This past Sunday began the season of Advent, a liturgical season in the Catholic Church that's a time of waiting, of hope and of preparation for the coming of Jesus. Advent obviously brings me closer to Jesus, but it also brings me closer to the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary. While Catholics especially have a deep respect for the Blessed Mother, I think even we can easily forget just how great her example is.

The Virgin Mary in
"The Nativity Story"

C.S. Lewis once said that if you were looking for a religion to make you comfortable, he wouldn't recommend Christianity. One day, I was praying over this quote, it occurred to me that our most holy books, the New Testament, start with a challenge. And who completed that challenge? It wasn't a king, wasn't a prophet, it wasn't even a man. It was a young poor girl from Nazareth. 

She truly was the first to say "yes" to Christianity. And she easily had the biggest challenge of any other Christian to come - to bear a son in a world that could easily stone her for being unmarried and pregnant. Not only any son, but God's own Son, the chosen Messiah.

Mary was conceived without sin (that's the Immaculate Conception - Jesus' conception is "virgin birth"), but she was still human. Not only was she still human, but she was still a young teenager. Like the rest of us, she felt emotion. She had to be confused, but, perhaps most of all, she had to be scared, even with the faith that God would always be with her.

How did she explain to Joseph, the one who she was promised to marry, that she was pregnant? How Joseph's initial reaction must have hurt and how relieved she must have felt when he heard the angel in a dream. How did she explain her pregnancy to her family and friends? Those of us who are discerning religious life sometimes stress out over telling our family/friends that we might just become a Sister/priest/etc. Imagine how Mary must have felt.   This wasn't a discernment, this was a call and action that had already been completed. There was no "Well, Mom and Dad, I'm thinking about this....". No, she was already pregnant. Becoming a Sister/priest/etc is accepted in religious circles, if not in our family and friends. Being unmarried and pregnant, on the other hand....

But what is so amazing about Mary is that she stayed true to her calling. The Gospels never tell us that Mary said "No, God, I change my mind...pick someone else". And well....there were probably times when she doubted, maybe even times where she broke down and cried. But she stayed faithful through all the difficulties. She knew that God was with her - both spiritually and physically - and, through the message of Gabriel, that absolutely nothing was impossible for God.

Dorothy Day once said "don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily" I believe that it is a big temptation for us to dismiss Mary with flowery language and images, especially in the Catholic world. While those can be nice, it is essential for us to know her as a real person who made a very radical choice to accept God's call through carrying Christ. By saying "yes", she made the first footstep on the road we all long to follow. 

This Advent, let us remember her faithful example as the "first Christian", the first one to accept the challenge of Christianity and the first one to wait for the coming of Christ. 

Let us put ourselves in her place as we wait, as we prepare and as we hope as she did.

And when Christmas finally arrives, let us welcome Him as Mary did, with absolute inexplicable joy.

A Different Type of French Revolution: The Founding of the Daughters of Charity

On this day, three hundred and seventy nine years ago, in Paris, France, a few young women started a revolution. It wasn't a revolution with guns or even with non-violent protests. In fact, these women, young peasants who could barely read or write, didn't understand the immensity of their quiet action of moving in with Mademoiselle LeGras (also known as Louise de Marillac) and forming a new religious community called The Daughters of Charity under the direction of a priest who was slowly becoming famous all over France, Monsieur Vincent de Paul.

But their simple action on this day and afterwards changed Church history forever.

These women were former servants who fell in love with the work of serving the poor and now were dedicating themselves to that mission, yet in a way that would have seemed nearly impossible before. They were now to be religious, to be Sisters. But unlike other religious communities, there was to be no separation based on the background of their family, no such thing as "choir sisters" and "lay sisters" to differentiate between Sisters from poor or rich families. And also unlike other religious communities, they were there not just to pray but for an apostolic purpose - to serve Christ in the poor.

The first "habit" of the
Daughters of Charity

These first Sisters probably didn't know anything about canon law at the time, but Monsieur Vincent de Paul did. He knew that, under canon law, all Sisters were to be cloistered and there were no "if's or but's" about it. He had seen religious communities that tried to bend the rules either crumble or forced into the cloister, even the religious community of his friend Francis de Sales (the Visitation Sisters). But he was determined that his Sisters would survive. So, being the clever man that he was, he took the loopholes to his advantage. Instead of taking perpetual vows, his Sisters would take annual vows. Instead of calling their house a "convent", they would simply call it a "house". Instead of calling it "novitiate", they called it "Seminary". And instead of wearing a religious habit, his Sisters would simply wear the typical clothes of French peasants. He summed it up when he wrote the Daughters were to have "as a convent, the houses of the sick; as a cell, a rented room; as a chapel, the parish church; as a cloister, the streets of the city and the halls of the hospitals; as enclosure, obedience; as grating, the fear of God; and as a veil, holy modesty."

