Nun | OC Catholic

EPISODE#228
OC CATHOLIC RADIO: THE PRESENTATION SISTERS: A NUNUMENTARY

It is always a pleasure to have new friends join us in the studio, high atop the Tower of Hope on the campus of Christ Cathedral. The topic on the table today is all about some wonderful, Godly servants who reside at St. Bonaventure Catholic School in Huntington Beach. They are known as ‘The Presentation Sisters.’ On this podcast, host Rick Howick welcomes three unique guests: Alexa Vellanoweth (a former student at St Bonaventure), Kim White (the principal at St. Bonaventure) and Vanessa Frei (Director of Marketing and Enrollment).

So what exactly is a “NUNUMENTARY?” Tune in, and find out!

Originally broadcast on 5/15/21

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EPISODE#216
OC CATHOLIC RADIO: GUEST IS JOAN PATTEN. WHAT IS AN APOSTOLIC OBLATE?

Host Rick Howick is delighted to welcome a new guest to today’s broadcast. Her name is Joan Patten.

Joan works for the Diocese of Orange in the vocations office as a delegate for consecrated life. She acts as a liaison between the bishop and the religious communities. Joan has a wonderful laugh and a great sense of humor. You are sure to be captivated by this dynamic conversation!

Tune in and SHARE this podcast.

Originally broadcast on 12/5/20

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FORMER PRO FOOTBALL PLAYER PREPARES TO TAKE FINAL VOWS AS A NUN

Toronto, Ohio, Jun 18, 2018 / 03:26 am (CNA) – Every single vocation story is different, but Sr. Rita Clare (Anne) Yoches is probably one of the more unusual.

Sr. Rita Clare, who this month will profess final vows with the Franciscan Sisters T.O.R. of Penance of the Sorrowful Mother, was a four-time national champion professional football player prior to entering the convent.

Yes, that’s American football. (She was a fullback.) Nowadays, the only football Yoches is playing is the annual two-hand touch game she organizes with the 38 T.O.R. sisters she lives with in Toronto, Ohio.

Although she was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools, Yoches said she never once considered becoming a nun. Her family attended Mass each Sunday, but that was about it in terms of her faith life. A talented athlete, Yoches earned a full basketball scholarship to the University of Detroit-Mercy, where she played for four years.

After college, she began her football career in 2003 after a successful tryout with the Detroit Demolition, a now-defunct women’s professional team. She left the team in 2006, and in March of 2007, the former self-described party girl experienced a calling to enter religious life. She ended her relationship with her boyfriend, and entered the Franciscans shortly after.

“(I) loved to stay out as late as could on Friday and Saturday nights, but always went to Mass on Sundays. But I never really listened to what God was saying,” said Yoches in a video about her conversion.

One Sunday, after a particularly moving homily, Yoches realized that she needed to drastically change her lifestyle.

“And I was like, that’s me. I’m sick and dying on the inside. So that convinced me to go to Confession for the first time in a long time.” Her priest provided her with guidance about reading scripture every day, and she began attending Eucharistic Adoration.

It was during Eucharistic Adoration that she felt truly embraced by God, and really began to get a sense of His plan for her life.

“And then I felt God the Father just wrap his arms around me and give me a hug, and just pulled me onto his chest like only a father can hug a daughter,” she said.

“And my life was forever changed. I just wanted more and more of Jesus.”

She says while her family was supportive of her decision to enter the convent, her friends were surprised, as she had largely kept her faith life private.

“People were very surprised that this was really who and what I wanted to do and be,” she told the Detroit Free Press.

Sr. Rita Clare will profess final vows on June 30.

NUN INVOLVED IN KATY PERRY REAL ESTATE DISPUTE DIES IN COURT

Los Angeles, Calif., Mar 12, 2018 / 02:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News) – Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, 89, was one of five remaining members of her religious community, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles.

She died suddenly on March 9, after collapsing during court proceedings for a legal dispute involving Katy Perry and some real estate formerly owned by the sisters.

In a statement following her death, Archbishop Jose Gomez of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles said he was sad to hear of the sister’s death and that he had offered a Mass for the repose of her soul.

“Sister Catherine Rose served the Church with dedication and love for many years and today we remember her life with gratitude,” he said.

“We extend our prayers today to the Immaculate Heart of Mary community and to all her friends and loved ones. On behalf of the entire family of God here in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, I pray that God grant her eternal rest and let his perpetual light shine upon her,” he added.

