Left: Felician Sisters gathered outside the Our Lady of the Angels Provincial House in Enfield, CT. Right: Felician Sisters living and ministering together at St. Mary Hospital in Centralia, IL.
At The Heart of Life Together
The importance of community for Felician Sisters
My name is Sister Grace Marie Del Priore. I am a Felician Sister and the director of the archives at the Heritage Center & Archive in Livonia, Michigan. I’ve lived in community since 2008 and professed final vows in 2017. I want to share about the important role community plays in the lives of religious sisters, from my experience as a sister and as an archivist. In 1996, it led to a major change for Felician Sisters in North America.
In religious life, the community is both the structure and heart of our life together. How we interact together is woven into our formal meetings and Franciscan sisterly bonds. Much of how our community is structured is determined by canon law – the laws governing the Roman Catholic Church. For that reason, we share characteristics with other religious communities, especially other Franciscans. This structure influences how we form relationships as Felician Sisters. It guides us as we serve together and fight for social justice together. It helps us to determine how we bring our charism and mission to the world.
Our Felician Distinction
Every order has its own charism, and each congregation has the gift of the Holy Spirit, but there are different spiritualities: Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite, Jesuit. Some are cloistered and spend their time in prayerful contemplation. There are apostolic communities whose members live alone in apartments, and they prioritize being available for ministry over common prayer and community life.
As Franciscans, the Felician Sisters are an evangelical order. We pray together, eat together, live the Gospel together, and share our lives daily. This aspect of community life is what many of my sisters and I love about being Felician Sisters.
It’s More Than Ministry
...that draws women to religious life.
When people think of religious sisters, they often think of us through the lens of our ministries. They connect us to the schools and hospitals we started; they may even have personal memories of sisters from their times in those institutions that our sisters operated. People think of the works of charity we do and what we have accomplished — and there’s a lot to think of. It’s admirable and impressive.
In the past, being a sister opened opportunities to perform jobs as teachers and nurses, and to hold important positions, such as school principal, hospital administrator, or college president.
Left-Right: Felician College President Sister Mary Justitia Laniczak, and Sister Mary Gabriela Barbosa teaching 7th-grade Geography.
Today, many women, both married and single, can achieve all these things, so it is not the lure of ministry that calls us. It is community that truly sets religious life apart.
We value and prioritize the bonds of community, the relationships we form, and how we discern God’s will together. It’s in the daily rhythm of our lives together and how we approach big decisions, praying together in a number of ways.
That's me looking through archival materials from our Felician Sisters of North America Provincial Archives in our archives' reading room.
It’s Built into Our Plan
Based on our schema, community comes first.
The inner workings of our religious life say a great deal about how much we value community. I noticed this while looking at the archive's schema. It reflects how the Congregation and province are governed internally. The schema, which is the Dewey Decimal system of archive records, reveals this.
The schema begins with the governance of the province and it starts with provincial chapters. That includes Chapters of Election, then Chapters of Mats (a Franciscan communal gathering), then moves on to assemblies and meetings of sister leaders of local convents. It is only after all of these meeting topics that the schema begins to explore specific leaders and their roles. It is telling that the provincial level of the schema doesn’t start with the provincial minister.
The main governance of the province is the sisters – the community as a body. It is not the provincial minister or her council.
Left: That's me waving while on retreat at Maryville Retreat Center a few years ago. Right: Back in 1981, when the Felician Sisters transformed the former Guardian Angel Summer Camp in Holly, MI, into the faith-based Maryville Retreat Center for use by lay people and sisters alike.
One way we get together in community is through retreats. Felician Sisters were primarily educators long ago, and they always came home during the summer. Those months were a time of service, community, and retreat in which every sister participated. These days, retreats are offered at our former provincial houses, which are now central convents, and we also use our Felician retreat house. Sisters also have other options, with approval from leadership. And community vacation houses are available for sisters to visit together, and also to invite family and friends.
Pictured clockwise, left to right: Felician Sisters photographed outdoors at the General Chapter in 2006. Sisters seated in conversation are Sister Mary Dulcine, Sister Jacqueline M., Sister Eleanor Marie, and Sister Janice Marie.
It Unified Us
We collaborate in community for our common good.
And the order of the schema is the same at the general level, which begins with general chapters before it gets to the minister general and her council. Critical decisions and directions are determined at provincial chapters and assemblies. Both the provincial ministers and general ministers help us to carry out what the community discerns, in response to the needs of the world.
Felician Sisters enjoy getting together for chapters and other official community gatherings. While we catch up with each other’s lives, praying together and willingly engaging in the schedule and content set before us as a community, important things happen. We open ourselves to the Holy Spirit together and discuss proposals and corporate stances and discern our direction as a community.
This is what happened in 1996, when Felician Sisters gathered and began discussing unifying eight provinces into one. It would take thirteen years of continued meetings to collaborate and work out the details, but the strength of our community life led to our unification, which has made us stronger.
Support Systems
Together, we bring out the best in each other.
At chapters of elections, we focus on sisters new in leadership. Sharing at these gatherings yields post-chapter committees, manned by sisters who continue the work of the chapter. A large part of the work that sisters in leadership perform is initiated at these community meetings.But the community also plays a key role in the ministries of individual sisters. Each sister prays over her ministry and communicates with leadership yearly through a form system. Then the sister in leadership in charge of ministries, dialogues with the sister about her ministry. In this way, the leader gains a good sense of the community, the needs of the province, and how the Felician Sisters are actively helping society.
The sister in leadership can help the sister discerning her ministry to understand where she is truly needed, changing her thought process from “I” to “we.” That individual sister shares with the leader how the Holy Spirit is communicating with her, and together they discern the path they feel the Holy Spirit is moving them. It is understood that the good of the community is a priority for all involved. It’s not about what “I” want to do, but about what we’re doing together, and how I get to be a part of that.
And when a sister is the only one involved in a ministry, she brings the community with her, by representing us, the Felician Sisters as a whole, embodying our values and mission. She shares about her ministry with the community and is supported in it. She finds encouragement in both the sisters she lives with and from our leadership, whether emotionally, psychologically, and at times, financially.
Community life concerns and informs religious life in many ways. It’s in the daily schedule of convent life, prayer, important decisions, and leadership. It’s at the heart of who we are as sisters.
Come and See
Experience our community in person.
If our community life appeals to you, we invite you to explore it further. You can reach out to one of the sisters who make up our Vocation ministry to find out when you could attend our next Come and See weekend, or a discernment event at our retreat center in Holly, Michigan, or other opportunities to experience life as a Felician Sister.
To find out more, you can call or text Sister Felicity Marie Madigan at 734-968-4307 or email her at vocation@feliciansisters.org
In the meantime, I invite you to learn more about the Felician Sisters — our charism, vows, history, prayer life, and formation process.
