"Young Women Answer Religion's Call" - Abbey of Saint Walburga

I arrived Sunday to spend several days with the Benedictines of the Abbey of Saint Walburga in Virginia Dale, Colorado - and found that they were featured in the Fort Collins newspaper, The Coloradoan. Read the full story there with captioned photos, or below.

Young women answer religion's call
BY KELLI LACKETT
KelliLackett@coloradoan.com

When Sister Immaculata Bertolli and Sister Maria Josepha Hombrebueno take one of their rare outings away from the Abbey of St. Walburga in the high plains of northern Larimer County, they look as if they've walked out of an earlier era.

The black habits and veils they wear are traditional, even compared to other convents. The dimples that frame their faces have their roots in the Middle Ages. It's a look that many people have come to associate with older women.

But Sister Bertolli, 25, and Sister Hombrebueno, 30, are the face of a new generation of religious Gen X'ers and Gen Y'ers longing for a spiritual alternative to the materialism and endless choice of the 21st century. The two are among the youngest sisters at the abbey which in the past three years has seen four young women entered as postulates at St. Walburga. And the abbey is expecting up to three more in the fall.

Away from the quiet abbey that sits on 750 beautiful acres near the Wyoming border in northern Larimer County, kids have the most dramatic reaction to the young Benedictine sisters.

"They stare at you and they don't say anything,'' Sister Bertolli said. "They are either thinking 'The Sound of Music' or 'Sister Act.' "

In the past 40 years, the number of Roman Catholic sisters has sharply declined. But the Abbey of St. Walburga in Virginia Dale has seen a spike in interest, said abbess Mother Maria-Michael Newe. Plus, the average age of the sisters at St. Walburga is 53 compared to 69 for Catholic sisters of active orders and 65 for contemplative orders. Other convents across the country have witnessed a similar phenomenon as religious orders reach out to young women through Web sites and e-mail.

“We don’t have any numbers on it yet, but there are anecdotal comments that indicate a little bit of increased interest,” said Mary Gautier, senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, or CARA.

Since 1965, the number of Catholic nuns in the United States has declined from 179,954 to 66,608 in 2006, according to CARA.

“I think it was part of people rebelling against rules and regulations,” Gautier said. “(Now) people are sensing that they need regulations in life.”

When abbess Newe entered the abbey in 1976 — and through the 1980s and ’90s — fewer young women than in generations before were opting for a life of obedience.

“To make a commitment in religious life is becoming an option for people more so than in the past,” she said.

On the flip side, student loans prevent some of today’s young women from entering the religious life, Newe said. Those entering the abbey must be free of debt.

Timeless rituals

Benedictine nuns and monks are a contemplative order, spending a large part of their time in communal prayer — rather than teaching, nursing or in another “active” vocation.

Starting at 4:50 a.m., the 19 Benedictine sisters in residence at the abbey convene in the chapel to chant and sing the first of seven daily parts of the Divine Office — prayers that are recited at fixed times of day.

Except for about 45 minutes after supper, they spend the rest of their day in near silence.

“We are allowed to talk about work,” Bertolli said. “We are called to offer up our work (as prayer) throughout the day. … That’s why we work in silence.”

The nuns are cloistered, which means that where they live and eat is not open to the public.

“It’s a difficult life — the contemplative life. There are not a lot of distractions,” Newe said. “You have to face yourself.”

But the contemplative life suits those who do stick it out at St. Walburga.

“You learn to know yourself in a very deep way,” Hombrebueno said.

Ultimate lifestyle change

If you asked Ria Hombrebueno’s friends from her pre-abbey life in Vancouver, Canada, if they pictured her as a nun, you would have gotten a resounding “no.”

“I wasn’t a very homebody person,” she said. “I went to bars, and I went out dancing.”

Like many young women joining the sisterhood in the past few years, Hombrebueno graduated from college. She worked as a nurse for six years and traveled for a year in Australia before she started what the church calls the process of discernment.

Now she spends her days praying, milking cows and feeding cattle and chickens at the abbey’s working ranch.

In the first year at the abbey, “I thought maybe God made a mistake,” she said. But she started to love the quiet and now she has to be talked into leaving the abbey grounds.

“It’s a complete lifestyle change,” she said. “It’s like getting married. Sometimes the commitment keeps you going.”

People outside the abbey tend to focus on what she has given up rather than what she has gained, Hombrebueno said.

“If you love what you do, you just do it. I don’t see it as a burden,” she said.

From Boulder to the monastery

When she was in college at the University of Colorado, joining the sisterhood was not remotely in Rosanna Bertolli’s plans.

“I was so intent on being a ballet dancer,” Bertolli said.

When she was 19, a priest who came to eat with her family asked her if she had every considered the religious life.

“Deep down I felt something,’’ she said. “It caused me to change my whole life.”
But the discernment process took three more years.

“I really wanted children,” she said. And she wanted the unique one-on-one relationship of being married.

“Everyone struggles with chastity,” Bertolli said. “(But) we want to sacrifice something to God. He is worth it.”

After graduating from CU with a degree in kinesthetics and applied physiology, she answered God’s call.

“From Boulder to the monastery,” she said.

Those in contemplative orders don’t have frequent contact with their families.

“We are allowed one visit a month, for an afternoon,” she said.

Prayer takes a discipline that is “very countercultural,” Bertolli said. Giving up one’s will in order to be obedient is a constant challenge.

But she said she would “give it up over and over again.”

She said the sisters get to experience a taste of what the faithful will experience in heaven.

“We are going to dwell with God,” she said. “We are fortunate to get a taste (on Earth) of what is to come.

“All of life here has meaning and purpose.”