Holzman had recently been involved in a legal dispute over a vacant convent used by the order, which singer Katy Perry had offered to buy from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for more than $14 million in 2015. According to the archdiocese, this deal stipulated that Perry find a replacement for a priest’s retreat house that was also part of the property.

Church regulations require Vatican approval for the sale of high-value properties, and the order has been in a dispute with the archdiocese over who has the canonical and legal right to orchestrate a sale of the property.

Holzman and another sister of the order opposed the sale of the property to Perry, due to the content of some of the pop star’s songs. In a separate transaction, and without the canonically-required approval of the Vatican or the archdiocese, the sisters sold the vacant convent property to real estate developer Dana Hollister for $44,000 and a promissory note totaling $15.5 million, without any guarantee for the rest of the payment.

Last year, a jury found Hollister guilty of malice and fraud for intentionally interfering with the sale of the property to Perry. A court ordered Hollister to pay back $15 million in legal fees to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and to Perry’s company, The Bird Nest, LLC.

Holzman died while attending Hollister’s bankruptcy hearing.

Archdiocesan spokeswoman Adrian Marquez Alarcon told CNA that while Sister Holzman and Sister Rita Callanan have been vocal about the case and opposed the sale to Katy Perry, the two sisters were never legally involved in the real estate dispute.

Alarcon said that the archdiocese, joined by Perry, took legal action in 2015 to protect the sisters from the illegal and invalid sale to Hollister. She also noted that as recently as December, the Vatican’s Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura affirmed that the archdiocese was the proper legal owner of the vacant convent property.

Alarcon also added that the archdiocese has promised to take care of the IHM sisters regardless of what happens with the property.

Post-judgement court proceedings involving Hollister and the archdiocese are temporarily on hold following Holzman’s death.

NUN’S RECOVERY RECOGNIZED AS 70TH OFFICIAL MIRACULOUS HEALING AT LOURDES

ROME (CNS) — As the Catholic Church celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, a French bishop announced the 70th officially recognized miraculous cure of a pilgrim to the Lourdes grotto where Mary appeared 160 years ago.

Bishop Jacques Benoit-Gonnin of Beauvais formally declared Feb. 11 “the prodigious, miraculous character” of the healing of Sister Bernadette Moriau, a French member of the Franciscan Oblates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who had been partially paralyzed for more than 20 years despite repeated surgeries to relieve pressure on the nerve roots of her lower back.

In November 2016, the International Medical Committee of Lourdes confirmed the nun’s “unexplained healing, in the current state of scientific knowledge.” But it is up to the bishop, not the physicians, to declare a healing miraculous.

Lourdes, close to the Pyrenees in southern France, attracts millions of visitors each year and has been a place of pilgrimage since St. Bernadette Soubirous reported the first of 18 visions of the Virgin Mary while gathering firewood in February 1858.

To be declared miraculous, cures must be “found complete and lasting,” involving a “serious illness which is incurable,” and must involve a sudden “indisputable change from a precise medical diagnosis of a known illness to a situation of restored health.”

Sister Moriau, now 78, made her pilgrimage to Lourdes in 2008, the 150th anniversary of the apparitions. She had experienced lower back pain, the first symptom of her disease, in 1966 at the age of 27. Four surgeries did not stop the progressive worsening of her neurological deficits.

“This pilgrimage was for me a source of grace,” she said in a statement posted on the website of the Diocese of Beauvais. In the cave where St. Bernadette reported seeing Mary, “I felt the mysterious presence of Mary and little Bernadette.”

She said she went to confession and received the anointing of the sick during the pilgrimage. “In no case did I ask for healing, but only for the conversion of heart and the strength to continue my journey as an invalid.”

A few days after returning to her convent, she said she felt unusually relaxed and she experienced warmth throughout her body. Sister Moriau said an inner voice asked her to remove the rigid corset that helped hold her erect, the splint that kept her foot straight and the neurostimulator she used for pain control. She began walking unaided and without pain.

Before her case went to the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, she underwent batteries of tests and examinations, which were studied by committees of the Lourdes Medical Bureau in 2009, 2013 and 2016.

FORMER ATTORNEY PROFESSES FIRST VOWS AS CLOISTERED DOMINICAN NUN

MENLO PARK, Calif. (CNS) — Tara Clemens was an Anchorage, Alaska, attorney, and an evangelical Christian who joined the Catholic Church during her last months of law school.

On May 28, she made first vows as Sister Marie Dominic of the Incarnate Word, a cloistered Dominican nun at Corpus Christi Monastery in Menlo Park.

