Three new Sisters:
Recruits join Huntington community

Missionary Sister of St. Benedict Mary Catherine Katrus (left) bows her head in prayer after she received her black veil and crucifix in honor of her first profession of vows. Sister Mary Bernadette Thompson (right) waits in prayer for her turn. (TLIC photo by Lena Pennino)

By Lena Pennino

Smithtown — As the church music swelled, the guests looked down the long aisle of St. Patrick’s Church, Smithtown, in search of the bride-to-be with her white veil. They saw three of them, hands pressed together in prayer, ready to vow their eternal love to their bridegroom.
“What kind of feeling can you have being espoused to the one who is love?” said one, Sister Pia Wojtak, 28.
Three novices of the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, Huntington, took their first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, on July 6 at a Mass of First Profession of Vows. A crowd of more than three hundred friends, family, priests and Religious filled the pews at St. Patrick’s. 
After a more than 30-year dry spell, lately it has been raining vocations for the Polish community of Sisters, including the first woman born in the U.S. to join the community. In the past, new Sisters have emigrated from Poland. Besides the three junior Sisters, the community has two postulants. Others are about to join the postulancy or are exploring the idea of joining.
The Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, who have 30 homes around the world, are traditionally a teaching order. But when two Sisters traveled to America in 1939, the same year that Germany invaded Poland, they were unable to return to their home. To support themselves, they began to care for a few Long Island elderly people. In 1962, a few more Sisters joined them. In 1967, St. Joseph’s Guest Home was founded; it now houses 31 Sisters and 42 elderly residents, including Capuchin Franciscan Father Malachy Flaherty, Msgr. Joseph Lawlor and Msgr. Francis Glimm. Two Sisters have continued the education tradition of their community and teach in parish religious education, RCIA and Vacation Bible School at St. Francis of Assisi, Greenlawn.
St. Joseph’s is usually buzzing with smiling nuns dressed in their blue work-gowns. (They usually dress in a black habit and veil.) It seems less like an old-age residence and more like a school with its yellow hallways with bright picture decorations. Some residents’ doors are trimmed with birthday messages or pictures from their Christmas pageant, an annual event. A nook in the hall has been transformed into a living room-like area with couches, a coffee table and a ticking grandfather clock. Another area holds a statue of the Blessed Mother encircled in a frame of flowers from the floor to the ceiling. 
“There is a special mission for me here,” said Sister Mary Bernadette Thompson, 27, who was baptized Susan. She is the first American-born woman to join the congregation. “These are uncharted waters for me and other women who are American,” commented Sister Bernadette, who is originally from Huntington and attended St. Francis of Assisi Church, Greenlawn. She thinks of herself as a bridge, so other Americans will feel comfortable joining the congregation. There are two Americans postulants now: Jess Sanzone, 26, from Smithtown, and Kim Chiappino, 27, from Centereach. (Before professing any vows, a woman joins the community as a postulant for six months and then as a novice for one year.) 
Some Sisters say it is a mystery why women are flocking to their fold, but Sister Benigna Kwapisiewicz, the novice mistress, explained there are three aspects of their community which young people are attracted to. The Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict wear a traditional black habit and veil which identity them as brides of Christ. Secondly, the Sisters live, work and pray communally in their home, the guest home and chapel. And thirdly, their life is centered on work and prayer. 
“What else could it be? Not our shabby English,” commented Sister Benigna in a Polish accent. “The congregation is growing quickly; it’s a beautiful thing …This is a miracle of the Jubilee year.”
Sister Bernadette believes that the United States, as a whole, is on a new horizon of “moral renewal” and that more people will join religious life.
“We are very happy that God sent them to us and that our community is growing younger and younger, by God’s grace,” said Sister Bernarda Krajewska, the superior of the community. The Sisters’ average age was 44 but now is dropping since the influx of 20-something-year-old women. Sister Bernarda said that although the three women who professed their first vows Sunday are different from each other, they were all attracted to the joy of living entirely for Christ.

