The cloistered life is an enigma to most of us — we admire those nuns behind the grille, hidden within the monasteries we pass in our travels, if we are so lucky to have a monastery near us. But what exactly do they do? And why in the world would anyone choose that life?
A Strong Voice for Authentic Religious Life
In A Right to Be Merry, written 50 years ago because her abbess directed her to write a book to win a $1,000 prize to pay for the repair of a leaky roof, Sister Mary Francis answered just those questions. Along the way, she wrote a religious bestseller published in 1956 by Sheed and Ward — and republished in 2001 by Ignatius Press — that continues to draw vocations today.
Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C., died February 11th, just a few days short of her 85th birthday, having helped found four new Poor Clare monasteries, including one in Holland, and having restored two more. She was a strong voice for authentic religious life, fearless in standing up in the turmoil of the disintegration of much of religious life in the years after Vatican II.
But she is perhaps best known for her loving, humor-filled account of life in a cloister, a book she read chapter by chapter as she wrote it to the nuns who populate the pages of A Right to Be Merry.
Most people are familiar with Thomas Merton, who inspired a generation of post-World War II men to think differently about themselves and about their faith with the 1947 classic The Seven Storey Mountain, the story of Merton’s journey to the Catholic faith and his vocation as a Trappist monk.
In a different but equally persuasive vein, Mother Mary Francis drew a portrait of the life of a Poor Clare that guarantees that no one who reads it can ever again imagine cloistered nuns as dour and sedate, and certainly not as boring!
Mother Mary Francis regaled the world with tales of turnips dubbed potatoes to meet the need for the main meal’s “third portion” because the nuns were too poor to afford potatoes; of the old nun Sister Mechtilde who keboshed ideas with a terse “it ’tisn’t customary”; and of faded multi-colored habits so darned and repaired that one finally fell off the nun wearing it.
Not to Forget the World
“Girls do not enter the cloister to forget the world, but to remember it always in every smallest sacrifice, every prayer, every penance,” wrote Sister Mary Francis in A Right to Be Merry. “Least of all do they enter to forget their disappointments in love. Just the thought of a score of lovelorn maidens, locked in an enclosure and sighing their way to sanctity is so ridiculous that one wonders how anyone could possibly give it a mental nod.”
“Hers was a quintessentially Franciscan heart,” recalled Mother Mary Angela, P.C.C., the new abbess of the Poor Clare Monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Roswell, New Mexico, where Mother lived most of her life and died. “One week after her death, a sister was reflecting on how Mother helped her. She mentioned her wonderful talents of mind and heart and spirit, all she did for the community, the Order and the Church. ‘But do you know how she helped me most of all? She was a happy Poor Clare and she loved her vocation.’”
Born in 1921 in St. Louis, Mary Francis entered the convent after high school, first as a School Sister of Notre Dame but then as a Poor Clare in 1942. She was part of a group of sisters sent to found the Roswell monastery in 1948. She was elected abbess of the convent in 1964 and the next year was elected head of the federation of Colettine Poor Clare monasteries in the US, a post she held off and on for a total of 16 years.
Mother Mary Francis wrote of a community life founded in 1212 by St. Clare and St. Francis, centered on love of God and prayer for the world, but grounded in the here and now. Mostly silent except for prayer and recreation, barefoot except when they ventured outside, nevertheless, the contemplatives’ world Mary Francis describes is vital and enticing.
The Heart of the Church
“The unique vocation of the cloistered contemplative is to be entirely dedicated to the service of mankind because she is utterly given to God,” then-Sister Mary Francis wrote in A Right to Be Merry. “The joyous high-spirited girl with a feeling for the splendid sense of things and the delicious nonsense of things is the one most likely to persevere in the enclosure.”
At the Roswell monastery now, most of the nuns had read A Right to Be Merry on the way to their vocations, said one sister.
“The incredible joy. That’s what you experience when you go in the cloister. They are so infected with the Lord. They are called to be the heart of the Church,” says Michael Wick, director of operations of the Institute on Religious Life www.religiouslife.com in Chicago, who called Mother Mary Francis “a remarkable woman.”
The 2003 Pontifical Yearbook shows nearly 800,000 women religious worldwide with almost 52,000 contemplatives. “Whenever I met Mother Mary Francis, there was that serenity and that joy — very there in the present moment,” Wick said.
The world Mother Mary Francis describes in her books is one in which the nuns so love each other that the thought of sending some off to establish other convents nearly broke their hearts. She recounted that saga in Forth and Abroad: Still Merry on Land and by Sea, a story of the monastery’s role in reviving cloistered life in the post-Vatican II Church:
God says: “Forth and abroad!” Our minds reply: “Impossible. At least, not now. This is all too precipitous.” Our hearts reply: “How true. But — here we come.” And after a while we begin to smile through our tears, noting once more that God is surely full of ideas and that he sometimes speaks to the heart what the mind cannot endorse.
As a young girl riding the train to join the Poor Clares, Mary Francis resigned herself to giving up her writing as part of her new vocation. But, as she notes, God had other plans. Her body of work is extensive: plays about Jesus, St. Bernadette, St. Francis, and St. Clare of Assisi, poems, biographies, and spiritual meditations including Anima Christi: Soul of Christ. Many of her works are available through the Poor Clare Monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe, (809 East 19th Street, Roswell, New Mexico 88201) and others are available through Ignatius Press.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Valerie Schmalz is a writer for IgnatiusInsight. She worked as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, and in print and broadcast media for ten years. She holds a BA in Government from University of San Francisco and a Master of Science from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the former director of Birthright of San Francisco and has four children.
