[Okay, I realize this is a long story and kind of odd for our forum (therefore, it is in the Odds and Ends thread); however, it could be another angle to consider in our continuing quest to see Papa. Notice the age that most of these nuns joined their order--50s and 60s. What if we started a lay order for, shall we say, "mature" women and requested an audience with Papa to get his papal seal of approval for our order? We could actually create a semi-serious rule. If that didn't work, we might as well join the group of sisters in this article. They sound like a fun group and many of them came from Germany. I wonder if any of them met Papa--maybe the 92-year-old nun who refers to him as her "buddy". Hmm, another Benaddict?]
Answering the call
By Robin Acton
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Sister M. Petra Littlejohn turned to face the altar and raised her hands high above her head as she began to sing the Latin verses she'd practiced for months before this day.
Aloud in her own words and on paper in her own handwriting, the 61-year-old divorced grandmother makes her solemn profession, a promise of love, obedience and chastity until death. Before a hundred friends and the family she has left behind -- a daughter, son-in-law and two small grandsons -- she vows to live a monastic life of humility and service.
Radiant in a new veil and a gold ring, she marks the end of a long journey, a search for place and peace that led her from her home in North Carolina to a sun-filled chapel at St. Emma Monastery in Greensburg.
On this, her wedding day, she is betrothed to God.
"I've always tried to do what is right," she says. "Now, it's time to live what's right. ... It's been 18 years since I received my first calling and I've tried a lot of places that were all right for a period of time. Finally, in 1997, an internal voice said, 'I have prepared a place for you. Come.'"
Benedictine nuns have taken various paths to find their place at St. Emma's since Mother Leonarda Fritz and 10 sisters from the St. Walburga Abbey in Germany came to Latrobe on Feb. 25, 1931, to cook for students, seminarians and Benedictine monks at St. Vincent Archabbey and College.
Some entered the order as teenagers fresh from the homes of their parents, while others have married, borne children and known the heartache of being widowed. A few have gone through the turmoil of divorce, which requires an annulment by the church. They've gone to college, traveled around the world and held jobs as clerks or teachers or factory workers. Many grew up Catholic; some converted from other faiths.
But all have been drawn here by a calling so strong that it sends them to their knees in prayer six times a day and leads them to give up everything they know and love and own.
"A sister said once, 'To give up your house, that's nothing. What's difficult is to give up yourself.' And it is," says Sister Maria Glaubitz, 67, a teacher who has spent 41 years in the religious life and came from Germany about six years ago to train novices.
Sister Miriam Walters, 59, of Meadville, is an energetic, converted Methodist who joined the order three years ago. She wanted to become a nun as a young girl, but her parents refused, so she married and had a daughter. Although her marriage broke up after 15 years, she had a house and a job and a full life that eventually included three grandchildren.
"All of a sudden, I was drawn back to it. I said, 'You're asking a lot of me, God,' but as it turned out, it worked out for the best," she says.
She says her daughter was upset at first, fearing they wouldn't be able to see each other.
"But they can visit me anytime, and I can go home once a year."
Sister Veronica Chverchko, 30, one of 13 children, says her mother writes to her every week from their home in Loretto, Cambria County, but she answers only about once in two months. She misses her family, particularly her "total opposite" twin sister, a massage therapist who also works for a firm that makes baking pans.
"But we're not supposed to have so much contact. We're supposed to leave our old life behind. It's not like we forget about them; we're praying for our families all the time," she explains.
Prayer -- six times daily according to the Liturgy of the Hours -- sets the rhythm of life in the busy community led by its first American-born prioress, Mother Mary Anne Noll, 61, who left her parents' home in Loretto and joined the order as a teenager in 1963.
Bells break the predawn quiet at 4:55 a.m., waking the sisters for vigils that begin at 5:30, followed by lauds at 6:30 and the Eucharist at 7, all sung in simplified, melodic Gregorian chant in the chapel that smells of new wood and old Bibles.
Afterward, they file in silent procession into the adjacent atrium, where they wait on straight-backed pews to hear their daily assignments. Some consult appointment books and scribble notes on pads kept in cloth pouches under black scapulars, the pinafores worn over their habits.
The community operates as a family, with chores to do, doctor appointments to keep, cars that break down and bills to pay. Tasks are divided among the sisters.
"This is not an escape from life," says Mother Mary Anne. "You're facing life."
