Poor Clares praying for new monastery

By J.D. Long-García
The Catholic Sun

The local Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration aren’t homeless, but they are without a cloister.

The self-described “desert nuns” are raising money to build Our Lady of Monastery to better suit their lives as contemplative nuns in Black Canyon City.

The monastery will cost $7 million, $1 million of which has already been raised, said Michael A. Longo, an attorney who’s spearheading the fundraising campaign.

“People have been really enthusiastic,” he said. Longo added that plans for the building are underway.

Since making the trek to the Valley from their home in Alabama, the five nuns have been living at Our Lady of Solitude Contemplative House of Prayer in Black Canyon City, founded and run as a place for silent retreats by the late Sr. Therese Sedlock, OSF.

The sisters need to raise $1.2 million for the property they are living on before beginning construction of the monastery and a chapel, said Poor Clare Sister Mary André, the group’s mother superior.

The structure would accommodate 25 nuns, she said.

“Our main apostolate is the cloister and spending time before our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament,” Sr. Mary André said. “In the monastery that we came from, we have a sister with our Lord 24 hours a day.”

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted began praying for a contemplative order when he first became the spiritual father of the diocese more than two years ago.

“The way they live, who they are, points beyond this world to the world that will never end,” the bishop said during a prayerful evening with the Poor Clares May 6. “They are sentinels of the dawn of eternity, harbingers of heaven.”

The bishop recognized the countless religious who have served the diocese through active apostolic life. Yet, he underscored the Poor Clares role as the first cloistered contemplative religious community in the diocese.

“Their mission is centered in prayer and sacrifice, in adoration of Christ in the Eucharist and intercessory prayer for the needs of the Church,” the bishop said. The sisters describe their vocation as embracing the “one thing necessary” in adoration.

Poor Clare Sister Mary Joanna compared the nuns’ role as intercessors to a princess or a queen to a king.

“Sometimes people feel it’s easier to go to a middle man than going straight to the top,” she said. “That’s an intercessor. The one who on behalf of others asks the higher superior for something for the common good of all people.”

Bishop Olmsted said that the Poor Clares, like other religious women, call attention to the “Church’s essential identity as the bride of Christ.”

“The Church is far more than the sum of her activities, far more than just an institution,” he said. “She is Christ’s beloved bride, the one for whom He died, so much does He love her.”

Woman discerns vocation

While they may not have a monastery yet, the sisters already have women discerning a vocation.

Mary McDonald, a Seton Catholic High School graduate and a parishioner at St. Mary in Chandler, is currently an aspirant and began living with the Poor Clares for five days a week this month.

As a college student, McDonald visited the motherhouse in Hanceville, Ala., and has been in discernment for a year.

“It’s like you finally found what you’re looking for,” she said. “Since then, I’ve been praying about it.”

The cloistered life of the Poor Clares would dramatically change McDonald’s relationship with her family.

“I always tell my 8-year-old sister we’ll be together in the heart of Jesus,” she said. “When we pray together, we are together with God. It’s so true, it’s so real.”

McDonald could enter as early as this summer.

“I look at her and see that the Lord is working in her in the same way he’s working in me,” Sr. Mary Joanna said. “Yet at the same time there are things that are just minutely different.”

Sr. Mary Joanna noted that if McDonald enters, it would be different for her without a monastery. She believes God continues to reveal His desire for a monastery in the diocese and vocations seem to support her beliefs.

“The Lord continues to manifest that it’s His will,” she said. Sr. Mary Joanna added that the sooner the monastery gets built, the better.