JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Seventy-eight-year-old Sister Phyllis is near death. Over a period of three days around the clock, the sisters have been taking turns keeping vigil at her bedside.

SISTER ANNE SHEPARD (Prioress of Mount St. Scholastica): In our monastery, sisters do not die alone. We stay with the sisters night and day, so that they know, they’re comforted by the fact that they joined a community, and as community they’re going to go home—the real home that we’ve been waiting for.

VALENTE: The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica die much as they live—peacefully, prayerfully, and surrounded by community. It’s a way of life that Benedictine monasteries have shown the world for more than 15 centuries, and it’s a message that still resonates.

SHEPARD: When I look at the condition of the world today, I see a world where there’s violence, one where there’s greed, one where there’s selfishness. But also one where there’s a craving for a rejuvenation of family life, a rejuvenation of spiritual life. It speaks to me of the need more than ever of a monastic presence in this world.

VALENTE: Monasteries such as this one stand in contrast to the prevailing culture. They value community over competition, service over self-interest, and in a world of Internet, cell phones, and 24-hour talk, they stress listening and silence.

SHEPARD: It’s a way of life here. It’s an absence of noise and clutter, and we come together first, and we’re just silent. We’re in the presence of God. It’s not a deadly silence. It’s a very reverent and beautiful silence. We don’t need noise to be productive. It’s just the opposite. We don’t need noise to communicate. It’s just the opposite.

Monastic life is a life of living together in prayer and community. We as Benedictines, we monastics—we’re not founded to do a particular work. The particular work of a monastery is community, and believe me, that’s hard work. Living with 165 women is hard work.

Sister saying grace at mealtime: Ever faithful God, bless the food we are about to eat and unite us in mind and heart to your son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

SHEPARD: The common table is central to who we are. You listen, and you listen with the ear of your heart. You listen with what’s inside you. That’s what it means to be a listening person, and that’s going to happen in the dining room.

VALENTE: Sister Anne says these and other practices at the monastery can be applied to family life and even to the professional world.

SHEPARD: You bring in everybody into a decision and learn from the newest members, as well as the wisdom of the older members and everything in between. So you have prioresses and former prioresses and PhDs in English and math doing dishes along with those that just entered, that don’t have those same higher degrees. That’s a radically different way than a top-down way of doing business.

VALENTE: The monastery reflects a spiritual way of life, but one that also contains practical wisdom.

SHEPARD: A major countercultural difference is that we hold things in common. That is a major thing, that it’s not the greed, that if I have a computer, if I have a laptop, it’s because it’s for the use of the community. For us, the less we have the more single our purpose. We don’t need things. We need the gospel call, and we need one another.

VALENTE: The sisters do a variety of work. They teach at Benedictine College. They operate a women’s center in nearby Kansas City, Kansas, where volunteers teach money management…

Sister teaching money management class: Budgeting is simple but it will bring, you know, a little bit of the peace of mind to your house.

VALENTE: …English as a second language…

Sister teaching language class: Out? Ought. Ought? Ought.

VALENTE: …and provide child care for mothers taking classes. Others work in the medical profession or in massage therapy. Until recently, one was even a firefighter; another, a funeral director. But the most important work of the monastery is prayer.

SHEPARD: We use the words of the Psalms and of the scriptures that nurture us, that give us life, that give us meaning. Our life is about seeking God together and bringing that God into our hearts. It’s so profound, it’s hard to even explain. But it’s the daily-ness of the prayer. It’s that we need the prayer.

VALENTE: Monastic life began to flourish after the fall of the Roman Empire. Men and women retreated to the desert to live solitary lives of prayer and penance. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia, known for his spiritual wisdom, left the solitary life behind and founded communities where like-minded individuals could seek learning, find security, and live a life of prayer. Today, every monastic order in the world, whether Benedictine or not, follows Benedict’s model to some extent.

A young woman comes to the monastery for music lessons from Sister Joachim Holthaus, a composer. Ever since the time of St. Benedict, monasteries have been important centers of learning and culture. This is Sister Paula Howard. Eight years ago, at age 77, she discovered her talent for creating icons, which the monastery then sells. She’s done nearly 200.

