![]() ![]() Once a month is local assembly, a house meeting where anything from the need for a new kitchen mixer to the need for new IHM recruits is discussed. ![]() "Sister Bernadette is the cookie monster she loves her chocolate cookies - she might say, 'How about getting some Chips Ahoy, or Double Stuf,' " Sister Brenda says.Įach sister also chooses her own time for private daily prayer, reciting the rosary and spiritual reading, a separate obligation from the chapel services. Sister Roseanne takes care of the hall and dining room, while Sister Regina pays the bills and cleans the chapel.Įveryone contributes to the shopping list that Sister Brenda fills when she goes to the supermarket. Sister Marita, for example, was responsible for cleaning the kitchen until she left last month for the order's retirement home in Immaculata, Pa. Each nun chooses when she'll perform her "charge," or housekeeping duty. Sister Regina Stupak, a lap-swimming coal-miner's granddaughter who directs religious education at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church.Īll professional women, most with graduate degrees, they live like college roommates. There was Sister Brenda, a Norfolk native whose cheerful even-handedness upends the stereotype of autocratic mother superiors. Yet among this small group, who range in age from 40s to 90s, the flame of faith still burns brightly, each woman proud to be an "IHM." This spring, the convent was down to six, and then it dropped to five in July, matching the decline in Catholic nuns nationwide, from 173,865 in 1965 to 79,876 in 2000. ![]() In the 1970s, as many as 14 religious sisters lived in the Halprin convent, which opened 53 years ago. "That's important, very important to our religious life, the three vows or sacred promises that we make." "Poverty, chastity and obedience," Sister Brenda says. Yet the core of a religious sister's vocational life remains unchanged since the 1845 founding of this order, the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. ![]()
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