Carmelite nuns come from Vietnam to Alabama to revitalize monastery
By Benjamin Mann
Sister Mary Assumpta greets Reverend Mother Therese Casey, the community's superior. Credit: Mary Ann Stevens
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"We welcome you home, for this is your home," said Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi of Mobile, celebrating the first Mass for the sisters at their new monastery on Feb. 21. "We are delighted that you are here."
Fr. Cu Minh Duong, a local pastor who preached at the Mass in English and Vietnamese, said it was "wonderful to see this monastery come alive again." The Vietnamese Carmelites are taking over the Monastery of St. Joseph and St. Teresa, which has been vacant for nearly a year.
Early in 2010, due to a combination of factors – including age, illness, and lack of vocations – the monastery's four remaining American nuns determined that they were no longer able to care for themselves and their monastery. They moved out in March 2010, but asked Archbishop Rodi's help in finding another Carmelite community that could replace them.
"I wrote to every Carmelite community in this country, and traveled to Rome to meet with the Carmelite Generalate," Archbishop Rodi recalled in a written account provided to EWTN News. For some time, his worked turned up nothing.
But eventually, through the cooperation and interconnections of four other religious orders – the Jesuits, the Sisters of Mercy, the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Lovers of the Holy Cross – the Archbishop found the young Carmelite sisters from Vietnam.
In that country, where the Catholic Church is sometimes threatened and restricted, religious orders have a problem that is barely known in the West: many of them are attracting more vocations than their facilities can contain.
The international connection that brought the Carmelites to the U.S. was first made during 2010 when two sisters from the Lovers of the Holy Cross came from Vietnam to Alabama for their studies.
They spent time with the Little Sisters of the Poor – who, in collaboration with the Sisters of Mercy, were accommodating and caring for the Carmelites who had moved out of their monastery. Through this connection, they learned of the search for a new Carmelite community.
Fr. Mark Lewis, former confessor to the Little Sisters of the poor, delegated the first-generation Vietnamese-American Jesuit Brother Bao Nguyen to travel to Vietnam. There, he conveyed Archbishop Rodi's request to Church officials in Hanoi, and sought out Carmelites who might be willing to come the U.S.
Finally, Archbishop Rodi recalled, the hopes of the monastery's original group of sisters were realized.
"By the grace of God, and the able help of Brother Bao, SJ, and Mother Paul Mary of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Carmelite monastery in Vietnam offered to send 8 nuns to reopen this cloistered community."
Accompanied by Br. Bao and others, they went to the monastery for the first time on Feb. 21.
During their first week, as they settle into their new and permanent home, the sisters expect to pay a visit to the convent in which the four Carmelite nuns of the former community are now living. On Feb. 26, the new sisters will host an open house for visitors to their monastery, followed by a private visit with local Vietnamese Catholics on Feb. 27.
After Feb. 26, the monastery will be closed to the public. On Feb. 28, Archbishop Rodi will preside over the canonical enclosure of the monastery, by which the sisters will be formally bound not to leave the cloister. Their life of prayer, however, will keep them deeply connected to the surrounding community.
"The sisters came from a long distance, to this place which is now their home," Fr. Cu Minh Duong reflected in his homily at the monastery's re-opening. "What was conceived in prayer must now be continued and sustained in prayer."
Read more: http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/US.php?id=2693#ixzz2av0maOKJ