SISTER PAULA HOWARD: Well, I think all appreciation of beauty lifts your heart—that beauty belongs here. It’s a foretaste of heaven, we hope, and I just think that beauty is an image of God.

VALENTE: Both artistic beauty and the beauty of nature.

SHEPARD: A contemplative life is being in tune with the spirit, in tune with nature, in tune with creation. It’s a communion with all that is around you. It’s a sense that everything we do is significant—the way I plant a garden and care for the garden. Everything that we do has meaning, and it has meaning because we’re intentionally trying to be more prayerful. You can live a contemplative life outside of a monastery. As a matter of fact, that is our hope, that people can come here and find a sense of peace.

VALENTE: The sisters earn some income by offering spiritual retreats. These high school girls are spending several days here. The monastery has 70 lay employees and an annual budget of $4 million. Most of it goes toward operating a nursing care facility for elderly sisters. The monastery also receives donations and bequests and government funding for its nursing home. Another source of income: the salaries of sisters who do outside work, like Sister Mary Palarino, a clinical social worker.

VALENTE: You could do this work as a lay person. I’m wondering what you think being a sister brings to this.

SISTER MARY PALARINO: You know, I really don’t think I could do it as holistically and as comprehensively unless I were a member of my community and living the Benedictine way of life.

VALENTE: Mount St. Scholastica is nearly 150 years old. Some 2,000 women religious have passed through its doors. Today the vast majority of the sisters here are over the age of 55.

PALARINO: I do get concerned about people not joining us, and I don’t understand that, I mean, because it seems like young people today are—they seek, and they have a hunger for community, for prayer life, for social justice issues. They have a hunger, you know, to follow something greater. We have that.

VALENTE: Sister Anne Shepard:

SHEPARD: Where it’s going to go in the future? It’s going to go wherever God takes us. We’re going to be smaller. We’re going to be just as vibrant. But it’s not easy. Any genuine commitment isn’t easy. That gift of unselfishness is the reason we make a promise to be faithful for all our lives, every day of our lives.

VALENTE: These sisters believe that as long as there is a need in the world for quietude, simplicity, balance, prayer, and community, there will always be a purpose to monastic life.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas.

“Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”

Those stirring words come from one of the most durable spiritual guides of all time, the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s been said everything one needs to know about living the spiritual life is contained in this little book. Over the past year, this 1,500-year-old treatise has become, for me, a constant companion.

Since June of 2008, I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to spend an average of a week a month at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas. I’ve been invited to share as deeply as a lay person can in the spiritual life of the sisters for a book I’ve been asked to write. I admit I questioned at first what practical wisdom a monastery might hold for a modern, married, professional woman like me. It turns out I’ve learned plenty.

I used to think of monasteries as outmoded remnants of a past era. But now, when I enter Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as if I’m peering into the future, a future our world so desperately needs—one that stresses community over competitiveness, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, and simplicity over constant consumption. The Mount is a place where those who listen are valued as much as those who speak up; a place where people forgo personal wealth but want for nothing, where prayers are said for the victims of violent crime and bells are tolled when a Death Row prisoner is executed.

I identify now with the words of Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and spiritual writer. After his first visit as a young man to the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton wrote in his journal: “I had wondered what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery.”

Whenever I walk into Mount St. Scholastica, I have the sense that I’m entering a deeper reality. It starts with the beginning of the day. The sisters don’t wake up and immediately turn on National Public Radio or read The New York Times, as I do. Day begins with Morning Praise. The sisters trace the sign of the cross over their lips and say, “Lord, open my lips, and we shall proclaim your praise.” It’s a way of promising that the entire day is going to be a form of praise. It’s not about checking off all the things on one’s to-do list, or plotting to sell more things today than yesterday or, as in my case, writing more words than I did the day before. It’s about making sure everything we do in the course of the day is an act of praise, an expression of gratitude for life.

