respiratory therapy department were invited to spend nights at the convent’s spiritual center. Sisters sent them meals and cards expressing their gratitude, said O’Beirne.

The sisters, who have the privilege of living in a safe environment, are dedicated to supporting those who are putting themselves at risk, she said.

At the motherhouse of the Presentation sisters in San Francisco, the community, which ranges in age from 76 to 100, has crafted more than 300 masks, said Sr. Rosina Conrotto. With no in-house Mass available, they have been watching it on television and listening to TED talks on aging, said Conrotto, the director of the Office of Consecrated Life for the San Francisco Archdiocese. Men in religious communities, like the Capuchins, have also been engaged in sewing masks, she said.

“I don’t bake, but there are some novels I’ve wanted to read, and I’m catching up on some spiritual reading,” as well as taking a break by listening to classical and country music, and watching a few Turner Classic Movies on the side, she said. In her relatively rare moments of downtime, Conrotto admits to a fondness for mysteries and courtroom dramas.

With public worship suspended for the time being, nuns at the Carmelite Monastery of Baltimore have taken to Zoom, both to participate in annual meetings of their larger Carmelite community and to share vespers and Saturday afternoon lectio divina (reading and reflection) on the next day’s Gospel passage, said Sr. Judy Murray, a member of the community.

At another Carmelite monastery, this one across the country in Carmel, California, much of the day is spent following the traditional horarium of worship, work, recreation and study. The sisters at the Carmelite Monastery of Our Lady and St. Therese don’t have television but are able to access news through newspapers and phone calls, said Mother Teresita, who is the community prioress. “We’ve got shelter-in-place down,” she joked, but added that they are very conscious of what is going on in the outside world.

“We are aware of the unrest, and we continue to live our lives in union with God, uniting all this suffering with Christ and, hopefully, praying for peace. The best we can do is pray. What is more powerful than prayer? That is why we are called to this vocation,” she said.

At Holy Name Monastery in St. Leo, Florida, monastery sacristan Sister Elizabeth Mathai is one on a team of Benedictine sisters who ring the outside Angelus bell every day at 3 p.m. They do this to remind the townspeople living in one of the national COVID-19 “hot spots” that the sisters are praying for them and for an end to the pandemic.

“I really do believe all things are possible with a little help from heaven,” Benedictine Sister Miriam Cosgrove said, but admitted that she was so disheartened by the prevalence of the virus that she doesn’t listen to the news.

When it gets overwhelming, she said, she heads outside, to the fish farm (the sisters raise tilapia, a nod toward economic and environmental stability, they say) and their vegetable garden. “I look around to see what’s come to life each day.”

But apart from two sisters who work outside the monastery walls, the Benedictines, who furloughed their staff with pay, only leave for doctors’ appointments, said Sister Roberta Bailey, the prioress. “We are cleaning bathrooms, scrubbing floors and cooking.”

Every Sunday night is still game night, she said. “Routines keep us together.” She now has more time for her hobby of cross-stitching and for reading, both spiritual and fun, she says.

Some sisters can’t wait for their favorite teams to take the field again.

Like legions of sports-starved fans across the country, many are missing the chance to root for their favorite players (or horse). GSR’s North American sister liaison, Michele Morek, an Ursuline Sister of Mount St. Joseph, Kentucky, confessed that community members at the motherhouse were disappointed about cancellation of this year’s Kentucky Derby, as well as the chance to bet on the NCAA basketball brackets.

In the pre-pandemic era, “we all made a ‘donation’ of $2 and our director of communication would send out bracket forms, which we would fill in and send back,” she wrote in an email. “He would give us updates every day, with which sisters had how many right at the time … and the one that got the most right at the end got all the money.”

At the moment, wrote Morek in an email last week, she’s watching the Kansas City Royals out of solidarity with her housemate, an “avid” fan, and eagerly awaiting the advent of football season.

Though many sisters have been pressing for social change during this unsettling time, few seemed daunted, either by the uncertainties of the lockdown or the weeks of protests.

Both male and female religious communities in Conrotto’s area of San Francisco are being conscientious about following directions, from social distancing to handwashing, she reports. “It’s part of our vow of obedience. We are very careful.”

While sisters spend a lot of hours in prayer and assisting others, their advice for staying sane amid all of the crazy also has a distinctly down-to-earth, even a hopeful, tone.

Tend your garden. Bring a neighbor a meal. Don’t fret about what might happen, but do something concrete to change the world, like addressing racism in your workplace, advised Baltimore Carmelite Murray, advocating a focus on beauty, goodness and truth.

“Generally, women religious are in it for the long haul,” said Lythgoe, the potter in Ohio. “They know that things will ultimately get better, and that the arc of history does move towards justice. We can say a lot of things. It’s what we do that speaks to people.”

~Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a freelance writer specializing in religion coverage. She is a frequent contributor to Global Sisters Report.
Continue Reading