Anna Maria Sanders, my classmate from both high school and the novitiate, spoke of a childhood experience that has stuck in my mind as it has in hers: “I remember as a small child, five or six years old, being at grandma’s house. She was cooking at the cook stove and her mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear her. I said, ‘What did you say, grandma?’ And she said, ‘Oh, child I was praying.’”
Barbara Ann Hoying’s experiences were similar: “We were a very, very strongly faith-filled family and prayer was before and after meals. We had night prayer at our mother or dad’s knees. . . . I was introduced to the rosary in school. We prayed the rosary as a family, in May and October the whole rosary and during the rest of the year often it was just a decade, especially if we were very busy on the farm.”
Of her family, Eleanor McNally said, “My father was a very religious man. His family had been a convert to the Church when he was just twelve years old, and he really took it very seriously. So I think there was an atmosphere of religion in our home that was rather exceptional. My mother was not so demonstrative in her religion, but it was very deep.”
I didn’t ask Eleanor what she meant by religious; I assumed religious meant to her what it means to me: spirituality centered in a personal relationship with God. Nancy Kinross put it in a few simple words: “When I was going through grade school with the Sisters of the Precious Blood I can remember what was really influencing me was our religion teachers who told of the faith in terms of stories. That’s the way Jesus taught. I can remember how influenced I was by that and my mother. Those were the years where you prayed the rosary with the neighbors on your city block, known as a block rosary. And you did things with the parish in the school. Out of that experience I developed a very personal relationship to God. My mother nurtured that by modeling it as well as sharing her stories.”
After a few months of such interviews my own memories of childhood prayer began to stir: walking a mile to daily Mass in every season and sitting quietly, often alone in God’s presence in our old, dark, Gothic church. I had never before thought about how I shared this childhood experience with so many Precious Blood sisters. I began to see that prayer was the common thread that had drawn us all to the Community. We had all taken to heart the message—from Church or school or family—that God is a personal God to whom we can relate in prayer.
Children Learn to Pray
Generations of Catholics learned the Catholic faith from the sisters who taught them in elementary and secondary schools. The sisters and the Catholic families met in the parish churches for Sunday Mass and Benediction, the rosary, novenas, devotions during the Lent and Easter time, Advent, May, and October. Patricia Kremer and her family participated in a Cincinnati Good Friday tradition every year: praying the rosary while climbing the church steps. “As a family we did that faithfully every Good Friday. My motivation as a kid, I think, was the donut and the juice at the top!” Regardless of motivation, the seasons of prayer were as regular as the seasons of the sun.
The sisters communicated a sense of mystery about the world even through rote Catechism questions and answers such as: “Who made you? God made me.” Many children, like Barbara Ann, continued to wonder about God in the off hours: “I do remember in the first grade being . . . fascinated by the stories, Bible stories, catechism lessons. . . . At night in bed, after the light was out and my sister, with whom I shared the bed, was quiet, and we weren’t talking any more as little girls do in bed, I would often think about the religion class that sister had taught and what she taught us about Jesus and Mary. . . . As I look back from my adult years to those childhood years, I believe God was trying to get my attention then.”
Not everyone who attended Catholic schools back then remembers such prayerful childhoods and such innocently joyful religious experiences. Popular film and theatre productions like Black Patent Leather Shoes project a different image of how sisters influenced their students. But in describing our elementary school experiences, I can personally vouch for the Precious Blood sisters’ credibility.
As late as the forties and fifties many children led simple lives in prayerful families not unlike the early European immigrants in this country. Television, malls, and organized sports had not yet intruded, so youngsters had free time to play pick-up baseball, to roam the woods and fields near their homes. Genevieve Volk was born on a farm in a sod house built by her grandparents near Linton, North Dakota. Her father’s love for music and the natural environment that surrounded them nurtured her contemplative childhood: “I liked to go down to the creek and explore. I’d go walking for hours and loved to sit under a big tree that we had down there and just ponder. It was very reflective . . . I loved all of nature and little animals and life and everything.” Genevieve was describing what is understood today to be contemplative prayer.
The Catholic child’s life revolved around school, the family, and the parish. Florence Seifert recalled “praying at grandma’s and grandpa’s when we went there, that was just a given; being at church when anything was happening.”