After the sisters say that little prayer, they sing. Imagine how different our days might begin, if we started out each morning singing—even just mentally singing something in our head. If you’re someone who loves Broadway show tunes, as I do, you might choose “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Or it could be a favorite hymn (“We Rise Again from Ashes” is one of my morning favorites).

People think of monasteries of very quiet, perhaps even lonely places. But the truth is they teem with activity. The sisters work outside at many different jobs: teaching, doing social work, counseling, and hospital chaplaincy (one at the Mount was even a firefighter, another a funeral director), but everyone also has a job to perform within the monastery. Each sister takes a turn at cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes (albeit with industrial-size mechanical dishwashers). Even the prioress and the PhDs have their “at bat” at these menial jobs. It’s a way of saying that all work is sacred. Ora et labora, work and prayer, is the Benedictine motto. I like to think of it not so much as work and prayer, but work as prayer.

“Let the cellarer [the monastery supply clerk] handle the kitchen utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar,” St. Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a reminder to respect the common objects and utensils of our lives and a promise to extend that respect to the people around us, the community we live in, our natural resources, and our environment.

In his book on the Rule of St. Benedict (Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, Morehouse Publishing, 1996) John McQuiston, a trial attorney, points out, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, businesses, rivers, closest relationships, bodies, and experiences, everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” This is the way of monastics. As we continue to reap the damages of our throw-away society, we can see just how far-sighted monasteries have been.

There are some old monastic customs that the sisters don’t follow anymore, and frankly I wish some of them could become a part of our everyday lives. My friend, Sister Thomasita Homan, told me that for many years, whenever a group of sisters were assigned to work together a project, they would bow to each other and say in German (the native language of the first Benedictines in Atchison), “Have patience with me.” Imagine doing that in today’s workplace! I think about how much more pleasant it might be, when I’m out reporting a story for PBS, if I bowed to the cameraman, bowed to the producer, and they to me, and we asked each other to have patience, please, with each others’ human frailties.

Such humility forms the core of monastic life. It is especially important for Benedictines, who take a vow of stability. The vow commits them to live—and grow—with the same group of people at the same monastery for the rest of their lives. Stability recognizes, as one sister put it, that “there’s nowhere else but here.”

At Mount St. Scholastica, there are sisters who have lived together for as many as 75 years. Having moved from state to state here in the U.S. and lived in three European cities over the course of my career, the notion of spending one’s entire life in the same place seems quite foreign to me. In fact, the whole concept is alien to our highly mobile American society. Stability reminds us to grow where we’re planted. A monk was asked, “What is it then to be stable?” And he answered, “You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere; that you do not need to seek God elsewhere. God is here, and it is useless to seek God elsewhere, because it is not God that is absent from us. It is we who are absent from God.”

Often that absence stems from a simple lack of balance. We have an abundance of food in this country, plenty of gadgets and opportunities for recreation. What we lack is time to enjoy them. The rhythm of monastic life opens the way for balance. Benedict in his Rule stipulates that monks get seven hours rest a night. Those who require more food because they are ill or weak should get it, and those who aren’t strong enough to do physical labor won’t be forced to do it. The Benedictines even go so far as to call leisure “holy.”

I saw firsthand the Benedictine way of balance when I was at Mount St. Scholastica as Lent began this year. First, the sisters enjoyed the monastic version of Mardi Gras. All of them, even the elderly ones living in the nursing home wing, gathered for beignets and hot chocolate. Not just any hot chocolate, but hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. The sisters laughed and joked and were having a grand time. But at the appointed moment, everyone got up from their tables and walked in a procession from the community room to the dining room. There, a fire blazed in the fireplace. One of the sisters carried in the palms from last year’s Palm Sunday. One by one she threw the branches in the fire to create the ashes for this year’s Ash Wednesday, and from that moment on there was complete silence in the monastery for the rest of the night and all day Ash Wednesday. A time for fun and leisure, yes, and a time to be serious and prayerful. Balance.

Perhaps the most important word I’ve learned at the monastery is a Latin word: conversatio. It refers to another one of the vows taken specifically by Benedictine monks and sisters: conversatio morum, literally “conversion of morals.” The phrase is often loosely translated as “conversion of life.” But I like the definition Sister Thomasita once gave to me:  conversatio as a constant “turning toward,” a constant conversation with life.

