| When Even Prayer is a Challenge |
| Monday, 02 April 2007 07:23 | |||
 Sister Marie Bruna Loh, webmaster, at work. (Photo by Terry T. Steele) BRANFORD – The Benedictine nuns at the Monastery of the Glorious Cross arise each morn-ing by 6:15 to devote the day to prayer, work and silence, just as they always have done. They’re nowhere near as able to do it as they used to be, though. They are getting old, and physical work is harder. For the 18 Benedictines of Jesus Crucified at the monastery, all 65 to 85 years old, “ora et labora” is now more like “ora et ora.” “With the increasing age and diminishing strength of a lot of the sisters here, prayer is the one thing that all can do (at least try to do),” said Sister M. Zita Wenker. Age isn’t the only problem. The nuns are members of a relig-ious community that, since its beginning, has welcomed women with lifelong disabilities. Failing eyesight or hearing, crippling arthritis and other age-related conditions only compound problems such as heart conditions and substantial impairments that cause chronic pain. Eight of the sisters rely on wheelchairs. At afternoon prayer, some stand while others can’t; some sing, others barely move their lips. The community, which in the past has found ingenious and off-beat ways to support itself, now finds itself asking for help. “I have to say that for the present, we don’t have a lot of remunerative work, and without God’s great generosity and the kindness of people, we couldn’t manage,” Sister Zita said. It didn’t used to be that way. The community moved to Branford in 2001, after their stately abbeys in Newport, R.I., and Devon, Pa., became too much for the shrinking number of nuns to handle and the stairways became barriers for some. Before that, a number of the sisters in both abbeys helped earn the community daily bread for 36 years by screening Pap smears in laboratories within their abbeys. A Philadelphia pathologist who was a member of the community’s men’s guild proposed the idea to the nuns in 1959, as more and more doctors relied on the Pap test to screen for cervical cancer. Sister Zita said the work was perfect for enclosed sisters, even those with physical disabilities, who were meticulous as they concentrated on their jobs in silence. “It was good work for us because it was hidden, it was necessary and it suited our needs as well,” she said. “We try to choose things that will fit into our life.” Although patients whose tests were screened by the nuns didn’t know it, they got more than skilled eyes as a result of the arrangement. “We followed some patients who did develop cancer,” Sister Zita said. “Women who had their smears done by us got our prayers as well. We could empathize and sympathize with them. It put us in touch with people.” Some of the nuns also helped support their congregation in the late 1990’s by working for The Electronic Scriptorium, an unconventional Leesburg, Va., firm that farms out data entry jobs to nuns and monks in monasteries across the country. The thinking behind it is that monks copied classical works onto parchment 1,000 years ago, so monastics are the go-to people when it comes to preserving printed material in the computer age. Sister Marie Bruna Loh said that, before her arrival in this country in 1996 from France, she copied classical music and Gregorian chant into wired form for the Benedictines of Jesus Crucified here and in other countries. Now the congregation’s webmaster, among other duties, Sister Bruna recalled their part in cataloguing the huge photo library of The New York Daily News, a tabloid that prides itself on eye-popping photos. She said the sisters entered captions into an electronic data-base, working from photocopies and material that accompanied them. The sisters saw and read about everything from Mohammed Ali to ZZ Top, war, theft and accidents, sometimes getting so engrossed in their reading that their work slowed down temporarily, she admitted with a laugh. Sister Bruna, a native of Singapore who converted from Buddhism, said she never found a conflict between the work and her role as a Benedictine nun. “In fact, this was a constant reminder for us to pray for the world,” she said. Also through The Electronic Scriptorium, the community catalogued some 30,000 man-scripts for New York’s Pierpont-Morgan Library, whose holdings include Charles Dickens’s manuscript of A Christmas Carol, Henry David Thoreau’s journals, and manuscripts and letters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, John Steinbeck, and Voltaire. They also helped create an on-ine database of works of art in The Frick Collection. Sister Bruna said that, at about the same time, some of the nuns transcribed lectures and corre-spondence for a French foundation that helps blind students and others to become fully integrated professionals. She recalled that six to eight sisters kept busy with that work, which also included filing, mailing and translating articles in German into Braille, and printing items in Braille on their own printing press. Nowdays, the printing press, cytology labs and association with The Electronic Scriptorium are no more, in part because of the sisters’ move to Branford and in part because there aren’t enough nuns who can still meet the demands of such work, Sister Zita said. Instead, the nuns sell cards and candles that they make, provide guest quarters for retreats, offer classes and collect and sell cancelled stamps. One sister does secretarial-type work on a computer for a person in Pennsylvania and another does data entry for an organization; both receive stipends. Since 2004, two sisters have done work for the Knights of Columbus, preparing reliquary prayer cards for the Father Michael J. McGivney Guild, also for stipends. “They do excellent work for us,” said Millie Millea, guild secretary, immediately providing an example from two days before: “I had to put pressure on them because we had run out of cards,” she said. “Boy, they could really whip them up for us. They did 1,000 in a day and a half.” These efforts, however, aren’t enough. Mother Marie-Rita Syn said that although the Sisters do their best to be self-sufficient, their income can’t keep pace with rising costs all around them. The sisters say the gas and electric bills alone are more than $100,000 a year. They currently are conducting a fund-raising effort with a goal of $350,000. Donations may be made online at http://www.benedictinesjc.org/GloriousCross.html or may be mailed to: Benedictines of Jesus Crucified, Monastery of the Glorious Cross, 61 Burban Drive, Branford, CT 06405-4003.
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