Both Charmaine Grilliot’s parents were involved with the parish activities. Her mother was president of the Altar Rosary Society. She recalled “especially the Holy Thursday all night vigil. My father was a day laborer at the National Cash Register. He always got up very early, but I remember that on Holy Thursday night he always went over to the church to pray and still would get up to go to work the next morning.” Charmaine and her father occasionally got up early together for Saturday mass. “And I liked that for several reasons . . . for one, we used to go to the bakery and get rolls and coffee cake for breakfast.”
No one was surprised when Charmaine announced that she would be a sister, since she had talked about it from the third grade on. “All I can say is I believed it had to be an inspiration of God.” Prayer, the relationship with God that began in childhood, led women like her to leave family and possessions, and all the world had to offer, to give themselves to God in religious life.
Of course, human factors were not absent in such decisions. How could a child go to school every day admiring her sister-teachers and not think of becoming a sister herself! The idea came privately and often dramatically to many little girls. Barbara Ann and I chuckled when she told me, “I had a sister in every grade. I thought the whole world was educated that way because my little world was. . . . Everybody was taught by a lady who wore a long black dress and was sweet and kind. . . . I watched sister very closely . . . thinking I could do that. I would like to do that. And especially when she swung around . . . up in the front of the classroom she would swing around, and her black dress would swing out, and it was so romantic!” Barbara Ann followed her childhood dream, coming to live at Salem Heights for high school after eighth grade, formally entering the Community four years later.
Seventeen years earlier Mary Bernard Reichert had come to Salem Heights after high school. She mentioned many sisters she admired from first grade on who inspired her desire “to be a sister. . . . I wanted to go out of the eighth grade to the convent, but my father and mother felt that they needed me at home, and they also thought I was too young.” Like Barbara Ann she has never had a doubt that religious life is what she wants.
Maryann Bremke told me, “As far back as I can remember I always knew that I wanted to be a sister. . . . But I have to say I really connected being a religious with being a teacher, and I knew I wanted to be a teacher. So it took awhile until I realized that there was something beyond teaching that religious life was about.”
Nancy Raley put her decision in the context of her times, the 1950s: “Young women in those days were encouraged to be pious; and we always attended daily mass. And as I started looking forward to what would come next in my life it seemed to me that it was teaching, nursing, or going to a convent.”
Many of the sisters grew up at a time before young women had much opportunity to continue studying beyond high school. Madonna Winkeljohn told me how a career in teaching blended imperceptibly with her interest in the religious life: “I knew I wasn’t going to go to college. . . . You never heard of that in a small town especially . . . I thought the sisters lived a beautiful life. I thought it would be nice if I could do that.” Later Madonna worked especially hard to encourage her high school science students to continue on to college.
Not all parishes supported a Catholic school, so Elise attended the local public school. However, her whole family was involved with the parish: her father took up the collection; her brothers were servers, and her mother played the organ holding baby Elise on her lap. Throughout grade school Elise attended parish Sunday school where she met sisters: the Sisters of St. Joseph first, then the Franciscan Sisters in seventh and eighth grades. Finally she met the Sisters of the Precious Blood in high school in San Luis Rey, California. She said, “I always felt called . . . from little on,” but she “felt drawn to the Sisters of the Precious Blood by their spirit of prayer and their spirit of joy.”
Donna Liette used the same words to describe her elementary school teachers. When I asked her what attracted her to the sisters she said, “Just their joy . . . sort of in love with God as I could understand, I think, as a little girl.” Her mother helped too, though not quite as planned. “My mother gave this little prayer card to my older sister . . . a teenager; it was a prayer for religious vocation.” But her sister passed the prayer card on to Donna: “`Here, you pray this. I’m not praying this!’ So I tried to struggle through the words and I guess God heard them!” When Donna had made up her mind to go to the convent preparatory high school in Dayton, she told her eighth grade girlfriends (in a class of fourteen). “Well, let’s all go!” they said. And five of them did! Their pastor laughingly told them maybe one would stay, “But not you, Liette!” The others soon returned to their families.
Mary Linus Bax told me a story that began for her with a moment in first grade. She knew on the day of her first communion that she would be a sister. She carried her commitment in her heart from elementary school through to profession and to her life today. She tells how she made formal contact with the Community without nudging from or even the knowledge of her eighth grade teacher. She wrote directly to the Mother General in Dayton. “I wrote to Mother Agreda and I told her I wanted to be a sister. I got a post card back from Mother Agreda.” Mary Linus understood Mother Agreda’s words to be: “So you want to be an apostate in our Community.” Finally Sister Gonzaga Sonderman, her teacher, explained to her that the word was postulant!