I like the idea of turning because it connotes change, and there are certain aspects of my life I’ve been trying to change for a long time. Like my quick temper. I find that I like the person I am at the monastery much better than the person I am in my everyday life, because when I’m at the monastery I’m calm. I’m patient. I don’t lose my temper. Once, just a few days after I returned home from the monastery, I argued with my beautiful husband. It was a totally silly, unnecessary argument, and I emailed Sister Thomasita and asked, “Why do I have these stupid arguments with my husband, who’s the person as close to me as God? Why can’t I live conversatio in my day-to-day life with the people I’m closest to? And she answered, “You are living conversatio. Your struggle. That’s the conversatio.” And that gave me hope—hope that I don’t have to be a saint. I just have to be human.

“Keep death before you daily,” Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a potent reminder not to spend my life twisting in anger or caught up with what Thomas Merton called “useless care.” My stays at the monastery propel me every day to remember what is essential, what gives my life meaning. Merton referred to it as finding “the hidden ground of our being,” finding that place where we not only discover God, but where God can discover us.

I suppose I am just one of the many Benedict has spoken to through the ages who yearns for life and desires to see good days. “Run, then,” Benedict reminds me and all of us, “while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.”

Judith Valente, a contributing correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, is also a poet and co-editor with Charles Reynard of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005).

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: An association of Catholic women religious leaders is asking the Vatican why the group is being investigated. The leadership conference that represents almost all of the Catholic religious orders in the United States is the target of a “doctrinal assessment,” the results of which will be a secret report to Rome. The group was warned eight years ago that it had failed to promote some of the church’s teachings, including the male-only priesthood. A separate “apostolic visitation” is looking into what the Vatican calls “the quality of the life” of all 60,000 American Catholic sisters.

Joining us now to discuss these investigations is Tom Fox, editor of the independent newspaper the National Catholic Reporter. Thanks for joining us.

TOM FOX (Editor, National Catholic Reporter): Great to be here.

POTTER: Tom, I wonder if you could tell us what appears to be behind these investigations or, maybe put another way, what does it seem that the Vatican is after?

MR. FOX: Well, the truth is that no one really knows, and that’s one of the disconcerting elements. This really has taken the women by surprise. They met, as you said, with the Vatican eight years ago and went over certain matters, and every year since then they’ve been returning to Rome talking to Vatican officials, been open for communication, and now, out of seemingly nowhere, comes these investigations.

POTTER: Why do you think it might be happening now? Has there been some kind of change in the make-up of religious orders, or is it just changing philosophies in Rome that might be pushing this forward?

MR. FOX: Well, there’s been a conflict going back 40 years, since the Second Vatican Council, between two models of church. One is the more conservative, traditional model, male-clergy-hierarchical model, and the second has been the model of the Second Vatican Council, which stressed collegiality, and the women religious of America really embraced that, and they changed their constitutions to become more collective in their own leadership. And they really represent the forefront of this second model of church. And I think today the older, more conservative model feels that it’s strong enough now, maybe, to rein in this last remnant of the Second Vatican Council.

POTTER: So is it in effect a sort of push to reestablish a kind of orthodoxy in the Catholic Church in America?

MR. FOX: I think that there’s a continued concern by the Vatican that American Catholics are not orthodox enough, that the women religious may not be orthodox, but let’s be clear this that this is not on traditional teachings on God, Trinity, Jesus. This is—these are teachings on homosexuality, on the male priesthood, and the primacy of the Catholic Church.

POTTER: And yet that seems pretty central to what concerns the Vatican.

MR. FOX: That’s a very central concern, at this point, to the Vatican.

POTTER: So what, then, are the wider implications of an investigation into the women religious for the Catholic Church in America?

MR. FOX: Right. That’s a good question, and I think women religious say that this really represents an investigation or an attack, if you will, on the American way of being church, which really has stressed more lay involvement, more religious involvement, collegiality, more accountability of—demanded of the bishops, and so we’re really seeing here maybe the clash of two models, and I think the women religious are right that this really is wider than just the women religious themselves.