Maybe these first Sisters didn't exactly know how much of an experiment their new community, called the Daughters of Charity, was. But the "experiment" worked. There was no category in canon law for such a community - and, although the Vatican approved their Constitutions soon after their foundation, there wouldn't be a term for their type of community until hundreds of years later when the Vatican came up with the term "Society of Apostolic Life". 

Simply by becoming Daughters of Charity and paving the way for others, these women changed what religious life would become in the Church. After the foundation of the Daughters of Charity, priests and bishops started founding new religious communities, also under an apostolic purpose. Eventually, canon law changed, allowing but not requiring the cloister for Sisters anymore.

Some claim that it was St Vincent's ingenuity that allowed this to happen. While that is true, that ingenuity would have been useless if it weren't for a few peasant girls who decided to leave everything they knew to serve Christ in the poor.

They had no idea that millions of Daughters of Charity would follow after them (some now numbered among the saints and martyrs), no idea that one day their community would be serving the poor all over the world in almost 100 countries. and no idea that they would change the face of religious life in the Catholic Church.

They just knew they loved Christ and loved the poor and that was enough. That was enough to start their own kind of French revolution.

Daughters of the Church

Due to recent events, I've seen my Facebook wall, Twitter and other blogs explode with comments/links supporting cloistered nuns, some underhandedly implying that they are the only ones getting young vocations because of their faithfulness to the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church (bishops and the Pope). I wanted to jump and wave my hands in front of them saying "HEY, LOOK OVER HERE!"

When some monasteries are filling to the brim with young vocations, it's easy to forget about active Sisters out there faithful to the Magisterium. We do exist, we are often left in the dust and I strongly believe there are more of us that exist than people think.

Recently, while reading an article celebrating the opening of our new Seminary in St Louis, a commenter posted, attacking the Daughters for the use of the word "Seminary", painting us as a religious community obviously in favor of female ordination for "re-naming" our novitiate "Seminary" Talk about a facepalm.

Because we use the word "Seminary", because some of us don't wear veils (coifs), because we do not call our community a "religious order", some Catholics write us off as unfaithful Sisters, without even glancing at our history. 

Many of those attacking us have no idea we're actually not "nuns". We are actually a Society of Apostolic Life, a genius idea of St Vincent de Paul. This idea of his allowed us to work among the poor while still remaining Sisters faithful to canon law, which said that "nuns" were to live cloistered in monasteries. So what's the difference? Historically, we were founded without a real habit - we were meant to walk with the poor, blending in with them. We take annual vows (of poverty, chastity, obedience and service of the poor), not perpetual ones. We live in houses, not "convents". We are a "community" or "Company", not a "religious order". And to avoid confusion over whether we are "nuns" or not, St Vincent named our "novitiate" to "Seminary". 

St Vincent de Paul founded us to be Daughters of Charity, specifically "to honor our Lord Jesus Christ as the source and model of all charity, serving Him corporeally and spiritual in the poor" But he also emphasized in his many conferences to the Sisters that we are also to be "daughters of prayer" and "Daughters of the Church", urging us to remain faithful to the bishops and the Pope. St Elizabeth Ann Seton, centuries later, whom we consider to be our third founder, in her last words whispered to her Sisters "Be children of the Church"

We haven't forgotten Vincent's conferences nor Elizabeth Ann's last words. 

One American Sister recently was awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia Et Pontifice. Two Irish Sisters received Bene Merenti medals. Bishop John McCarthy raves about the Daughters of Charity in his state of Texas. Pope John Paul II, in a letter to us in 1997, he wrote "as a pledge of encouragement for your assembly’s work and the apostolic life of the institute, I entrust all the Daughters of Charity to the motherly protection of the Immaculate Virgin, Mother of the Church and Mother of the Little Society, as well as to the intercession of St Vincent de Paul, St Louise de Marillac and St Catherine Labouré, and I wholeheartedly send them my Apostolic Blessing." (Fun fact of the day: we actually own a vial of his blood from his assassination and his undershirt) And decades before, our Superioress General, Mother Suzanne Guillemin, was one of the few women invited to the Vatican II Council. 

We love our Church.

For me, it isn't a blind love. If it was a blind love - love without thinking for myself - it wouldn't mean a thing. Ask any active Sister (Daughter of Charity or not) faithful to the Magisterium and I'm sure they would tell you the same. We don't follow those teachings just because we're told to, but rather because it's what our consciences tell us is the right thing to do, the right thing to believe. It's the same conscience that tells us to be Roman Catholics rather than Methodist, rather than Baptist, rather than non-denominational.

We are children of the Church and I, for one, long to not be forgotten by our fellow Catholics. We exist, we're still here, we're still on fire with love for our Church and trying to follow our founders' teachings.