For the first 30 years, there was no space in the order for new novices, she says, so there is a big age gap among the sisters, who range in age from 30 to 92.
In the years since the order first purchased the 10-acre Robertshaw estate in 1943 as a summer retreat and retirement home, there has been room for expansion with additional acquisitions and construction of a three-story retreat center, chapel and guest house. In 1961, the community opened its doors to novices, and by its peak in 1963, it was home to 47 women.
Time and again, though, death has robbed them, filling the nearby hillside with tombstones until only 13 sisters remain.
Single women -- ideally between 18 and 40, but older in rare exceptions -- start their relationship with the community on short visits, with some eventually staying for a three-month live-in experience. If both the community and an individual find that God may be calling her to serve, she starts a one-year period as a postulate and begins studies on the Rule of St. Benedict and the ways of monastic life.
Sheri Fremming, 51, a petite, strawberry-blonde Texan, is six months into her postulancy. She's hopeful that she'll continue, even though she misses things like movies and surfing the Internet for news and weather.
"If all goes well, in six months I will become a novice and get a white veil," she says.
A novice wears the black habit and white veil for two years during an intense period of study and prayer. After that, she may be admitted to temporary profession and given a religious name and a black veil, but it takes another three years to make solemn profession and receive the gold ring and a black veil lined in white.
Mother Mary Anne says novices' property and assets are managed by an appointed administrator and protected should they choose not to remain in the order. They must give up their money and possessions before making final profession, but it is ultimately their decision alone as to whether their assets go to family, a charity or the church.
Although the community's numbers are dwindling, the prioress believes the sisters will be able to carry out their mission of hospitality and run the 54-room retreat and conference center, guest house and book store that provide them with income.
"It's really hectic, though. There's always something going on," says Mother Mary Anne, whose cell phone strapped to a belt at her waist rings incessantly throughout any given day.
In the days leading to Sister Petra's profession, the prioress sends the sisters and a group of volunteers running with jobs to do: mop the dining hall, clean guest rooms, set tables for 110 people, load boxes of food into walk-in refrigerators, arrange flowers, count and fold starched white napkins.
A perfectionist who guides the community with a firm demeanor pleasantly tempered by kindness, love and humor, she works alongside the sisters tirelessly, racing around in black rubber-soled shoes until the veil that covers her white pleated coif flaps in the breeze behind her.
She wants things done right -- the first time - but insists it's for a higher purpose and according to St. Benedict's rule, which sanctifies work.
"Every thing we do, every tool that is used in the monastery is for God. We are welcoming guests as Christ and we take great care because we are doing it out of love for God and respect for one another," she says.
Volunteer Bob Dietrich, of Greensburg, who spends several days a week at the monastery painting and doing odd jobs, has nicknamed her "Mother of Perpetual Motion."
"She never stops," he says.
The prioress says she values the many volunteers who keep things operating smoothly without paid help.
"My favorite color is free. My favorite flavor is free. Once we get hold of you, we don't let you go," she says, hugging a volunteer who has come to sew torn habits and collars.
Another volunteer, Betty Cheeks, of Baltimore, hitches a ride with her priest and visits the monastery several times a year for several weeks. Cheeks, who speaks in a hoarse whisper from throat cancer, says the sisters remind her of the nuns who gave her the nickname "Sunshine" during her childhood in an orphanage seven decades ago.
"I love them. I'm so contented here," she says, mopping and rinsing a long hallway in the retreat center until the floor glistens.
Midway through morning tasks, bells call the sisters to chapel for the 11:45 a.m. prayer, which is followed by lunch and an hour's rest before they go back to work until 5 p.m. vespers and supper.
Meals are eaten in silence in their dimly-lit private refectory, away from volunteers and guests, interrupted only by prayers and the voice of one sister who reads aloud from scriptures and selected books.
Hearty and plentiful food -- thick soups, melt-in-your-mouth beef, warm bread, sweet puddings -- is set up on a buffet table and spooned onto plates according to rank with the prioress leading the way.
Absent from the dining room these days is the frail Sister Gaudentia Kaemmerle, 92, who is nestled on flannel sheets in a hospital bed in her small bedroom, or "cell." Her walls are decorated with pictures of the man she calls "my buddy," Pope Benedict.
The younger sisters revere the diminutive nun, a spirited only child who left her family in Germany at the age of 20 in 1934, never to see her mother alive again. Between stops from a visiting nurse, they fluff her pillows and spoon-feed her applesauce and warm oatmeal laced with one of several medications her doctor permits them to crush.
