Sister Paulina Mary Kennedy, Ph.D., formerly a psychologist at Holy Names College in Oakland, enjoys a visit with Patrick James Wolfe. Patrick's grandmother, Pat Meehan Atthowe, came to visit Sister Paulina and other nuns at the Care Center who were her teachers at both Holy Names High School and Holy Names College, both founded by the California Province. Sister Paulina suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
In 1868, six young nuns from Montréal traveled by ship and rail to Oakland, where they established a high school for girls. They belonged to the Sisters of the Holy Names, a religious order that was founded 25 years earlier by Mother Marie Rose Durocher.
Today, the spiritual journey they began concludes at the Convent of the Holy Names, 200 Prospect Ave. in Los Gatos. It is here that members of the California Province come at the end of a lifetime dedicated to prayer, meditation and service.
Some fear that the convent, in addition to being a place where nuns retire, may also represent the proverbial end of the road for the religious community that now numbers 290 sisters engaged in pastoral ministries and formal education in California. There are 2,077 nuns representing various provinces of the order throughout the world.
Some 70 nuns call the Convent of the Holy Names home. Most are older women; many are elderly. The average age of Catholic nuns today is over 60. That's because few young women hear the call to a spiritual life. Vows of poverty sound oddly anachronistic in today's material world.
As in the priesthood, one of the greatest concerns for communities of "women religious"--the term is used to connote women who have taken vows as opposed to women who are simply religious--is how to care for their increasingly aging population. They are concerned, likewise, with what the lack of young novices means to the future of religious orders.
Sister Lolita Krebsback has served as convent administrator for the past four years. She thinks lay people and "associates" will continue the mission of the sisters. Associates enjoy an alternative form of membership, which is a formally recognized affiliation, without canonical vows, offered to both women and men.
"We're trying to make choices about that right now," she says. "Maybe in 40 years, there will only be two or three women religious here and the rest will be associates, but that will be OK if we make the right choices about that now."
The convent may be where aging nuns live out the rest of their lives, but the facility in the hills behind the Los Gatos Civic Center is anything but lonely or depressing.
In fact, the Convent of the Holy Names is a thriving community that welcomes more than 150 preschool and kindergarten students every day of the school year. It is a place where a lively group of volunteers creates craft items for fundraising. It is the administrative headquarters for nuns who teach and serve the poor and work for social justice in California and several Latin American countries. And it is where Sister Emily Marie McKernan directs a fundraising operation that communicates with 150,000 donors using a computer program called Donor Perfect.
The convent is also home to Sister Nicki Thomas, principal of St. Mary's School in Los Gatos, and it is with the aging sisters that she entrusts many of the responsibilities for the creation of Christmas ornaments she makes to augment the community's retirement fund. It is a place where retired nuns gather food for soup kitchens and where 89-year-old Sister Teracina Bretz does oil paintings to raise money for the convent.
On the 17-acre property, the sisters also operate Villa Holy Names, a retreat center where sisters in the statewide community vacation and where a variety of outside groups come for retreats and conferences.
The convent operates on an annual budget of $1 million for its 30-bed Care Center, medical services, plant services and food service for the entire complex. There are 30 employees, including 10 in the kitchen. The figure does not include administrative expenses for province administration or expenses of the Casa Maria Montessori School or its staff.
Shaping Young Lives
Founded 25 years ago as a community school of the Sisters of the Holy Names, Casa Maria Montessori provides education for up to 156 preschoolers and kindergarten students. Based on the teachings of Maria Montessori, the school's focus is teaching children to respect themselves and others.
Sister Betty Shields, the school's director, joined the Sisters of the Holy Names 35 years ago and has been an educator ever since. She attended Notre Dame College in Belmont and earned a master's degree in education with an emphasis in early childhood education.
Her teachers--only two of them are nuns--must be Montessori-trained, or they must have teaching credentials or early childhood training. Some teach in an area of expertise, such as art.
"When I hire a staff person," she says, "I always make sure it is someone who is very comfortable with children--someone who looks in their eyes when she talks to them; our teachers must be comfortable sitting on the floor with children and giving them a hug when they need one."
And in the hug department, some of the older sisters at the convent have been recruited as "grandmothers" to give special attention to youngsters in the Montessori School when they seem to need it.
Caring for Their Elderly
Sister Helen Irene Fremouw, 89, waits patiently in her room in the Care Center for Jim Lehrer's daily news report on PBS. An elementary school teacher for 35 years, she spent 10 years as director of novices for the community. "I can't walk any more," she says, "but I keep up with the news."
The Care Center, which provides 24-hour nursing care and assisted living on two separate floors, offers private rooms, all equipped with television sets. Closed-circuit TV allows the nuns in the center to participate in a variety of activities from prayer programs in the convent chapel
to social activities in the dining hall.