As a young child who first saw sisters at parish functions, Armella Schoenlein had the idea that these women were an attractive but different species “who just came that way. . . . I thought they were made up of clothes; their rosaries and medals came with them.” One day she saw the sisters’ clothes drying on the line. She hurried home to tell: “Mom, they take their clothes off!” Once in school she thought she might like to be a teacher and a sister. Armella claimed she was too young to have any deep spiritual insights at the time. Nevertheless, during an eighth grade trip to Salem Heights, she admitted to reading most of the biography of Saint Therese of Lisieux.
As a small child Eleanor was first fascinated by her mother’s explanation of the odd clothing—the habit—on a statue of St. Rita. When she met a real live sister later, desire sparked within her and grew stronger when she started Catholic school in Los Angeles. “From the very beginning I just had the desire to become a sister. . . . It never left me.” She was the oldest girl in her family. It was the Depression years; but her parents encouraged her even though it meant she would be far from home and not see them again for many years. She was fourteen when she boarded a train to Dayton in 1933. Of course, as she pointed out, “The sisters were all great in those days about getting the eighth graders into the convent!”
There are those who never attended Catholic schools but nevertheless found their way to the Community. Angeline Hoffman had become a successful teacher before she made her decision. She had thought seriously about the religious life off and on since childhood, but she enjoyed her high school years, went on to earn a degree in education, and took a job she loved, teaching in Russia, Ohio, with the Sisters of the Precious Blood. Like many young women her age she loved her independence and enjoyed dating, along with the clothes and other things her salary made possible. When a priest told her “I think you should be a religious,” she had a ready response. “No. I think I am going to get married and have a lot of children. And they can become sisters!”
But when her dearly loved grandmother died, Angeline’s focus on life shifted. She shared with me a difficult conversation she carried on with God about entering religious life. It occurred during one long night shortly after that loss: “I’ll have to give up cigarettes, dancing, pretty hats and shoes. . . . I love you, Lord. If it’s your will, I want to do your will.” Finally, at three in the morning she put out her cigarette and said, “Ok, Lord, I am going to do what I know you want me to do.” She went on, “Then I was at peace. That night I said my vows. I said my ‘Yes;’ I made my commitment.”
Teresa (Terry) Maher’s idea of nuns had come from television and film, though her family was Catholic. Only briefly in high school did the notion of religious life as an option occur to her. But after high school her mother’s death in a tragic accident precipitated changes in her life. She first enrolled in a junior college near home so she could be available for her family; but later, when she transferred to the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution, she found she was required to enroll in religion courses. These attracted her so much that she majored in religious studies. It was then that she began to experience “an inner gnawing that just wouldn’t go away” to consider religious life.
Any self-respecting tomboy can understand why Terry tried to dismiss the idea, given her Hollywood stereotypes. “I liked sports. I liked to play ball. I liked boys. I would much rather go around in slacks. . . . Especially when you couldn’t have boys. That was a biggy!” Besides, she was used to the independent life of a military brat! She finally decided to see “what if” only so she wouldn’t have to wonder for the rest of her life.
Terry found out how outdated her stereotypes were as soon as she met the Sisters of the Precious Blood in the late 1970s. What attracted her? The same thing that drew all the other sisters I talked with: “I was attracted by their prayer . . . they seemed peace-filled women, which for me can only come out of their prayer life, out of their relationship with God. . . . They seemed to be people of joy. They could have a lot of fun.” Still she bought a round trip ticket when she headed to Dayton for the novitiate because, “I really didn’t see myself staying!” More than twenty-five years have passed since then and Terry hasn’t used the other half of her ticket.