One Big Family: Sisterly Love Between Communities

It amazes me how big my family has gotten just within a few months. Yes, my cousin did have a beautiful baby boy and added yet another little one to our large family, but I talk here about how my life has amazingly changed from having just one sibling (a brother) to have thousands of new sisters.

By now, I'm sure you've figured out that I'm talking about my Sisters, the Daughters of Charity. And you might be thinking "ugh, what a cheesy way to say that". But ha! You are half wrong! Yes, it probably is a trite way to illustrate the "family feeling" there is between the Sisters. However, I'm not only talking about the 14,000 Daughters of Charity around the world, I'm talking about all religious around the world. 

In the past few months, thanks to the young adult group I belong to, I've been able to meet many religious from a whole array of congregations - the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Nashville Dominicans, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters and the All Saints Sisters. Although I wasn't joining their community, they smiled when I shared with them my discernment with the Daughters and rejoiced with me when I was accepted. 

I grew particularly close to the Little Sisters of the Poor, who were not only very active in our young adult group but also seemed to pop up unexpectedly since I met them. My vocation is not with them but I do feel quite a friendship with them. Interestingly enough, many of the residents of the nursing home of the Little Sisters are relatives of Daughters of Charity! Anyway, the day before I was to leave for prepostulancy, I stopped by their house and talked in length with two Sisters I had grown close to. One is not much older than I am and we bonded over our love of yarn (hey, don't judge). She gave me good advice about entering and, as we hugged goodbye, I felt a deep sense of family, even though she wears a different habit, works in a different ministry, etc. 

I think many people think a girl is losing family when she enters religious life. They couldn't be more wrong. I feel that my family has practically exploded in growth. I could write in length about how I've grown to see many Daughters of Charity and other Sisters as sisters, but the gist is that you gain so many sisters - of different ages, of different backgrounds - that aren't connected with you through blood but through love of the same lifestyle, through love of the same vows. (Also, I cannot speak for other communities but, on a more practical note, the Daughters allow yearly home visits and encourage constant communication with your "blood" family.) 

That same yarn-loving Little Sister of the Poor I talked about wrote this to me, it made me laugh and I had to share: "There is something so deep among Sisters, no matter what Congregation we are part of. It's the bond of Christ's love as our Spouse! Aren't we lucky ducks?!"

Mother Suzanne Guillemin and the Vatican II "Revolution"

Being just 25 years old, I was born well after the Councils of Vatican II. It wasn't until college when I started studying theology and discerning did Vatican II really come into my life.

Internally, without thinking, every time I met a religious community, I evaluated in my head their faithfulness to the spirit of Vatican II – on both sides of the spectrum, too much change or too little. Outside of my own thoughts, the actual topic wasn't brought up again until I was handed a book on Mother Suzanne Guillemin, Superioress General of the Daughters of Charity during Vatican II. She was not only that but, after the second session of the Council, she was one of only eight religious women invited by the Pope as auditors to the Council. She was integrated fully in the Third and Fourth session, sharing her opinion.

Mother Guillemin did a lot for the Community and I want to say she “revolutionized” religious life in the community but I feel as if she wouldn't like that phrase....so I will say instead that she helped guide the Daughters of Charity into an evolution to fit today's world, to be daughters of Saint Vincent in a world that is utterly changed from when he was alive. She changed the governance of the Daughters, modified the habit, encouraged cooperation with the laity, and pushed Sisters to be professionally trained in their ministry. As I read her reflections, I can imagine the strength it must have taken to write this and perhaps the fear she must have had to take away something that had existed from the very beginning, the cornette:

“Tomorrow, everyone should be able to recognize without the help of the cornette, the Daughter of Charity, humble without affectation, attentive to everyone, disengaged from herself, truly available, an outcome of the love of God in order to give this love to all. We should be obsessed by this true charity and examine and revise our interior and exterior attitude continually to readjust it to charity. Wherever we are, we ourselves should be the expression of charity.”

On a less serious note, the cornette
inspired a certain 1960s TV show...

Why take away something like the cornette, the basic symbol of the Daughters of Charity? Mother Guillemin and the rest of the Daughters didn't implement this change for the sake of change itself, but rather to evolve the life of a Sister in today's world. St. Vincent and St. Louise founded the Daughters of Charity essentially with no specific habit. They all wore the cornette so as to blend in with the French peasants, the poor they were serving. Over the years, French fashion among the poor changed but the Daughters never did.

Before anyone thinks Mother Guillemin changed too many things or was too radical, let it be known that she, in my opinion, embodies that perfect “in between” of Vatican II that I was searching for. She did not change so much that her community left the ideals of the Catholic Church or their Founders behind, but rather she clung more tightly unto the two. She remained always faithful to the Roman Catholic Church and her fidelity to the Pope was impeccable, obedient (and pushing all the Sisters to do the same) to all the decrees of the Holy Father. Of all the changes happening during Vatican II, she wrote: “let us acknowledge clearly that evolution is not revolution, renovation is not innovation. It is not a question of making a clean sweep of the past, of rebuilding everything into something new.”