The sisters watch her closely because she sometimes "cheeks" pills that should be swallowed whole. She sends them into fits of giggles when she smiles and sticks out her tongue to show a pill hidden in her mouth through spoon after spoon of chicken noodle soup.
"You may have this," she says, her voice laced in a thick German accent.
After the supper dishes are cleared, there's some time for recreation -- usually an hour or so -- when the sisters can talk and share stories. They watch television only on rare occasions, for events like the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the election of the pope or coverage of disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
Until 1987 when they left St. Vincent, the sisters cooked meals for the Pittsburgh Steelers during summer training camps in Latrobe. In February, they stayed up long past their bedtime to watch their team win the Super Bowl as Sister Veronica, waving a Terrible Towel, explained plays.
On a recent stressful day, two sisters were hurt in a wreck that demolished their car and sent one to the hospital with several broken bones that required surgery. Later, a burning cake in a convection oven set off fire alarms, filled their private quarters with smoke and sent them running from the chapel during prayers. That evening, Mother Mary Anne decides that a treat at recreation might elevate their mood.
It does.
Munching potato chips and candy, they begin to relax. Soon, they're laughing about the ruined cake and counting their blessings aloud that the injured sisters were not killed.
"Just another quiet day at the monastery," jokes Sister Renata Augustine, 39, a jovial convert who grew up as a fourth-generation Jehovah's Witness.
Growing serious, she talks about the hardships in her life. She was 14 when she lost her father to congestive heart failure; five years later, her vehicle was hit by a drunken driver. Although she was paralyzed for two years, she recuperated fully and came to the monastery nine years ago.
"The last thing I remember about the accident was saying, 'Let me live, I want to serve you,'" she says.
Recreation is over by 7:30, the time for compline, or evening prayers. Just as they started it, the sisters end the day in the chapel, huddled together in candlelight before they retreat silently in the dark to their private cells.
This is their time alone to read or pray or drift off to sleep in stillness broken only by ticking clocks and the hissing sounds from radiators along walls next to their twin-sized beds.
If there is peace at the monastery, it is hard to find the day before what Mother Mary Anne calls a celebration of so many "special occasions." In addition to Sister Petra's solemn profession, Feb. 25 marks both the order's 75th anniversary in America and the Feast of St. Walburga, who died on Feb. 25, 779.
All day, sisters attend to last-minute details, launching an attack on their tasks with the precision of a combat operation. They work with volunteers in the retreat center's sleek commercial kitchen, where they cut fruit and divide it into crystal bowls, brown chicken breasts on a sizzling griddle and stack salad bowls and plates for buffet tables.
Always mindful of saving money, they mix some "resurrection flowers" -- their term for flowers taken from donated funeral arrangements and given a new purpose -- with fresh mini-carnations, candles and organza ribbons to make centerpieces for the wedding banquet tables.
"We want everything to be just right for her," says Sister Renata, who is in charge of dining room hospitality. "I remember how beautiful it was for my profession and I want it to be just as special."
Sister Franziska Mintus, 77, a thin, tall woman who spent 30 years making semiconductors for Westinghouse before joining the order 10 years ago, supervises the kitchen and cooks for retreats. She rattles off the menu chosen by Sister Petra: Caesar salad, chicken, mashed potatoes and canned -- not fresh or frozen -- green beans.
And despite the earlier oven fiasco, there will be cake.
"I hate to cook," she says, winking. "But you learn to do what you're asked to do for God and obedience."
She says she started as a volunteer and soon found she was spending 90 percent of her time at the monastery.
"I went everywhere I wanted to go. I've traveled and I've seen everything I wanted to see. The only thing I wanted to do that I didn't get to do was ride a hot air balloon, and I guess I can live without it."
During these preparations, Sister Petra spends her time on a week-long silent retreat, alone in her thoughts and prayers, exempt from work and recreation.
"She's a late vocation, but I think she's a very good vocation," says Sister Maria, explaining that the ceremony of solemn profession is a happy occasion. "This is a celebration in which you give yourself over to God."
And on her wedding day, the petite Sister Petra's eyes shine and she smiles broadly as she walks from the chapel in a procession led by Archabbot Douglas Nowicki of St. Vincent Archabbey.
"This is the fulfillment of all of God's promises," she says.
"This is where I belong."