When a young Poor Clare offers her life to God on the day of her profession, the bishop prays, “Lord, in your love grant that her way of life may bring glory to your name, salvation to all mankind, and spread your love and joy through all the world.” An amazing prayer for the Church to make, considering that this young woman will spend her life within the embrace of the monastic enclosure. She will not be teaching children their catechism, nor instructing RCIA classes, nor engaging in the other manifold and magnificent works of the active ministry. But the Church confidently asks God that her life of persevering prayer and willing penance may help to bring His salvation to the world. This prayer is made with the conviction that a cloistered nun is indeed handing on the Faith by her life of love at the very heart of the Church.
 

The Poor Clare rises just after midnight to begin her day’s work of prayer for the Church and in the name of the Church for all mankind. Seven times a day she gathers with her sisters for this blessed, hidden work of love, offering God a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, begging his grace and mercy, interceding for healing and peace for a suffering world.

Pope John Paul II frequently spoke of this evangelization-by-prayer during his long pontificate. In 1980 he addressed the cloistered nuns in Nairobi: “The Church … forcefully proclaims that there is an intimate connection between prayer and the spreading of the Kingdom of God, between prayer and the conversion of hearts, between prayer and the fruitful reception of the saving and uplifting Gospel message.”1 He asked cloistered nuns to “set themselves at the very heart of Mission by their constant prayer.”2

The life of the cloistered religious also bears silent but eloquent witness to the things of eternity. In a society where material wealth is presented by the media as life’s only meaning and satisfaction, the Poor Clare’s life of joyous Franciscan poverty proclaims that only God can bring the human heart, created by Him and for Him, the true and eternal happiness for which it longs.

A monastery of contemplative nuns is also a gift for the diocese to which it belongs. In the words of Verbi Sponsa, a recent Instruction from the Holy See, “Representing the prayerful face of the Church, a monastery makes the Church’s presence more complete and meaningful in the local community. … It represents what is most intimate to a local Church  its heart.”3 From this hidden heart of our diocese, the Poor Clares in Roswell collaborate by prayer and penance with our bishop and his people in handing on the Faith.

1                     John Paul II, Address to Cloistered Nuns, Nairobi, May 7, 1980

2                     John Paul II, Homily in the Vatican Basilica, Nov. 30, 1997

3                    Verbi Sponsa, Instruction on the Contemplative Life and the Enclosure of
                      Nuns,Vatican City, 1999