Thanks to a friend who sent this to me, Kathryn Sharpe, whose brother, Br. Bernadine, is featured in the article in the New Jersey Star-Ledger.Brothers Find Their Way Among the Impoverished
Newark monastery will open up its space this fall for religious retreats
Sunday, August 05, 2007
BY JEFF DIAMANT
Star-Ledger Staff
The thin stream of blood extended the length of the sidewalk running by the Catholic monastery's front door, trickled around the corner and ended midway down the block. The friars who live inside assumed a gunshot victim had collapsed. There, the monks gathered one night last summer and prayed, as residents of 13th Avenue in Newark's West Ward looked on.
Two months later, the friars showed up in religious garb at a funeral for another young area gunshot victim, and they again drew stares.
Last autumn, the friars learned that people liked having them in the neighborhood. A man at the door seeking a sandwich told a friar that area residents thought they were "good guys," recalled the Rev. Richard Roemer, who has lived at the monastery since 2005.
The friars and their order, Franciscans of the Renewal, is an order that has been attracting national attention.
Catholic religious orders worldwide are having trouble recruiting new members. But the Franciscans of Renewal, a young order founded in 1987, have been drawing a steady flow of recruits in their 20s and 30s. Starting with just eight members, the order now has 107 friars.
The Newark priory was purchased for $1.5 million in 2004 by a nonprofit group called Friends of the Newark Monastery. Because the friars take a vow of poverty, they are not permitted to own property.
The priory had been used for years by a group of cloistered Dominican nuns who rarely ventured beyond the walls and who had not let outsiders in except to pray at a chapel.
This fall, the friars will open the European-style courtyard, spacious back lawn and other prayer space for regular religious retreats.
"For years and years, no one has been behind these walls," said the Rev. Glenn Sudano, 54, a founding member of the order and a spiritual director for novices. "People think it's a prison. I want people to come in, and to see how simply we live."
Eight friars, including Sudano, live in the space permanently, and novices live and train there for 12 months. The novices then take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience before they leave for the order's friaries in New York, Texas, Honduras, England, or Ireland. Many eventually become priests.
BUCKING A TREND
Newark monastery will open up its space this fall for religious retreats
Sunday, August 05, 2007
BY JEFF DIAMANT
Star-Ledger Staff
The thin stream of blood extended the length of the sidewalk running by the Catholic monastery's front door, trickled around the corner and ended midway down the block. The friars who live inside assumed a gunshot victim had collapsed. There, the monks gathered one night last summer and prayed, as residents of 13th Avenue in Newark's West Ward looked on.
Two months later, the friars showed up in religious garb at a funeral for another young area gunshot victim, and they again drew stares.
Last autumn, the friars learned that people liked having them in the neighborhood. A man at the door seeking a sandwich told a friar that area residents thought they were "good guys," recalled the Rev. Richard Roemer, who has lived at the monastery since 2005.
The friars and their order, Franciscans of the Renewal, is an order that has been attracting national attention.
Catholic religious orders worldwide are having trouble recruiting new members. But the Franciscans of Renewal, a young order founded in 1987, have been drawing a steady flow of recruits in their 20s and 30s. Starting with just eight members, the order now has 107 friars.
The Newark priory was purchased for $1.5 million in 2004 by a nonprofit group called Friends of the Newark Monastery. Because the friars take a vow of poverty, they are not permitted to own property.
The priory had been used for years by a group of cloistered Dominican nuns who rarely ventured beyond the walls and who had not let outsiders in except to pray at a chapel.
This fall, the friars will open the European-style courtyard, spacious back lawn and other prayer space for regular religious retreats.
"For years and years, no one has been behind these walls," said the Rev. Glenn Sudano, 54, a founding member of the order and a spiritual director for novices. "People think it's a prison. I want people to come in, and to see how simply we live."
Eight friars, including Sudano, live in the space permanently, and novices live and train there for 12 months. The novices then take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience before they leave for the order's friaries in New York, Texas, Honduras, England, or Ireland. Many eventually become priests.
BUCKING A TREND
By the time they left the Newark priory in 2003 for other monasteries, the Dominican nuns who lived there for 121 years had not drawn a new member for more than a decade. Their plight was similar to other Catholic orders. In the last 40 years, the number of Catholic religious priests, brothers and sisters in the United States has decreased from 214,932 to 85,284, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
The friars living at the monastery now say the popularity of their order stems from its adherence to religious tradition. The Franciscans of the Renewal, which split from a Capuchin order in 1987, was founded on the belief that other orders had lost their way following liberal church reforms of the 1960s. Unlike some larger orders, the Franciscan friars still live together, pray together, and wear traditional garb. On Saturdays, they pray outside abortion clinics. They do not have a television.
In a 2005 book about the order, "A Drama of Reform," its chief founder, the Rev. Benedict Groeschel, complained most Catholic orders in the English-speaking world were "lost in the woods" and that some are even "filled with dissent from official Church teaching ..."
"The old proverb is relevant here: 'If the trumpeter sounds an uncertain note, who will follow?'" wrote Groeschel, who once was arrested for praying in the driveway of an abortion clinic.
Sudano says he shares these views. His own path to the Newark monastery passed through St. John's University and, 30 years ago, a CBS newsroom.
Working as a CBS desk assistant, he says, he came to believe that the world's problems too often involved people making bad choices. Rather than help a net work report on these bad choices, he wanted to spend his life helping people to stop making them, he said.
After a year teaching at a Catholic school in White Plains, N.Y., he joined the Capuchin religious order. In time, he said he became frustrated that the friars spent too much time running churches and not enough time helping the poor.