With first vows, Sister Marie Dominic received the black veil, replacing the white veil of novices.

“The priest says, ‘Accept the sacred veil by which you may be recognized as a house of prayer for your Lord and a temple of intercession for all people,'” Sister Marie Dominic said. “The center of the contemplative life of the Dominican nuns is the love of God.

“As a nun inside the cloister, even though I can never leave, I can embrace the whole world with that love and intercede for the whole world,” Sister Marie Dominic told Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocesan newspaper.

First vows are for three years. Those vows will be followed by two one-year renewals as she and the community continue to discern her vocation. At Corpus Christi Monastery, a nun is in formation for a total of seven-and-a-half to eight years before professing solemn vows, that is, vows until death.

Sister Marie Dominic already has spent two-and-half years in the monastery, first as a postulant and then as a novice. Dominican friars and nuns profess the vow of obedience to God, Mary, St. Dominic, the master of the Order of Friars Preachers, and for the nuns, to the prioress and her successors. Vows of chastity and poverty are included.

It was a sudden change to Catholicism and a relatively quick decision to discern a vocation to the Dominican Monastery of Corpus Christi that caught Clemens by surprise. A visit to a Friday Lenten Mass with a friend during her last months of study at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, led to three months of studying of Catholicism late at night. She also was working full time. By Pentecost 2007, a few months later, she was convicted of the truth of Catholicism.

In Anchorage, she was asked out of the blue about becoming a nun. She responded she had never considered the idea. By November 2008, just months after entering the church at the Easter Vigil, the young attorney was visiting Corpus Christi Monastery.

“When God calls, he is very persistent,” Sister Marie Dominic said.

But with more than $100,000 of student loans, the nun-to-be was at times close to despairing because she could not enter with outstanding debt. So the story of her vocation journey also is the story of how the Laboure Society helped Clemens resolve her student loans and become Sister Marie Dominic.

“She has a dear place in my heart,” said John Flanagan, the society’s executive director.

The Laboure Society, based in Minnesota, assists those with a priestly or religious vocation resolve their debt, which can be an obstacle to entering religious life. The society enrolls a “class” of a dozen to 25 people who believe they have a religious vocation and puts them through a fundraising “boot camp.” The aspirants raise funds for their class, not for themselves. For Clemens, she participated in the program for two years. At the end of her last class, it looked like she would be in for another year until two benefactors made large contributions.

“People all around the country know they have done something to help Tara Clemens become Sister Marie Dominic. She didn’t get there alone,” Flanagan said.

And Flanagan said Sister Marie Dominic has not forgotten any of those people. “She has a gift of gratitude,” he said.

“She inspired the heck out of me,” Flanagan added. “She had her own difficulties in her journey but she faced them with great trust in the Lord.”

Schmalz is assistant editor of Catholic San Francisco, newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

NIKE TV SPOT FEATURES NUN WHO IS TRIATHLETE AT 86

SPOKANE, Wash. (CNS) — With every Olympics, summer or winter, the 24/7 coverage usually includes stories about the oldest athlete in history to compete in this sport or that sport — and “oldest” usually means 31, 35 or perhaps early 40s.

But Nike has launched a new TV campaign that features someone a lot older than that who is still active in her sport: 86-year-old Sister Madonna Buder, a Sister of Christian Community from Spokane, who is a triathlete.

She is featured in Nike’s “Unlimited Youth” ad campaign that has been running through the Summer Olympics taking place in Rio de Janeiro.

“It wasn’t until I was about 47, 48 that I was introduced to running — actually by a priest. I’m Sister Madonna Buder, known as the ‘Iron Nun,'” she says in a short video interview released in addition to the TV spot.

“There was a point where I did not want to see a pair of running shoes. Then triathlon came in. That was a salvation,” she explains. “There were a lot of times I had to think about failures and not reaching the goal I may have set for myself. Then I realized the only failure is not to try because your effort in itself is a success.”

She has completed 45 triathlons. Currently, Sister Madonna holds the world record for the oldest person to ever finish an Ironman Triathlon, which she earned at age 82 by finishing the Subaru Ironman Canada Aug. 26, 2012.

Sister Madonna’s cheery disposition, unbounded determination and quick wit carry her through the tough circumstances that are typical of each Ironman competition. Cheers of “you go, girl” and “way to go, Sister” have spurred her along at each race.

The one-minute-long Nike TV spot opens with a still photo of her in her running togs, wearing medals and surrounded by trophies. Then comes footage of her wearing her religious habit and kneeling in a chapel. When the narrator introduces her as an 86-year-old sister, she turns and says: “Shhh.” She’s in the middle of prayer.

