All posts by Anne Tschanz

News, Women's Communities

EWTN’s Home Monastery is 50!

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On May 20, 2012, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration marked the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Mother Angelica’s Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Alabama. The monastery was dedicated on May 20, 1962.

By the early 70’s the sisters were duplicating Mother’s talks and printing “mini” books to explain the basics of the Faith. And in 1981, Mother launched Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) in the monastery garage and the rest as they say is history.

I remember visiting EWTN in the late 90’s and attending one of Mother’s Live shows. She wandered around the set before the show began greeting people as if she didn’t have a care in the world and sat down with only seconds to spare. Everything came from a heart prepared by and with prayer. I had a message to give to her from a mutual friend that day and felt somewhat awkward doing it just minutes before she was to go on the air but she gave me her full attention and spent sometime talking with me. I was very impressed.

I thank God for EWTN which gave my housebound relatives a participation in the life of the Church and great consolation in the weeks before their deaths. May EWTN flourish and grow to the ends of the earth in all the languages of the human race.

For the full article in the National Catholic Register and many reflections on the 50 years of history, click here.

General interest

The Roots of the Religious Vocation Crisis

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In Rome last week, a conference was held at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross to resurrect the name and works of Jesuit Jean Cardinal Daniélou who died in 1974 in mysterious circumstances that clouded his work as a one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century. His outspokenness on the truths of the Faith made him unpopular with the intelligentsia but his views on the decline of vocations and religious orders is still right on.

In an interview given in 1972, here are the reasons he gives for crisis facing religious institutions:

  • The evangelical counsels are no longer considered as consecrations to God, but are seen in a sociological and psychological perspective.
  • The group dynamic replaces religious obedience.
  • All regularity of the life of prayer is abandoned and the first consequence of this state of confusion is the disappearance of vocations, because young people require a serious formation.
  • In the name of a false secularization, men and women are renouncing their habits, abandoning their works in order to take their places in secular institutions, substituting social and political activities for the worship of God.
  • A false conception of freedom brings with it the devaluing of the constitutions and rules and exalts spontaneity and improvisation.

He concludes by saying that “experience will demonstrate if the vocations are more numerous in the houses of strict observance or in the houses of mitigated observance.”  I think we can answer that question today, at least in the Western world.

 

News, Women's Communities

Hold Back Nothing of Yourselves

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Our local seminary’s magazine (The Bridge – excellent by the way) has an article this issue about a new community of young women in Chicago called the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist. Why are they in a seminary magazine? Because part of their charism is to develop a strong relationship with diocesan priests and they are in fact studying there to earn a Masters Degree in Divinity.

Led by Fr. Bob Lombardo, CFR, the sisters take to heart St. Francis’ admonition: Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, that He, who gives Himself totally to you, may receive you totally. They live in a desperate neighborhood of Chicago and they strive to help the local families with food and household goods and the children by keeping them out of gangs and off drugs. One of their goals is to have perpetual Eucharistic adoration in the newly renovated Church. After their theological training, they will teach religion in Catholic schools.

Please pray for them and the violent streets of Chicago that the Lord’s peace may come to dwell in all hearts.

News, Women's Communities

When Reverend Mothers Cease Being Motherly

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Tim Drake, writing in the National Catholic Register, has an excellent article which summarizes my frustration over the misleading, inaccurate and totally secular portrayal of the LCWR doctrinal assessment in the press.

One would think that every nun, sister and woman in America is up in arms and angry at the Vatican. Hardly the case.

Tim mentions a Washington Post article in which the female author writes:  “For more than a thousand years, women like Mary have entered religious life hoping to find a safe place where they might receive an education and protection from the oppression of marriage and the dangers of child-bearing.” She goes on to say that the Church’s contemporary view of women is that “they are equal, but inferior.”

Eh? Who besides Jesus, the Son of God, is considered more blessed in the Church than a woman – the Blessed Virgin Mary?

Tim goes on to say: “Would Mary, like Dominican Sister Laurie Brink, say that she was “moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus?”

I agree with Tim when he says that too many religious women have been betrayed by their leadership. They are the White Martyrs of our time. Tim calls it a generational hijacking. “How many dying religious orders continue to hang on to the property and money obtained through previous social capital while betraying the charism of their founders?”

Check out the whole article here.

News, Women's Communities

Fortnight for Freedom

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The bishops of the United States of America have issued a call to action to defend religious liberty and to protect the First Freedom of the Bill of Rights.

The bishops have asked that the fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More—to July 4, Independence Day, be dedicated to the theme of a “Fortnight for Freedom.”

This period will be a special time of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action that will emphasize the double heritage of Christian and American liberty.

“As Catholic bishops and American citizens, we address an urgent summons to our fellow Catholics and fellow Americans to be on guard, for religious liberty is under attack, both at home and abroad,” they declared.