POTTER: Now, there have been some discussions that perhaps what the Vatican’s really doing is sort of assessing property for its value. Does that have any bearing, do you think, any validity?

MR. FOX: Well, again, Deborah, the fact is that no one really knows, and so you end up in this speculation, and of course there have been millions of dollars in lawsuits against the Church, and the Church is hurting for money, and so some of the women are at least speculating that Rome wants a better assessment of their property values and—with an eye on maybe using some of that money to pay some of these bills.

POTTER: Obviously, we’ll be watching this and report the results when we can get them. Tom, I appreciate you being here. Tom Fox from the National Catholic Reporter.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The Vatican reported this week that the number of Catholics in religious orders around the world continued to decline. In the latest figures for 2006, there were just over 945,000 monks and nuns, down about 7,000 from the year before. The overwhelming majority, 753,000, about 80 percent, were women. Around the U.S. the number of nuns has also been going down, and their average age rising. But there are a few places where the reverse is true. Betty Rollin found a Dominican teaching order in Nashville fairly bursting with dedicated young nuns.

BETTY ROLLIN: They are the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee, a traditional order that began in 1860. Their day begins at 5 a.m. with meditation followed by a Mass. Meals are held in silence. Their vocation is to teach. The sisters here have come from different states and different backgrounds, most of them raised Catholic, some not. In 1965, there were about 180,000 nuns in America. By 2007, that number dropped to 63,000 with an average age of 70. The average age of the Dominican sisters is 36. Their numbers have increased so steadily in the past 15 years that they have had to build a 100,000 square-foot addition to the property. The sisters here — the first year postulants, the second year novices, and those who, after seven years, have taken their final vows all say they have been called by God and that they are in love.

Sister KATHERINE WILEY: When you’re a little girl, you’re planning your wedding, you’re playing bride. But just to allow the Lord to transform my heart to see that I would still be a bride, but I would be his bride.

Sister CHRISTIANA MICKWEE, O.P.: When you have fallen in love with God, everything doesn’t seem quite so important anymore because God, the creator of the world, has asked you to be his bride. No, I will not be having sex. No, I will not be having children. No, I will not be marrying a spouse. But my very body and blood is united to God in a way that isn’t offered to everyone in the world.

strong>Sister CHRISTIANA MICKWEE, O.P.

Sister AMELIA HUELLER: A woman wants to give herself so totally to one man, to hold nothing back, to be so intimate with him and to bring forth life with him. It took me awhile to understand — well, “understand” is the wrong word — but to see that God will fulfill all of that, that he was asking me in a total way to give myself totally to him.

ROLLIN (to Sr. Hueller): How do you know that this God that you’ve given everything to is really there?

Sr. HUELLER: Because it’s whom I am in love with, and when you fall in love with someone, it has to be a someone. You can like something a lot. You can say I love this or that. But when you are falling in love, and a woman knows when she is in love, it has to be a person.

ROLLIN: Sister Amelia Hueller was brought up in a non-religious home and converted to Catholicism.

Sr. HUELLER: I finished high school, I went to college in Washington, DC for four years, and I came up against relativism: the idea that we can’t — people said that we couldn’t know what was good, what was bad, what was true. So I really began questioning where truth comes from. Where does goodness come from? I know I have values. Who gives them to me? And so between that moment and here, it was a process of, “This is scary, I don’t understand this. I don’t see why I would be called. How can I be called? I am so normal.”

ROLLIN: After seven years of study and contemplation, Sister Christiana Mickwee took her final vows last summer. She teaches fifth grade at a parochial elementary school.

Sr. MICKWEE: For me, it wasn’t so much a voice per se but through prayer — just in the silence, just letting him be there and finding out, really asking him, “What do you want from me, God?” I mean, I really had everything I could have wanted in the world, and there wasn’t anything that I was trying to get away from.

ROLLIN: Sister Catherine Marie Hopkins, who has been a Dominican nun for 23 years, helps direct the order’s educational program.

