This is not Something You See Every Day

From the Baltimore Sun:

Archdiocese of Baltimore welcomes new order of nuns

All Saints' Sisters of the Poor left the Episcopal Church two years ago

 By Mary Gail Hare, The Baltimore Sun

7:58 p.m. EDT, November 1, 2011

The Archdiocese of Baltimore added a new religious order of nuns Tuesday, its first in decades and one that began as an Anglican community.

The All Saints' Sisters of the Poor left the Episcopal Church for the Roman Catholic Church two years ago. By a decree from the Vatican, they are now an official diocesan priory, or order, the same designation carried by the School Sisters of Notre Dame or the Daughters of Charity.

"We feel we have broken ground," said Mother Christina Christie, leader of the community and a nun since 1966.

Yesterday, All Saints' Day, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, all 10 members of the Catonsville convent individually professed perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience "for the rest of my life in this world." Then each signed her profession at the altar before nearly a dozen priests and bishops.

The good sisters are getting along in years (thus giving additional, if unintended, significance to "for the rest of my life in this world") and it will behoove them to seek out more vocations. This should prove an easier task now that they are part of the Holy Catholic Church; religious orders of a traditionalist bent (which the All Saints Sisters of the Poor are, as one look at the pic below will tell you) are doing rather well these days recruiting new religious, even as those orders that bear-hugged the noxious post-Vatican II reforms seem to be in irreversible decline. While the outlook for Anglican orders, which resulted from the Oxford Movement and the Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century (and always struck this writer as as slightly incongruous, even as an Anglo-Catholic) is probably even bleaker than that for the Episcopal Church.

For the newest community, it will be business as usual in their lives of prayer and service, said Christie. Now that they are an official religious institute, they can re-open their novitiate and welcome new candidates to their community. Since their change of denomination, there have been several inquiries, she said.

"We are not expecting a mad rush to join us," she said. "But we will take those that God sends us."

May she be pleasantly surprised.

                                                        Proper nuns