Poor Clares offer 'monastic experience' to potential nuns

YOUNG WOMEN interested in pursuing a life of “obedience, poverty, chastity and enclosure” are being sought for an alternative career by the Poor Clares.

The enclosed order of contemplative nuns is offering potential recruits a rare opportunity to sample its austere way of life during a Monastic Experience Weekend at a monastery in Carlow next month.

The nuns do not communicate by telephone, but they have launched a slick new website to promote their lifestyle.

The nuns’ daily routine is a mix of work and prayer, with just 30 minutes of recreation, which is “increased to one hour on Sundays and also feast days”.

The order does not remain totally silent, and during recreation the nuns can “chat away” and exchange “items of news”.

Hobbies include gardening, music, art and knitting. But the emphasis is on prayer. Set piece routines involve daily Mass, the Divine Office and the Liturgy of the Hours.

Because the monastery maintains “perpetual eucharistic adoration”, each nun spends time “during the day or night in private prayer before the Blessed Sacrament”.

The nuns don’t go out either to work or socialise, but do perform certain tasks inside the monastery so long as they don’t “extinguish the spirit of holy prayer and devotion to which all temporal things should be subservient”.

They rely on charity, but occasionally take on remunerative tasks such as the “baking of altar-breads, vestment-making, printing and artwork”.

To become a Poor Clare involves completing a six-year noviciate. Aspiring sisters must begin with a one-year postulancy to assess their suitability for “a life of total giving”.

If a woman successfully completes the noviciate, she exchanges the white veil of the novice for the black veil of a professed nun and is consecrated at a ceremony where she takes the “solemn vows of Obedience, Poverty, Chastity and Enclosure”.

Prospective candidates may find inspiration in the nuns’ testimonials. Sister Anna Maria, formerly Francie O’Neill, from Bracknagh, Rathangan, Co Kildare admits that her family were “up in arms” about her decision to join the order, but she has “never looked back” and describes it as “a great life”.

Sister Agnes, formerly Joan Griffin, was born in Market Square, Cahir, Co Tipperary, and was one of a family of 12 children, three of whom died young.

She entered the monastery in Carlow on June 13th, 1940, and “found a warm welcoming community” where she “felt at home immediately”.

She said: “As for my fears of being locked up, they all evaporated, and I never felt the enclosure to be anything else but a blessed space whose horizons stretched to the very limits of the Earth – and beyond.”

Applicants interested in participating in the Monastic Experience Weekend are invited to submit expressions of interest by September 8th to: Mother Abbess, Poor Clare Monastery, Carlow.

See poorclarescarlow.ie

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