Sister CATHERINE MARIE HOPKINS, O.P.: Very rarely do people come and say, “I’ve always wanted to be a sister.” You know, I always found that very suspect. You know, usually it was, “I was going through life very happily and suddenly this strange idea came and I tried really hard to eliminate it.” In my own life, that was the case.

ROLLIN: This life is not for everyone who comes here. Who is most likely to remain?

Sr. HOPKINS: I would say those who are most comfortable with themselves — the young person who would have made a good wife and mother, who would have made a good career person. They’re not the loner. They’re not the introvert, necessarily, although we have all personality types in the religious life.

ROLLIN: Colleen Carroll Campbell, who is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote THE NEW FAITHFUL: WHY YOUNG ADULTS ARE EMBRACING CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY. Ms. Campbell found that the conservative orders, like the Nashville Dominicans, are the ones that are attracting young people.

COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL (Author, THE NEW FAITHFUL): These are orders where the sisters still wear their full-length habits, where they still gather to pray seven times a day, where they still live what is really a very traditional religious life.

ROLLIN: The new nuns say they were hugely affected by Pope John Paul II, who reached out to young people in his World Youth Days and rallies, entreating them to remain faithful to the traditional teachings of the church.

Ms. CAMPBELL: Young adults really saw in Pope John Paul II someone who was calling them to something the world never dared called them to, and that is sacrifice, self-denial, laying down their lives at the feet of Christ and asking him, “What do you want me to do with my life?” And for a lot of these young women when they ask that question, following John Paul’s example, what they heard is that I want you to give up everything and follow me as a consecrated woman.

The younger sisters we’re seeing tend to be very firmly in support of the pope in terms of Catholic teaching, including on the non-ordination of women. So this is kind of an interesting reversal here, and often it is referred to by some of the older Catholics as, you know, the “young fogies” because they’re in many ways more traditional than their elders. There’s an element of reaction there. After Vatican II, there were many good changes. There were a lot of things that got tossed out prematurely: the devotional life — almost completely obliterated; liturgical music and the liturgy itself just became very entertainment-oriented.

ROLLIN: Regimentation, rules, sacrifice — all part of convent life. But those who are here speak mainly of their joy.

Sister HUELLER: With sacrifice can come great joy. We know that sacrificing is not opposed to being happy. In fact, it can be our path to happiness. So sadness, no; sacrifice, yes.

Sr. MICKWEE: The joy I see in my sisters is far greater than the joy I see in many of the people that I grew up with.

ROLLIN: Colleen Carroll Campbell thinks that their initial passion may fade, but that the joy these young women feel will sustain them and encourage others to a more religious life.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Nashville, Tennessee.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: There is a group of Benedictine nuns in Missouri who bake and sell millions of Communion wafers, small and large. But some would-be communicants complained that they are allergic to the gluten in the wheat in the nun’s wafers — the hosts, as they are known. So they could not receive Communion. For the sisters that was a challenge, as Betty Rollin reports.

BETTY ROLLIN: They are the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. They live in Clyde, Missouri, a remote — a very remote — part of the state, and what they do is pray.

Sister LYNN D’SOUZA: Our main work is prayer. That is what we see as our mission for the Church, for the world: to pray for the needs of people of all places of all times.

ROLLIN: They pray together five times a day, and they pray alone two-and-a-half hours a day. But that’s not all they do. The mission of the Benedictines is both to pray and to work. These sisters’ work is to bake, and they’ve been baking for nearly 100 years. Today, they are the largest religious producers of Communion wafers, shipping two million wafers a week.

Sister LYNN D’SOUZA: We as Catholics believe in the true presence of Christ in the Communion wafer, in the
wine that we use at Eucharist. In the Gospel, Jesus says those who eat my flesh and drink my blood dwell in me and I dwell in them. To receive the wafer and to receive the wine is integral to the faith life of most Catholics.

ROLLIN: But a problem arose when the sisters began to hear from some Catholic parishioners who couldn’t receive the all-important sacrament of Communion because the wafers contained wheat. They had celiac disease, a disorder which makes the gluten contained in wheat undigestable.

