Blogs For Victory

Deep within all of us is not just the ability to do the right thing, but the desire to do it – some people still rise to the challenge:

They are the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. They wear long white habits, carry rosaries, live in community, teach, and attract so many new recruits that they’re building a new motherhouse big enough to house 100 women religious.

The community, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is only 11 years old. It started as an offshoot of a large convent, with four nuns, but it has grown to 85 sisters. Their average age is only 28, more than 40 years younger than the average age of all women religious in the United States. They come from more than 30 states, plus Canada, Europe and the Caribbean. They have been featured on NBC, ABC, National Public Radio and Canadian TV.

Their lives, traditions and devotion are part of the 800-year-old Dominican charism. They form “a beautiful and alluring sign of contradiction,” says one of the foundresses, Sister Joseph Andrew, director of vocations. “You can get ‘the world’ wherever you go.”

Young women discerning religious life, she said, want authenticity, and with her community, “what they see is what they get,” that is, one with “a clear vision and identity.”…

…“I can’t imagine living religious life in an apartment,” said Sister Maria, a native of the Bronx, a first-year novitiate. “It’s not puppy dogs and rainbows every day; your sisters bring you up.”

She gave up a successful corporate career in the car business to enter the convent. She chose the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, she said, because of their devotion to Mary, traditional lifestyle and sense of humor.

“I knew that to go to heaven, I needed to be in a convent!” she said with a laugh. “I knew that I could slip into being greedy. I wanted more than a house on the lake and a closet full of shoes. Life is empty without Christ. It doesn’t make any sense without him.”

In the end, she said, she felt compelled to stand up for what she believed in, regardless of what other people thought she should do.

“Go big or go home,” she said. “No one will live my life but me.”

Sister Maria Jose, a second-year novice, grew up in a strong, Catholic, Mexican-American family and graduated from the University of Texas-El Paso. After working as a software engineer for six years, she entered the convent.

“I loved my career, but Jesus Christ is better,” she said. “I realized that there was more to life than going to a job. There was a lot of emptiness there. I could either do something to distract me, like going out to the bars, or I could pursue prayer, seek Jesus, and see what it was that Jesus was calling me to do.”

And the meek shall inherit the earth…or, at least in this case, the feminist movement. Wrap all the broads at NOW together and you won’t get something a tenth as worthy as these Sisters, and their like around the world. One of the wisest statements I’ve seen is that – “There was a lot of emptiness there.”. False feminism held that for women to be fulfilled they would have to follow men on the treadmill of corporate life…get a degree, slave away in a corporate behemoth, expend your sexual energy in pointless affairs, eschew children or – if you have them – consign them to the care of others…that terrible mistake men made was, for the feminists, precisely what women should do. Never in the course of human history was there ever a more stupid idea.

And here, now, is the signpost back – just as it was 2,000 years ago, it is the devoutly Christian women who will save our society (and, yes, devoutly Jewish and Moslem women will, too, but we’re a mostly Christian society and thus the lion’s share of it will be from Christians). In a large sense, the Greco-Roman world went insane and the only thing the women of Rome could think to do was to follow the men into their insanity. Along came the Christians – men, of course, but it was the sobriety and solidarity of the women, I think, who really made the running – to recall people back to sanity; and thus it will be again, in this time when our society has gone insane.

The most important thing for those who are not Catholic to understand here is that these women are not so much giving up everything, but mostly giving up nothing, and seeking for something…in fact, seeking for the only genuinely real thing there is. The biggest mistake anyone can make in contemplating this story is to think that these women are in retreat – they are in the vanguard, the sharp point of the revived world.

HAT TIP: The Anchoress