2017 Leading with Faith Awards B Section August 10, 2017 Newspaper of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis
Sisters at work
New religious communities expanding to archdiocese
From left, postulant Meg Miller works with Sisters Mary Angela Gross and Mary Elizabeth Plante July 31 to paint walls at a former chancery building in St. Paul that the Handmaids of the Heart of Jesus in New Ulm will use as a convent. Dave Hrbacek/ The Catholic Spirit
By Maria Wiering The Catholic Spirit
W
earing sneakers and smocks, five sisters of the Handmaids of the Heart of Jesus painted ceilings and scraped floors July 31 in the building they’re renovating to become their St. Paul convent. In May, the New Ulm-based sisters announced they had accepted Archbishop Bernard Hebda’s invitation to establish a convent in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It’s a dream come true for the sisters, who have longtime ties to the archdiocese. The community’s foundress, Mother Mary Clare Roufs, attended the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul and then worked in the archdiocese’s vocations office as she discerned a call to start a new community of sisters. In 2007, she and three other women founded a discernment house in St. Paul and started to live in common. In 2009, Bishop John LeVoir of New Ulm, a Minneapolis native, invited the sisters to formally establish themselves in his diocese. As their community has grown, many of the sisters have come from the Twin Cities. Because so many of the Handmaids are from the archdiocese, establishing a presence here makes sense for the community’s mission, Mother Mary Clare said. Recognizable by their habits — black tunics with white apron-like “scapulars” and veils — they’ll be based at the Cathedral of St. Paul and are working to transform a former chancery building on Dayton Avenue that served as the longtime offices of The Catholic Spirit, into a convent. They hope the work will be done within a year, but they don’t have a firm timeline, Mother Mary Clare said. In the meanwhile, they’ll live at a former convent at St. Michael in West St. Paul. “Our greatest desire is to be part of the family and to serve the family of the archdiocese in whatever way the Lord desires,” Mother Mary Clare said.
Teachers and models The Handmaids aren’t the only new community of sisters establishing themselves in the archdiocese. St. Agnes in St. Paul announced July 29 that the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist from Ann Arbor, Michigan, will begin teaching at St. Agnes
School and living on the parish campus next year. The number of sisters the teaching community will send has yet to be determined, but news of their anticipated presence was received warmly by the school and parish. The school has wanted a teaching order to join the faculty since the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of the Church, who had been teaching at the school, left a few years ago, said Headmaster Kevin Ferdinandt. He calls the Ann Arbor Dominicans “a perfect fit.” Not only are the sisters known as stellar educators, but they may also inspire students to consider religious life, he said. “We pray a lot for vocations to the priesthood and religious life,” Ferdinandt said. “Without a living presence here, it’s tough to foster those vocations in the same way as it is when there are teaching sisters who are ... attracting young people to their orders.” He said that when the sisters visited the school, students flocked to them, as if they had missed the presence of religious sisters.
“From my standpoint, the great gift is to the children,” he said of the order’s impending arrival. “In education, what are we about? We’re about forming souls to be soldiers in this life and to live eternally in the next with God in heaven, and what better way to do that than to have some teaching sisters who are living examples of that sincere and significant commitment to Christ, in living their whole lives for him.” In a July 29 statement, Mother Assumpta Long, the order’s foundress, said the community receives many invitations to teach in schools across the country, but felt “this was the divine prompting to send sisters into this wonderful parish and school.” Formerly a Dominican Sister of St. Cecilia, Mother Assumpta, along with three other Dominicans, left their order in Nashville to establish the Mary, Mother of the Eucharist community 20 years ago. The order is now present in Arizona, California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Washington, D.C., as well as Rome. Please turn to SISTERS on page 6A
ALSO inside
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Parish plans 54-day novena
St. Alphonsus in Brooklyn Center welcomes African Catholics for a conference featuring archbishop from Kenya.
Local Catholics, leaders weigh in on minimum wage policies after Minneapolis voted to raise its wage to $15 an hour.
Year dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary set to begin Aug. 21 with rosary event at St. Pius X in White Bear Lake.
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