Sister JANE HESCHMEYER: I was working in the customer service department in the early ’90s and a woman called in and said, “Do you make hosts that have no gluten in them because I’m intolerant to gluten and I need that?” I’d never heard that before, and we certainly didn’t, because wheat has gluten in it, and that was that.

Sr. D’SOUZA: The Catholic Church requires that breads used at Eucharist contain some wheat, and this is in keeping with the tradition of the Church. It’s believed that’s what Jesus used at the Last Supper.

So the Catholic Church is saying we need a wheat bread to be used. People with celiac disease are saying, “We need a bread that has no gluten in it.” Wheat equals gluten pretty much, so that was the dilemma we were working with.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: And gradually more and more calls started coming in. So I started doing research and talked to technicians, bakers, lawyers, doctors, people who couldn’t tolerate gluten, to try to find out everything I could about it.

ROLLIN: Years later, in 1999, Sister Lynn, newly arrived at the monastery after receiving a degree in biochemistry, joined the baking effort.

Sr. D’SOUZA: I just like happened to cross Sister Jane in the kitchen one afternoon working on these breads, putting stuff together. Just because I have somewhat of a scientific background, it intrigued me as a science project-type thing. It wasn’t that I had high lofty ambitions of providing someone’s need. I just thought, oh, this is a science experiment.

ROLLIN: Given the Church’s insistence that wheat had to be in the wafer, they thought that wheat starch might be a solution, since most of the gluten is removed.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: What the scientists were telling us what we were trying to do was impossible. If you add wheat starch and water you get glue. Or if you bake it, it gets very hard, which is what we found out. It was a certain intrigue for me when they said it was impossible.

I said, “Oh, that’s a challenge!” And so, if the Holy Spirit was asking people to ask us to do it, the Holy Spirit had something in mind. There was just something in me that just said go with this thing — we could do it — although I had no idea that 12 years later I would still be doing it or trying to do it.

ROLLIN: A supporter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took their plight to — where else — the Vatican.

Sister HESCHMEYER: He had been in Rome, and when he came back he said he had just talked to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict, and said that Cardinal Ratzinger said if the sisters in Clyde can produce this bread, we will fully support it.

ROLLIN: With that encouragement and armed with two different kinds of wheat starch supplied by the bishops, the nuns gave it one last try.

Sister HESCHMEYER: We decided to try mixing both of those together with some water, and what we came up with was like sticky goo. It stuck to our fingers.

Sr. D’SOUZA: I mean, really, it’s like we could not get it off the spoons. We tried to scrape it off the spoon to the finger. It stuck on our fingers. It was such a mess. We put a blob of it on the waffle irons we were using, and we went to clean up. We said this batch isn’t working. We are just going to start over and try something else. We had cleaned up everything, and we left some of the dough on the waffle iron, and we opened up the waffle iron and –

Sr. HESCHMEYER: Voila!

Sr. D’SOUZA: Voila! There was a bread.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: It was not pretty. It was a very interesting looking little bread on the plate, but it had withstood the baking process. It was intact. It was not gooey. It didn’t stick to the plate. We picked it up. I mean, for us it was beautiful

Sr. D’SOUZA: Yes

Sr. HESCHMEYER: We knew this bread had potential.

Sr. D’SOUZA: Our first reaction was to eat it.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: Yes, we have to try this, and it tasted delicious. It was light and crisp. It was just what we were looking for, we hoped.

ROLLIN: So what did that feel like?

Sr. HESCHMEYER: It was wonderful.

Sr. D’SOUZA: It was. I can see in hindsight that we were being used by God. You know, we were God’s hands, God’s instrument, and when I look back on it, I’m kind of awed.

CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE (speaking to Sr. D’Souza): And Sister, I left you all the low-gluten orders, and I think there are five new accounts that we’ve gotten today.

Sr. D’SOUZA: Oh my gosh! All right. It must be because of Easter.

ROLLIN: It is peak season for wafer production, both for the wheat variety and the now thriving low-gluten specialty. Business is booming. A patent is pending.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Clyde, Missouri.