Eileen Tomlinson, too, attended public schools—except for third and fifth grades in a Catholic school. Those two years gave her the opportunity to be confirmed. She took the name Therese at Confirmation and seriously embarked on her life’s journey in prayer. After graduating from high school she decided to look up the autobiography of her patron, Therese of Lisieux. She found Story of a Soul at the public library. When she told some friends what she was reading one of them said, “Seems to me like you would really like to be one of those sisters.” Eileen remembered replying, “Maybe . . . it surely is an ideal life.” She began to follow up on her interest in Saint Therese and in the religious life by contacting Precious Blood sisters at Regina High School. Coincidentally Sister Theresita Berting had just come to Regina at the conclusion of her work as director of novices. She took over Eileen’s evening instructions. Eileen remembered one snowy night when neither of them was deterred from meeting. Eileen had found someone to talk with about her inclination to religious life and she entered the Community soon after.
The interview with Eileen held special significance for me because she had been my art professor in the novitiate. She was the first teacher who helped me feel free to express myself visually! Where earlier teachers criticized, not unreasonably, everything I did, Eileen gently teased out my unschooled creativity. She wore the gray habit then. Now as we talked I realized how much the attractive, colorful design of her hand crafted suit added to the joy radiating from her eyes and smile.
With a Little Help
Sisters would sometimes nudge a vocation along by inviting a student to visit the Dayton Motherhouse. Rose Margaret Broerman needed two trips. The first one to Maria Stein (location of the original Motherhouse in northwest Ohio about an hour from Dayton) did not convince her. “I remember the sisters always were talking about vocation . . . I thought, ‘That is not for me.’ I remember I was a girl scout, and one of the things we did is make a field trip to Maria Stein. I guess we saw the relics and got to visit a little bit with the sisters. I remember Maria Stein. I realized this was a convent: the interior was dark wood. The sisters, though, were nice and friendly. One sister said, ‘Now maybe one of you will come and be a sister.’ I thought, ‘that will be the last thing that I would ever do! Whoever would want to be a sister! No, that is not for me.’” And yet a few weeks later, by chance she visited the Motherhouse in Dayton where she promptly changed her mind; and she has “not had any doubts ever since.”
Virginia Hebbeler’s dream had always been to become a nurse. The idea of being a sister never entered her head until her senior year at Regina High School in Norwood, Ohio. Norwood is a neighborhood in the middle of Cincinnati. Regina High School had been managed and staffed by the Sisters of the Precious Blood since they built it in the 1930s. Virginia’s literature teacher, Sister Corinne Riffle, asked her, “What are you going to do after high school?” Virginia made it clear she was going into nurses’ training at Good Samaritan Hospital. Corinne was just as certain that Virginia had a calling to religious life. Virginia agreed to make the novena that sister suggested and, “Eight days later I was going to go to the Community!” She knew there was almost no chance she could be a nurse in this teaching Community, yet she says, “I really felt it was where I should go.”
A few sisters told me of an over zealous high school teacher who brought fear into the recruiting discussion. It is not a big leap to imagine that, as a result, a young girl could enter with a question on her mind: “Would she lose her soul if she did not become a nun?” But only a few described such a sad experience. Several told me, “Sister So-and-So had my vocation for me!” Later these women made their own decisions and commitments either within or outside the Community. In a gentler approach, a sister might notice certain qualities in a girl and mentor her, eventually suggesting that she might have a call from God to religious life.
Maria Anna Brunner, the First Precious Blood Sister
As the interviews progressed I began to wonder what Maria Anna Brunner, who founded the Sisters of the Precious Blood, would have revealed about her call to follow Christ. When did she say her “I can do that”?
Maria Anna was a mature, prayerful mother and grandmother before she followed her call to a different life. She married and raised five children in a household marked by a deeply religious atmosphere. Her husband died when she was only forty-eight, in January of 1813.
Her neighbors in the Swiss Alps villages referred to Frau Brunner as the pious mother because they knew how her family lived and because they saw her walking to church or making pilgrimages to the numerous mountain shrines of the area. She worked hard farming, cooking, and sewing, providing for her own family as well as for the needy of the nearby hamlets.
When her own children were settled in life she decided to bring her life to conclusion in prayer, charity, and self-sacrifice rather than enjoy a retirement full of grandchildren and well-deserved rest. She was sixty-eight years old when she moved to the medieval Castle Loewenberg (above the village of Schleuis, Switzerland) for this purpose. There her oldest son, Francis de Sales Brunner, a Precious Blood priest, was converting the old castle into a kind of seminary to train young recruits to be missionaries in the New World. She could have a room near the chapel and help her son with his work when she was not engrossed in prayer. Like many modern women her creativity continued long past her child-bearing years.