In support of this effort, the Handmaids of the Precious Blood (www.nunsforpriests.org) in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, have asked that anyone interested in supporting this effort send their petitions for the nation and for our leaders to Cor Jesu Monastery, PO Box 90, Jemez Springs, NM, 87025. The petitions will be placed under the high altar throughout the nun’s Corpus Christi novena (May 30th – June 7th), included in their Mass intentions and will remain at the altar until July 4th.

The Handmaids of the Precious Blood, an IRL Affiliate Community, are cloistered nuns offering their lives for the sanctification of priests in Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration.

Papal Address

The Flowering of a Vocation

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On April 29, Pope Benedict XVI ordained nine men to the priesthood. In his Regina Caeli address following the Eucharistic celebration, he provided us with a beautiful image of a vocation:

Dear friends, let us pray for the Church, for every local community, that it may be like a watered garden in which all the seeds of vocation that God scatters in abundance sprout and ripen. Let us pray that this garden may be cultivated everywhere, with the joy of feeling that we are all called, in the variety of our gifts.

Let us pray for all men and women to prayerfully discern their vocation from the Lord. If we do this, we will have strong families, vibrant religious life and a holy nation.

News

Oldest Monastery in Europe Found?

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Bulgarian archaeologists have uncovered what they believe is the oldest Christian monastery in Europe. It is hard to verify and others make a similar claim (Candida Casa monastery, c.371 AD, Galloway, Scotland & St. Martin monastery, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, c. 373 AD) however no one can doubt its antiquity. It is believed to have been founded by St. Athanasius himself c. 344 AD.  Studies at the Vatican have confirmed that St. Athanasius was present at the Church Council in Serdica (modern Sofia, Bulgaria) in 343 AD.

St. Athanasius was the Bishop of Alexandria and is a Doctor of the Church He was born c. 296 and died May 2, 373. Known as the “greatest champion of Catholic belief on the subject of the Incarnation”, during his lifetime he was known as the “Father of Orthodoxy.”  St. Athanasius, pray for us today!

 

Resources

The New Media’s Effect on Vocations

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At the 2011 National Meeting, Sr. Marysia Weber, R.S.M., a Religious Sister of Mercy, gave a very popular talk on the effect of the new forms of media on priestly and religious vocations.

Sister made the point that studies have shown that people today are more narcissistic, hardly a good foundation for religious life. There is also more of a blurring between fantasy and reality. One example was that of a youngish priest who spent hours on a social networking site after 11:00 pm each night. As a result, he was late for Mass, lost his prayer life, and could not fulfill his pastoral duties.

And how do people hear the voice of the Lord when they are glued to technology 24 hours a day? Can they really give it up for, say, monastic life?

“The internet is a useful tool, but it can be harmful if not used with discretion or excessively,” she said.

If you want a very thoughtful and insightful perspective on these questions and issues, please visit our website to order Sister’s talks. Three topics are covered: The Church and Electronic Media, Unanticipated Effects of Regular Internet Use, and The Interface of Virtual Reality with Actual Reality. They are available on CD and also in MP3 format.

Women's Communities

Servants of Mary Visit Thomas Aquinas College

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On Friday, April 20th, twenty members of the Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, visited Thomas Aquinas College (TAC). In town for their annual provincial meeting, the sisters were given a tour of the campus and plan to return for a vocations talk to interested women in the fall. The Director of College Relations, Anne S. Forsyth, said that roughly 10% of Thomas Aquinas alumni enter the priesthood or religious life (Wow).

The Servants of Mary care for the dying and gravely sick in their own homes, at night, free of charge, in addition to their work with hospitals, orphanages, hospices and nursing homes. Their foundress was St. Maria Soledad, canonized in 1970 and they, along with TAC, are IRL Affiliates.

I pray that one of those young women who will hear the sisters speak later this year may have a vocation to their beautiful life and so needed charism.

News, Women's Communities

The Attractiveness of Truth

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When Pope Benedict XVI visited Great Britain in 2010, the Press had their pens poised to write stories about the dismal failure of his trip. You didn’t read any stores of the kind because guess what, it was a big success. The crowds were big (even in Protestant Scotland over 100,000 people lined the streets to wish him well) and the critics seemed to disappear in light of the outpouring of love for the Holy Father.

Now comes an article in The Times of London which indicates that the number of women entering religious orders has almost tripled since the Holy Father’s visit.

Laura Adshead, the former girlfriend of the current Prime Minister David Cameron,  entered Regina Laudis Abbey in the USA. A congregation in York, after years of no activity, has six solid inquiries. In another order, three women are entering their novitiate in the fall. Still another has had no novices for twelve years but now has one with two more coming.

Father Christopher Jamison, National Office for Vocation, said, “In the last few years, the number of people applying to seminaries has been gradually increasing and, in more recent years, just in the last couple of years, ever since the Papal visit, the number of women approaching women’s congregations has also been increasing.”

Also, 1 in 5 new vocations are converts. The Lord calls. And women are responding.