By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

When the Glenmary Home Missioners started the Glenmary Farm in eastern Kentucky 30 years ago, they expected it to provide a pipeline for young men who might have a vocation to the religious life—specifically, to the Glenmary congregation.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, said Susan Hellman, director of the congregation’s volunteer program.

The Farm has proved hugely successful among teens and twenty-somethings looking for a significant life experience. More than 10,000 young men and women have come and worked, Hellman said. But that hasn’t translated to generations of young men so taken with building and renovating housing for poor people, serving elderly nursing home residents and interacting with developmentally disabled people of all ages that they beat down the doors of the congregation asking to join.

For Hellman, that’s no longer the point.

“It is a life-changing event,” Hellman said. “It truly is not unusual to get letters from people five, 10, 15 years after they come. It deepens their experience of faith and makes them rethink what their life’s work should be. If someone’s going to be a lawyer, they might start doing housing work or advocacy for the poor.”

Students have no dearth of service-learning trips to choose from. High school hallways list opportunities to build homes with Habitat for Humanity to working with more specifically Catholic organizations. In some schools, trips to serve the poor rival beach vacations as spring break activities.

This year’s Glenmary Farm volunteers included a group from St. Ignatius College Prep, who traveled to the farm shortly after classes ended for the summer in June. While there, they teamed up with high school students from Logansport, Ind.; Jersey City, N.J.; and Becker, Minn. On service projects and small- and large-group reflection activities.

“I liked building community with the other people staying on the Farm,” said St. Ignatius student Lauren McArdle. “I also liked getting to know and work with all the people around the Farm.”

St. Ignatius actually offers its juniors opportunities to join one of nine service learning trips, which last year included a 17-day journey to Guatemala and a week at Pilson’s St. Procopius Parish, only a few blocks from the high school, said Colleen Doyle, St. Ignatius community service director. Several of the other trips go to various service programs in Appalachia.

Students who apply and are accepted—nearly 150 applied last year, and about 100 made trips—are assigned to a trip based on the summer dates they have available, she said, with school staff trying to make sure students travel with classmates they don’t know well.

“You can’t intentionally go with your friends,” she said. “Part of what we tell them is that this is not your agenda. It’s the agenda of the community you’re serving. We try to push kids out of their comfort zone and give them a greater appreciation of what they have.”

For many students, such trips open their eyes to the reality of poverty, especially urban poverty. Daily opportunities for prayer and reflection help the teens grow spiritually.

That’s part of the plan, Glenmary’s Hellman said.

“We try to make it more than just a work camp,” she said. “We want to make it a retreat-like mission experience.”

Chicago nun remembers Hiroshima

For many people, the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima seems like ancient history. Not to Sister Theresia Yamada, a member of the Society of Helpers who now lives on Chicago’s North Side. She was there.

Yamada, then 28, was assigned to the society’s Hiroshima Convent on Aug. 6, 1945. In an interview with John Edward Murphy for Ireland’s Western People magazine, she said she didn’t feel well that morning, and wanted to stay in bed. After being encouraged to get up anyway, she spent the morning praying and meditating outdoors, under a pine tree. That was where she was when she heard the loud explosion and saw the incredibly bright light of the first nuclear bomb ever dropped as an act of war. She fell face down on the ground, begging God’s forgiveness for her shortcomings.

When she got up moments later, she found that a heavy beam had fallen across her bed.

All eight sisters in the convent survived and ministered to the homeless and hungry, burned, injured and disoriented bombing victims. They joined some 90 other refugees at the city’s Jesuit residence, as their own convent had been destroyed.

After the war ended, Yamada, now 83, spent some years in France, before coming to the United States to work with the Japanese community in Los Angeles and then Chicago, where she served for many years as the treasurer for her community, said Sister Catherine Tighe. Although retired, Yamada is in relatively good health and still offers a ministry of presence to the Japanese community in Chicago.

But the after effects of the blast have never left her. Every year, Tighe said, Yamada travels to Japan, not only to visit the sisters there, but for medical tests to track her condition because of the radiation to which she was exposed.

Benedictines honored for women’s work

To be a prophet means to work at the margins.

