Latin Mass, Church traditions bring boom in vocations for US order of nuns
carmelites, catholic, fairfield carmelites, latin mass, liturgy, nuns, vocations
FAIRFIELD, Pennsylvania, August 13, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – In an age where religious professions are in decline, especially in the United States, one order is looking back in time to buck the trend. The Discalced Carmelites have turned from the modern Church’s reforms of the 1960s and embraced ancient traditions – particularly the traditional Latin Mass. Now their order is booming, with multiple at-capacity monasteries dotting the eastern U.S.
Since 2000, the Carmelites have been faced with the sort of challenge many religious orders pine for: a boom in vocations. In that year, the nuns moved into the monastery at Elysburg, Pennsylvania from their original home in Nebraska, which they soon outgrew. They were thus granted permission to take over another declining Carmelite monastery, the Carmel of St. Joseph and St. Anne, in Philadelphia — and filled that one with vocations as well. So finally, with the community having overflowed its lodgings twice, the Carmelites received permission last summer from His Excellency Ronald Gainer, bishop of the Diocese of Harrisburg, to expand operations again, this time constructing a new monastery from the ground up.
That’s how the Carmel at Fairfield, still under construction but already in operation, was born.
Women interested in a life with the cloistered Carmelites must meet a number of qualifications. Postulants need a high school education and to be in good health, coming in at an age range of 17 to their late twenties — though Mother Stella-Marie of Jesus, who heads the Fairfield monastery, told LifeSiteNews that inquirers tend to be between 17 and 24.
Currently, the monastery at Fairfield has ten professed members, with more on the way from around the globe, including as far as Sweden.
The cloistered nuns at the Carmel in Fairfield close themselves off from the world and devote the rest of their lives to strict silence, arduous labor, and prayer. Once they profess their vows, their faces may not be seen in photographs until after they die. When LifeSiteNews traveled to Pennsylvania to profile the monastery, Mother Stella gave her interview from behind a heavy grate – the same grate through which the Carmelites are permitted to speak to their family members a single time per year.
“I think the young women are drawn to beauty in the liturgy. They know that if God exists, if God is on our altars, if God is within the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, then He needs to be worshiped as He deserves: with beauty and reverence,” she said of what she thinks draws young women to the Carmelites in particular. “They see that we have that here in our monastery, and they want to be a part of that. They also want something that is authentic, that goes back to the time of our holy mother, St. Teresa.”
St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), whom the Carmelites revere as their
patroness, is one of the order’s most distinguished saints. A famous mystic and
foundress of many Carmelite houses, she also wrote the famous works The
Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Pope Gregory XV
canonized her in 1622, and Pope Paul VI declared her a doctor of the Church in
1970.
“One of the unique aspects of our monastery,” Mother Stella elaborated, “is that we do have the extraordinary form of the Mass. We also have the traditional Divine Office. We pray the Office in Latin. We have permission also to pray the traditional form of the Carmelite Office, and young women are very much drawn to that.”
The Carmelites had always had the Latin Mass up until the Second Vatican Council, Mother Stella told LifeSiteNews, so the transition back to form was “like hand in glove.” She said, “As soon as we took on the extraordinary form of the Mass and we returned to the traditional Carmelite rite, just everything made sense. All of our customs — we understood why we had them, because they all flowed from the liturgy, whereas before that, there had been a disconnect there.”
Re-embracing the traditional Mass, Mother Stella explained, effected a
“complete explosion of grace and joy for the sisters.” The nuns switched from
the Novus Ordo in 2000, “and ever since then, we've had a great increase
in vocations, and the spirit of the community has been one of joy and growth in
the spiritual life.”
With the Church’s ancient liturgy and traditions now firmly ensconced in the order, “young women are writing, are knocking at the door to enter,” said Mother Stella. “The growth is very clear and very palpable.”