Sister Mary Bernadette

When Sister Mary Bernadette Thompson was first discerning her vocation with the help of a priest from Smithtown, Father Douglas Arcoleo, she realized that she was “not satisfied with what she was doing in the world.” This teacher who majored in percussion and music education was not fulfilled by her work. “I wanted to be close to Christ,” Sister Bernadette said. As she settled into regular prayer, the rosary, devotion to the Eucharist and daily Mass, she began to “understand that God was calling me into a deeper relationship with him…and I wanted to do everything for Christ.”
She laughed when she discovered that the Sisters her spiritual director pointed her to were the same ones who helped teach parish religious education in her childhood parish in Greenlawn; the same nuns whose long black gowns and veils had intimidated her as a girl. But she soon learned, through volunteering at the guest home on Saturdays, that the Sisters were full of joy and love. 
After a year in the novitiate, she and her fellow novices, have traded their white veil for black ones, donned new crucifixes, and professed their first vows. They are now junior Sisters. In five years, they hope to make their final vows. 
Although Sister Bernadette finds joy in caring for the elderly, playing the organ in chapel and having fun with the other nuns bike-riding, playing volleyball and kickball, that is not the center of her life. “It is God who is the source of all joy…anything we do is motivated by his love…it surrounds us all day.”

Sister Mary Pia

When Sister Mary Pia heard Christ’s call, she knew she was too weak to answer it on her own especially considering her medical problems. 
“I wasn’t able to do it on my own but through his holy Scriptures, God pointed to Mary saying, behold your mother,” said Sister Mary Pia Wojtak, 28, originally from Poland, who moved to the U.S. in 1990. “Like John the Evangelist, I took her home to my heart and my life changed... I needed someone to help me, to say yes for me and with each beating of my heart she says yes again and again.”
Even though Sister Pia befriended the Blessed Mother in her prayers in 1996, by 1999 several congregations had declined her petition to enter their community. That year, she had major surgery on her upper spine. Screws were fastened into her skull to keep her from moving her head and damaging herself. “I had a metal halo on my head,” Sister Pia said. During her five-month recovery, she stayed with the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict. 
“Pain and suffering brought me here and I found that there was a place that I could be relieved from suffering and immersed in God’s love, which was radiating from the Sisters. Love heals,” said Sister Pia. “In caring for others and myself, I really saw the Sisters were taking care of Christ. I was drawn by that.”

Sister Mary Catherine

Sister Mary Catherine Katrus, 44, wanted to be a Religious since she was a little girl throwing flower petals toward a statue of Jesus at a Corpus Christi feast in Poland, her birthplace. She pleaded with her mother, “I want to be a nun, Mommy.” Her mother looked at her “strangely” yet told her she could become a nun when she grew up. 
“It took me that many years to grow up,” she said with a smile. 
She traveled to America for vacation in 1958, but was unable to return due to unstable conditions in Poland. She worked at various places for 20 years: a printing press, photography shop, hospice care and a pharmaceutical shipping company. But “all the time, I told my friends I knew I wanted to be a nun,” she said. Her best friend would protest, “We have someone for you to marry!” But Sister Catherine, whose baptismal name was Lucy, had different plans. Now almost 40 years after she told her mother of her desire to dedicate her life to God, she has vowed to a “marriage with him forever. It’s so wonderful.”
Sister Catherine also loves the work at the guest home. “I just feel the heart of the Father” when she looks at the elderly residents. “I see how they have become like little children and I get a warm feeling like I want to become like one of them and run away,” she said lightheartedly.
On the 22-acre grounds of St. Joseph’s Guest Home is a St. Benedict’s Grotto. Behind the state of St. Benedict, there is a picture of a stump with ivy-like leaves sprouting from it. The saint is credited for bringing life back to the monastic movement. The Polish Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict may have seemed like that stump at one time, incapable of sprouting branches in America. But now the leaves are poking through the surface. 
“As a mother of this community, I am very grateful to God. Through our prayer and work, I feel I have given birth to new children in our community who will hopefully grow and serve the Church and the people,” said Sister Bernarda.