Maria Anna Brunner appears also to have been restless, searching for a more central vision for her spiritual life. She began the last of her life’s many pilgrimages soon after she moved to Loewenberg. She traveled to Rome with her son in 1832 to spend nine months in prayer at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church.
Culturally, Maria Anna’s nineteenth century Europe and her Catholic Church existed under the long shadow of the French Revolution, of the Napoleonic wars, and of religious Jansenism. It was at least partially in response to the brutalities of revolution and war that St. Gaspar del Bufalo and others were reviving devotion to the Precious Blood in Rome when Maria Anna visited. From there the devotion spread, and continues to spread, throughout the world.
We have no record of what happened in Maria Anna Brunner’s mind and heart during her months in Rome, but I can imagine that she experienced moments of heightened understanding—a kind of faith shock—about the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as she listened to the priests who spoke of devotion to the Precious Blood. After her return from Rome she was both at peace and on fire. She had found the inspiration for her life of prayer in the Precious Blood; in particular she wanted to attract enough women to be able to take turns expressing devotion to the Precious Blood by praying continuously throughout the night. In less than a year, two women joined her and several others soon followed; her dream became reality. Probably without knowing it—she died in 1836—she had given birth to a second family. The Community dates its foundation from 1834.
Many young women who have entered the Community have experienced a faith shock, a moment of unusual clarity and intensity—similar in some ways to Maria Anna’s. Benita Volk remembered: “Every once in a while one of the Precious Blood sisters at school would say to all of us or to individuals: ‘Have you thought about being a sister?’ And I was always, like, ‘Oh, no! No. Go all the way to Dayton, Ohio, from North Dakota and wear those crazy clothes! No way!’ Well, in the eighth grade, we had a retreat . . . I don’t even remember who the priest was. . . . All I remember is part of a phrase that he said to all of us. He said, ‘God doesn’t need you. He doesn’t need anybody.’ And in my mind I said, ‘Well, then I’m going to be a sister.’ Now, go figure! I don’t know how that worked. . . . I think it was that sense of freedom . . . a kind of unconditional call or love. . . . God doesn’t want you to do this because he needs you or . . . because you have to save the world or you have to do this to save your soul. It was none of that kind of stuff. It was that wide-open love, I think.”
A Precious Blood sister nudged Margaret (Margie) Zureick during her high school years in the late 1950s. “I really liked Regina High School, and I liked the sisters. I was in the camera club, and I was a member all four years. . . . I also worked with Sister Benedicta, our moderator, in the dark room. So one day—I think it was in the dark room and I couldn’t get out—Sister Benedicta asked me had I ever thought about being a sister. I said, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Because now by my high school years, I had been thinking of it more. But I thought, ‘I will just tell her to get her off my back.’ I said, ‘But I’m going to be a Benedictine if I join a convent.’ And she was just very cool about the whole thing. She never reacted. She just said, ‘That would be wonderful.’ She said, ‘You know I’d be glad to help you in whatever way.’ I thought, ‘Oh, no!’”
So Margie visited the Dayton Motherhouse with high school classmates to see what it was all about. There she experienced her faith shock: “We toured everything and when we went in that chapel I just thought, ‘This is the place.’ There was something that happened there that did it. . . . The sisters just impressed me so much, just their presence, their being. I never saw auras. . . . But they had an aura that I could feel. . . . And walking in that chapel and seeing those sisters up there praying—it was just such a prayerful atmosphere.”
It’s Prayer
From Maria Anna Brunner to Margie and all those like her, prayerful women have been attracted to the Community by prayerful sisters. For some the call came almost as a shock, a moment of knowing “I can do that;” for others it was the culmination of human and divine inspiration that took root over time.
Many of the sisters grew up in northern Ohio—where the Community began in the United States and where Community schools continued to be most concentrated for many years. But young women also came from across the country, from every urban and rural community in every state where the sisters had schools or had contacts. They came from ages thirteen to thirty, after eighth grade, or after high school, or after earning college degrees and working. So the Community prospered and grew in numbers, reaching its peak in the mid-1960s with 850 members. The restless, visionary mother and grandmother whose prayerful devotion to the Precious Blood drew the first Sisters of the Precious Blood to join her in prayer must be pleased to know that today Carmen sums up the sisters’ lives with the words, “It’s prayer.”