Better in their words…

Protecting life. Imagine that!
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By William McGurn
WSJ Aug. 13, 2015 7:08 p.m. ET

On a hot August morning, 30-year-old Sister Bethany Madonna sits before the altar of the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist. Seated alongside her are seven other women, also in their 30s, also dressed in blue habits and long white veils.

The moment has been years in coming: the day they consecrate themselves to Jesus Christ as they offer their final vows as members of the Sisters of Life.

Which provoked a question: What could lead a personable young woman from a happy family to give up everything — especially at a moment when women have never had as many opportunities before them?

It’s a reasonable question.

Yet amid the palpable jubilance of this jam-packed basilica, it is clear that this question is the wrong one. There are no sad sacks or martyrs on this altar today. These are happy, excited women. What is it they believe they have found?

Sister Bethany says it’s the “peace in your heart” that comes from knowing you are where you are meant to be. In this case it’s a place so countercultural, it’s almost un-American. For in a nation founded upon the God-given right to the pursuit of happiness, these sisters vow to put the happiness of others before their own.

Far from being the little girl who had always imagined herself in a habit, moreover, Sister Bethany also says that when she was growing up, almost all her ideas about nuns came from movies—“The Sound of Music” and “Sister Act.” Her sense of vocation grew only gradually, strengthened by the years spent with the community, first as a novice and then as a postulant, or candidate to join the religious order.

“After eight years,” she says with a smile, “you know if this is the life for you.”

The Sisters of Life themselves are a relatively new Catholic order. Canonically speaking, they are sisters and not nuns—women who live a cloistered, contemplative life—though they spend at least four hours in prayer every day. These days, however, the words are often used interchangeably.

The order was founded by New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor in 1991. Years earlier O’Connor had visited Dachau, site of the Nazi death camp. He never forgot the experience. It would lead him to start a religious community of women who added a fourth vow to the traditional three of poverty, chastity and obedience: a vow to protect the sacredness of every human life. This is the sisters’ “charism,” the spirit that gives each order its distinctiveness and defines its mission.

“We are asked to treat the children of other women as if they are our own flesh and blood,” says Sister Bethany. “That means loving their mothers at a time in their lives when they may be feeling most alone and unloved.”

This also means the sisters open their convents to expectant moms with nowhere else to go. The fruits are real and apparent on this day. How many other brides go to the altar in a church filled with babies whose cries and laughter would never have been heard without their work?

Indeed, for all the material things the sisters lack, they say their work impresses upon them what they do have: the security of knowing they are loved, by God certainly, but also by their families and fellow sisters. It is a love, the sisters say, that many of the women who come to them for help have never felt before.

The idea of religious sisters as brides of Christ is easily lampooned. But the metaphor isn’t just a pretty substitute for the weddings and husbands they give up. Just as the ideal of conventional marriage calls upon husbands and wives to rise above themselves to put their spouses first, so it is for these nuns.

For it is precisely the abandonment of self to Christ that sustains these women in those moments when perhaps they’d rather not obey, when they might prefer not to get out of bed in the middle of the night to help a pregnant mother who is throwing up in the next room.

In other words, the vows they make today and the rings they received as a sign of these vows isn’t about “no.” It’s about a radical “yes,” an echo of the assent given more than two millennia ago by a Jewish girl in Nazareth: Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to thy word.

Or, as a young redhead in Florida says she put it in her own prayer when she first considered religious life: “You know that I’ve had my wedding planned since kindergarten . . . but I can take a hint if you want me to be Yours.”

The hardships imposed by Sister Bethany’s choice are plain and undeniable. But on this festive day before the altar of St. John the Evangelist, so is the joy.

Mr. McGurn is a Journal columnist and member of the editorial board.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-motivates-a-modern-nun-1439507300