The Daughters of Charity today live on Mother Guillemin's legacy. They no longer wear the cornette, yet they continue on a “uniformity” as Mother Guillemin wanted for the community. The Sisters wear their “uniform” of blue with pride. Though the clothes themselves may be different, the blue color and the skirt/blouse combination unites them all. As an alternative to the scratchy starchy cornette, Sisters may also choose to wear a dark blue coiffe, a short veil. The governance Mother Guillemin set in place continues today, allowing for a wider and greater communication between the Motherhouse in France and countries all around the world. Her push for Sisters to complete professional training in their field evolved into what it is today, an encouragement to pursue higher education for the sake of better serving the poor.

The Sisters also follow her example of charity, which she had followed from St. Vincent and St. Louise and Sisters before her. Mother Guillemin did everything from work in an orphanage, heal and comfort the wounded of World War II as air raids played out all around her, and serve her fellow Sisters as a Sister Servant (superior of a house), Visitatrix (superior of a province), and Superioress General.

Mother Guillemin died unexpectedly in March 1968, shortly after being nominated by the Pope as a consultor of the Congregation of Religious and before the end of her term as Superioress General. Yet, I believe what St. Vincent said to the Sisters about St. Louise's death can ring true for Mother Guillemin as well: “Mademoiselle Le Gras is praying for you in Heaven, and she will not be less useful to you now than she was before, nay, more so, provided you are faithful to God”

Daughters of Charity, Sisters of Charity, what?

The other day, I had an interesting conversation with my principal. He's known for months that I'm applying for pre-postulancy. And before the school announced it was closing, we even had a fun plan of me continuing to work there as a pre-postulant, but alas, God had other plans. Anyway, that day, at lunch duty, he turns to me and goes "So next year will your pre-postulancy. What are the Sisters called again? The Sisters of Charity?"


My answer was complicated "They're the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Some people call them the Sisters of Charity though so you're technically not wrong. But there ARE other groups that are Sisters of Charity" and then I attempted to explain the whole Setonian (St Elizabeth Ann Seton) history and the handful of communities she founded that are named "Sisters of Charity".  I decided not to explain the fact that the Sisters in Emmitsburg still are registered financially under the name Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph. Good grief, he probably just wanted a "yes" or "no" answer but he ended up with a long dissertation from me.


Also, believe it or not, there are other groups that are "_______ of Charity" that have nothing to do with Elizabeth Ann Seton or Vincent de Paul! Crazy, huh? This is probably making your head spin. Don't worry too much about all the differences...maybe I'll explain them more in depth in a different post!


But, as I was telling my principal, although there may be too many religious communities to know, all these differences really speak to the universality of the Church. Each religious community has a specific charism - that is, their own personal spiritual characteristics shown by their mission and/or values they find important. (And how many religious communities are there in the world? My guess is thousands. ) Franciscan Sisters are different than Benedictine Sisters, Carmelite Sisters different than Salesian Sisters, Salesian Sisters different than Daughters of Charity....and those are just a few!

St Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscan charism,
which includes a love of personal
poverty and a dedication to a simple
straight-forward living of the Gospel

Point is - in this great Church of ours, everyone fits. The Church doesn't expect us to be the same. She knows that each person is different - each person has different gifts, each person finds God in a different way and serves God in a different way. It's always frustrating to me when people lump Catholic Sisters (or really, Catholics in general) as all the same. Just do a little investigating in religious orders and you'll find out just how different we all are! (Not to mention, the Church asks us to practice our own personal charism, even if we're not priests, brothers, or Sisters!)


Obviously, I was talking about my Catholic Church just then but I also know that overall, this is a characteristic of Christians in general. I have a good number of Protestant friends that are able to use their own personal charism, their own personal spirituality, in their church. One in particular that I admire deeply is a friend, belonging to the Church of God denomination, who is currently working as a missionary in Bogotá, Colombia by working with at-risk kids and youth.

Jesus called each disciple in a different way. Even the Letters (of the New Testament) show us how different each writer was, how each connected to God in a different way. Peter and Paul were quite different, but they were both great followers of Christ. In the Old Testament, we see two prophets - Moses and Elijah - that experienced God in two different ways...Moses in a very active way through the burning bush and Elijah through the more contemplative "whispering wind". One experience wasn't better than the other - just different as our own personal charisms are. 


Go in search of your own personal charism...how do you feel called to serve God ? how do you experience God? what Christian values do you cherish the most? which saints or personal spiritual heroes inspire you?...and live it!