Next she is seen going for a morning run. “Good for you, Sister,” the narrator says. Then she is swimming in an open body of water. “She’s still active at her age. That’s … great,” the narrator says hesitantly. As Sister Madonna rides her bike on a curvy country highway, the narrator says, “Whoa! Maybe a little too active. Naptime, Sister?” She looks directly in the camera, shakes her head and says firmly: “I don’t think so.”

In the last scene, wearing a body suit, she is in a huge crowd of fellow swimmers heading for open water during a triathlon. “What! What? An Ironman? Wait! Oh no, no, no, no, no. This is a bad idea, Sister! A real bad idea!” comes the voice-over. “Relax! She’s the Iron Nun,” says another voice. “But this is the Ironman. … She won’t make it!”

As she runs into the water, Sister Madonna yells back: “The first 45 didn’t kill me!”

“You’ve done 45 of these? OK, do your thing, Sister, do your thing,” says the narrator.

NUN ASKS JURY FOR MERCY, TO SPARE BOSTON BOMBER’S LIFE

Boston, Mass., May 11, 2015 / 04:26 pm (CNA/EWTN News) – In the defense’s final move to save the life of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Sister Helen Prejean asked the jury not to execute the young man.

The man responsible for the Boston bombings is “genuinely sorry for what he did,” testified Sr. Prejean on May 11 before a federal jury. “He said it emphatically. He said no one deserves to suffer like they did,” she recounted of Tsarnaev.

“I had every reason to think that he was taking it in and that he was genuinely sorry for what he did.”

Sr. Prejean was the last of 44 witnesses heard in the sentencing trial for Tsarnaev after he was found guilty of all 30 charges he faced for participating in the bombings at the April 2013 Boston Marathon.

The attacks, which he conducted with his elder brother Tamerlan, killed three people and injured more than 260. Tamerlan died in a shootout with police days after the bombings.

Instead of facing execution, Tsarnaev’s defense is asking that the young adult, receive life in prison without parole as a punishment for his actions.

Sr. Prejean, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph since 1957, has been a longtime advocate against the death penalty following her ministry to prisoners on death row. Her life and ministry was portrayed in the 1993 Academy Award-winning film “Dead Man Walking.”

She began meeting with Tsarnaev in March at the request of his defense team, and continued to meet with him, last seeing him only days before the testimony.

Challenging the prosecution’s narrative that Tsarnaev has no remorse, Prejean told the jury that the young man “kind of lowered his eyes” when speaking about victims and his “face registered” what he said about them.

She testified that indeed Tsarnaev felt remorse for his actions and that in her opinion this regret was “absolutely sincere.”

“It had pain in it, actually,” she said of his face, when his actions were brought up. “When he said what he did, I knew, I felt it.”

Sr. Prejean also said she was moved and concerned by the defendant’s age; he was 19 at the time of the bombings. “I walked in the room, I looked at his face and said, ‘Oh my God, he’s so young!’” she said of their first meeting.

The religious sister also revealed that she and Tsarnaev had discussed their religions, saying that she “talked about how in the Catholic Church we have become more and more opposed to the death penalty,” and that he was “very open and receptive” during these talks.

Sr. Prejean is one of many Catholic voices who have petitioned the court and the public to not take the life of Tsarnaev in retaliation for the others lost during the bombing.

On April 7, the Catholic bishops of Massachusetts issued a joint statement reaffirming the opposition of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to taking a life if there are other ways for society to protect itself.

“The defendant in this case has been neutralized and will never again have the ability to cause harm,” the bishops wrote. “Because of this, we, the Catholic Bishops of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, believe that society can do better than the death penalty.”

Bill and Denise Richard, who are Catholics and the parents of the bombing’s youngest victims: 8-year-old Martin Richard, who passed away, and his 7-year-old sister who survived with serious injuries, also oppose the death penalty in this trial.

They stated that if Tsarnaev were to receive the death penalty, their family’s pain would continue rather than end.

“We understand all too well the heinousness and brutality of the crimes committed. We were there. We lived it,” wrote the Richards in an April 16 column for the Boston Globe. “We know that the government has its reasons for seeking the death penalty, but the continued pursuit of that punishment could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives.”

“As long as the defendant is in the spotlight, we have no choice but to live a story told on his terms, not ours,” they affirmed. “The minute the defendant fades from our newspapers and TV screens is the minute we begin the process of rebuilding our lives and our family.”

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