So said Sister Christine Vladimiroff, prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, when she accepted the 2002 U.S. Catholic Award for furthering the cause of women in the church on behalf of her community.

Vladimiroff and her 135 sisters seek to be prophets both to the world around them, by engaging in the profoundly counter-cultural act of living in community, and to the church of which they are a part, even if they do not always find wholehearted acceptance.

“The present situation is not an incarnation of the full Gospel,” Vladimiroff said, recalling the early Christian communities of the Acts of the Apostles, where all were to be seen as equal in God’s eyes, male and female, slave and free, Jew and gentile, all sharing their goods in community. “We will plead for a place at the table for all women, both in the boardroom and in the church.”

Vladimiroff, whose community has stood by controversial member Sister Joan Chittister, said that the church and the world at large often accept the need for prophets, even when they do not like what the prophetic voices are telling them.

“The true prophet poses a threat to the stability of the here and now, the security of the status quo,” she said. “Religious women live in tension with the church and with society. We have struggled to find our place at the table, to have our voices heard and our questions answered.”

And while activities like helping to settle the Lost Boys of Sudan, protesting at the former School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., decrying racial profiling and arguing for legal protection of gays and lesbians may mean that some will no longer consider them “the good sisters” of past generations, Vladimiroff pledged that she and her sisters would continue.

“We will do our part,” she said, “to see that God’s reign will be where we live in years to come.”

Rewarding life for spiritual, biological sisters

The feast of St. Francis of Assisi is a special day for the Smagacz sisters, originally of Chicago.

It was on that day, Oct. 4, 1931, that Gertrude Smagacz decided to enter the convent of the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago. Two years later, on the same day, her 14-year-old sister, Mary, joined the congregation in the Our Lady of Victory Convent, and on Oct. 4, 1940, 19-year-old Victoria Valerie Smagacz followed in her sisters’ footsteps.

Ironically, the first sister to enter, Gertrude, left the congregation in 1935 after deciding that religious life was not her calling. But the other two—now known as Sister Innocent and Sister Victoria Valerie—have lived full lives within the congregation.

The women, now 83 and 80, respectively, share memories of growing up in the convent, where life was not always as serious as it may have appeared from the outside. As young postulants, they used to hide in the shrubbery and play “cops and robbers” and “ring around the rosie,” and the sisters weren’t immune to giving each other unexpected baths when they shared laundry duty.

Over the years, Sister Innocent served mostly as a primary grade teacher and a sacristan, said Sister Victoria. Sister Victoria taught and did administrative work, including setting up the housekeeping departments at hospitals and nursing homes in South Dakota and Ohio. She also traveled to nearly all of the congregation’s 65 missions, often to fill in for another sister who was on leave.

While sisters maintained a close relationship through correspondence, they rarely saw one another except during the summers, when they would join fellow Franciscan sisters on a trip to visit Polish parishes in Ontario to visit with the older parishioners in their native language and teach some Polish to the children, Sister Victoria said.

While their older sister found her vocation in marriage and motherhood, the two younger sisters say their calling to religious life was a gift from God. Asked why she had joined the congregation, Sister Innocent said, “I didn’t have any influence. I just knew.”

Her mother was proud that two of her nine children—six of whom lived to adulthood—chose the religious life, but she was also happy that Gertrude had found her own vocation in the home, especially as Gertrude was her mother’s caretaker as she got older.

“She always used to say God knew what he was doing, because who would have taken care of her?” Sister Victoria said.

Sister Innocent and Sister Victoria both live at the Our Lady of Victory Convent in Lemont, and both say they can’t imagine having done anything else with their lives.

“I wouldn’t change anything,” Sister Innocent said.

“Put Out into the Deep: Vocations for the New Century” is being put together on a shortened schedule. The organization decided to bring the gathering back home to Chicago—the birthplace of Serra—in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the likely reluctance of some to travel to Curitiba, Brazil, the original site.

To help, Serrans who live in the Midwest are being asked to live out their Christian vocation of service and consider volunteering at the convention. Available jobs include everything from helping to plan liturgies to driving VIPs to and from the airport.

Anyone interested in helping out can contact John Doyle at [email protected] or (847) 392-0785.