Roberta Robbins, R.N., is administrator of the center. "I've worked in other facilities, and the difference is dramatic," she says. "Most of the sisters here are alert compared to most people in long-term care."
She says that's not surprising, however. "Scientists are actually trying to figure out why it is that, as a group, elderly nuns are so much healthier physically and mentally than other elderly people. Studies show that nuns suffer much less dementia in old age than does the rest of the population," she says.
Becoming old and frail doesn't relieve nuns from their obligation to serve others--even if prayer is all they can give. Each year, every nun, including those in the Care Center, makes a commitment to pray for a specific mission. It could be any of a number of missions, including the Watsonville Project (where two sisters from their community provide after-school tutoring and have organized a Women's Project in the farm labor camps), the Next Step Literacy Project in downtown Oakland, or the ministry begun by three sisters of the community in Nicaragua.
Administration and Financial Support
After a lifetime of working without compensation, nuns today have to depend, to a great extent, on those who were recipients of their good works. Many of the names on the donor list are those who were helped or whose children were helped by the nuns. One such group congregates weekly down the hall from the Development Office--past the Casa Maria Montessori classrooms--in a room where sewing machines buzz and where one wall is lined with shelves of plastic boxes crammed full of fabric, paper bags, Styrofoam cups, thread, buttons and eyes--of the stuffed-animal variety. Those cutting and sewing and gluing belong to the Marie Rose Guild, and they create handcrafted items for the group's spring fundraiser, "Bagels, Baskets, Bunnies and Bears," and the annual Strawberry Lunch. Proceeds from the sale of their craft items go to the support of the Care Center.
Such projects are a tried and true method of raising funds in churches and community groups, but with the population of nuns getting older every day, pressure for more dependable sources of income is increasing.
The sisters now have a retirement fund, but it is not yet fully funded. "We've been lucky we haven't had to dip into it," Development Director Sister Emily says. Beginning in April, she will turn her full attention to the community's planned giving program.
In 1983, the community established the Province Board of Consultors, a group of lay people to advise the community on a variety of administrative matters, particularly in the area of development.
Thomas Albanese of Saratoga, vice president of Central Concrete in San Jose, has served on the board for 10 years and is now its chairman. He's one of those who remembers how much the sisters did for him when he was a child. Albanese grew up in Los Gatos and attended St. Mary's School. "These women are workers," he says. "They're good at praying, too," he adds quickly, "but they're really workers!"
That's why, says Albanese, he's willing to do what he can to help ensure that they are well cared for in their old age.
Albanese acknowledges that there are those who criticize the Catholic Church for not taking care of the aging nuns, but he thinks it's an unfair criticism. "Historically," he says, "religious orders have pretty much been expected to fend for themselves."
As lay people begin to move into roles previously filled by nuns, the religious community will find itself paying salaries it never had to pay in the past.
After four years as convent administrator, Sister Lolita will soon move on to other work. Job descriptions for the administrative post are being circulated not only among the religious community, but also among lay people.
A Period of Transition
Other changes are occurring as well. When St. Mary's Parish was looking for a new principal eight years ago, members trusted the decision to the Sisters of the Holy Names, who sent Sister Nicki Thomas. "It's my guess," Sister Nicki says, "that when I leave, it will probably be the parish that will make the final decision on my replacement." There are only two nuns at the school today; most instructors are lay teachers.
When Sister Nicki was hired, no one had to negotiate a salary agreement. As was traditional, she was paid a small stipend or "religious" salary. The need for nuns to be able to support their aging population, has prompted changes in this area, as well. Next year, for the first time, Sister Nicki, who has earned a national reputation for bringing technology into the classroom and incorporating it into the entire school, will be paid a salary commensurate with a lay principal.
The pay will go not to her, but, as is the custom, to the convent. She will continue submitting a budget to the convent for her personal needs.
Prior to coming to St. Mary's, Sister Nicki served in an Orange County parish, where she was responsible for religious education and was the youth minister. It was to cope with her frustrations over the problems of the young people--pregnancy, abortion, runaways--that she began making Christmas ornaments of Fimo clay, a polymer clay that hardens to a smooth plastic-like surface.
Her hobby has become a cottage industry that keeps a number of the older sisters at the convent busy making body parts for the various stuffed animals representing different occupations. Sister Nicki travels as far south as Orange County and goes to Sacramento and other Northern California communities to sell the ornaments at craft fairs. All proceeds support the community's retirement fund.
When she was in Orange County, she lived by herself in an apartment. Now, as a resident of the convent where nuns retire, she says, "It's like having 50 or 60 grandparents. They're very supportive of me."
Sister Nicki is less optimistic than some that the work of women religious will continue without an infusion of young novices.
What will happen when she is elderly? "I doubt the community will be here then," she says.
And with a philosophical shrug, she adds: "Last one out, turn out
the lights."
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 7, 1996.
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