Sudano and seven other men, including Groeschel, then founded the Franciscans of the Renewal, to help poor people and to try to stay true to Catholic religious tradition. The flow of novices into the order shows they were on to something, he said.
"People here are looking for a sense of community," Sudano said. "They want to belong to something, but not simply to an organization: They want to belong to a family ... that has identity, parameters, a mission, ideals."
COUNTERCULTURAL DECISIONS
Still, the decision for a young man to live by the order's dictates of celibacy and poverty does not come easy these days. In interviews, the novices in Newark described varied paths to the monastery: a spiritual awakening after an illness; a restless heart after an Army tour in Iraq; a simple decision to live a countercultural life, and, for a former truck driver, a feeling that God wanted him to become a friar rather than a husband.
COUNTERCULTURAL DECISIONS
Still, the decision for a young man to live by the order's dictates of celibacy and poverty does not come easy these days. In interviews, the novices in Newark described varied paths to the monastery: a spiritual awakening after an illness; a restless heart after an Army tour in Iraq; a simple decision to live a countercultural life, and, for a former truck driver, a feeling that God wanted him to become a friar rather than a husband.
Behind the wheel of his big rig, "I had a lot of time to pray and listen to Christian music and Christian radio," said Brother Teresiano, 32, who grew up in Modesto, Calif. "I kept growing in my faith."
Every time I started to go out with a girl, my relationship with God started to become cold," he said. "And little by little, through the Bible and watching movies of the saints, I realized God was calling me not to marry but to live for him alone."
Brother Bernadine, 25, of Old Hickory, Tenn., said he first was attracted to religious life as a Catholic school student, inspired by the works of St. Francis Assisi. A college trip to Brazil affirmed his desire, he said, after he saw "a different type of poverty. I realized how much for granted I take in my life."
Later he visited with Francis cans of the Renewal.
"You could see they believed something special. ... And in everything I was doing in life, I couldn't deny God's call, that he was calling me to this life, and that if I didn't follow it I would have no joy, no peace, no happiness outside of it," he said.
THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE
Friars and novices at the monastery, formally called Most Blessed Sacrament Friary, awake at 5:30 a.m. each day. Morning prayer lasts from 6 to 9 a.m., and then novices take classes, do manual labor to help run the facility, or volunteer at a nearby soup kitchen. After night prayer at 9:15 p.m., the novices and friars alike are silent through the morning prayer.
That is not to say quiet prevails.
"We have all the sounds of Newark, the helicopters with the occasional spotlight coming down to the courtyard," said the Rev. Roemer, 37.
Sitting under one of the 28 vaulted arches that surround the monastery's courtyard, Roemer re counted a scene from the order's weekly 2:30 a.m. courtyard vigil on a recent Saturday.
While chanting psalms, "we heard the screech and the crash on the other side of the wall. All the voices were going 'Oh!' -- not in pain, but the voices of young people watching. ... It's definitely a different world."
The not-so-serene surroundings of their monastery do not bother them, the friars and novices say. In deed, the order's constitution essentially dictates that they will live in tough neighborhoods.
"We choose to live in areas noted for poverty," Sudano said. "The South Bronx is noted for poverty. Let's say in 10 years the South Bronx loses that identity. We would leave the community. We need to be identified as living with the poor. The same thing with Harlem. The same thing here."
Behind the wheel of his big rig, "I had a lot of time to pray and listen to Christian music and Christian radio," said Brother Teresiano, 32, who grew up in Modesto, Calif. "I kept growing in my faith."
Every time I started to go out with a girl, my relationship with God started to become cold," he said. "And little by little, through the Bible and watching movies of the saints, I realized God was calling me not to marry but to live for him alone."
Brother Bernadine, 25, of Old Hickory, Tenn., said he first was attracted to religious life as a Catholic school student, inspired by the works of St. Francis Assisi. A college trip to Brazil affirmed his desire, he said, after he saw "a different type of poverty. I realized how much for granted I take in my life."
Later he visited with Francis cans of the Renewal.
"You could see they believed something special. ... And in everything I was doing in life, I couldn't deny God's call, that he was calling me to this life, and that if I didn't follow it I would have no joy, no peace, no happiness outside of it," he said.
THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE
Friars and novices at the monastery, formally called Most Blessed Sacrament Friary, awake at 5:30 a.m. each day. Morning prayer lasts from 6 to 9 a.m., and then novices take classes, do manual labor to help run the facility, or volunteer at a nearby soup kitchen. After night prayer at 9:15 p.m., the novices and friars alike are silent through the morning prayer.
That is not to say quiet prevails.
"We have all the sounds of Newark, the helicopters with the occasional spotlight coming down to the courtyard," said the Rev. Roemer, 37.
Sitting under one of the 28 vaulted arches that surround the monastery's courtyard, Roemer re counted a scene from the order's weekly 2:30 a.m. courtyard vigil on a recent Saturday.
While chanting psalms, "we heard the screech and the crash on the other side of the wall. All the voices were going 'Oh!' -- not in pain, but the voices of young people watching. ... It's definitely a different world."
The not-so-serene surroundings of their monastery do not bother them, the friars and novices say. In deed, the order's constitution essentially dictates that they will live in tough neighborhoods.
"We choose to live in areas noted for poverty," Sudano said. "The South Bronx is noted for poverty. Let's say in 10 years the South Bronx loses that identity. We would leave the community. We need to be identified as living with the poor. The same thing with Harlem. The same thing here."
UPDATE: This is the accompanying video...
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1 comment:
Beautiful! I love the CFRs.
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