Guest
Sr. Mary Josefa of the Eucharist entered the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles in 2010. In 2019, she was sent as one of the founding members of the community’s first daughter house, the Monastery of St. Joseph, in the Ozark mountains near Ava, MO. She is one of the four sisters who prepared Sr. Wilhelmina’s body for burial upon her death.
Links
- The Life of Sr. Mary Wilhelmina (book)
- Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles (website)
- Sister Wilhelmina: An American Incorruptible (podcast)
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
Finding the incorrupt body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster is the most important Catholic story of the year in my opinion. But who was Sister Wilhelmina? We’re going to talk to a member of her order today, the order she helped found, about what makes this woman so remarkable. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and editor in chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to hit the like button to subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. Also, you can follow Crisis Magazine on social media @CrisisMag. So today we have a great guest, Sister Mary Josefa. I probably mispronounced it. She just told me right before we got on how to pronounce it, but I’m terrible at that. But we’ll try.
She is a member of the Benedictines of Mary Queen of Apostles, and when she entered back in 2010, they were still in temporary residence in Kansas City, Missouri, but they finished building their permanent monastery in Gower, Missouri and moved there while Sister was still a postulant. And then she received her religious name in honor of St. Joseph in 2019, she was sent to be one of the founding members of the community’s first daughter house, the Monastery of St. Joseph in the Ozark Mountains near Ava, Missouri. So welcome very much to the program, Sister.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Thank you, Eric. It’s a privilege to be here.
Eric Sammons:
So, okay, first of all, I just want to tell everybody there might be a little bit of delay between us because as you can imagine, most good religious monasteries don’t have super high-tech internet connections, so we do our best. I think that’s a good sign if you don’t because it probably means you’re out in the middle of nowhere where you should be praying for all of us. Okay, so I did a podcast a few months ago on Sister Wilhelmina when the story first broke of her body being found to be incorrupt. And somebody who had gone to visit, Andy Flattery, he’s a friend of mine and he lives nearby, he went to visit so he was talking about it and it was one of the most popular podcasts we’ve had. I personally think, and I said it at the beginning, I’ve said it before, I personally think this is the most important Catholic story of the year, everything else just kind of pales in comparison.
I feel like this is God saying something so we probably should listen as opposed to when we say something. But I’m very excited to have you on because first of all, I just want to note that there’s a new book coming out on the life of Sister Mary Wilhelmina from TAM Publishers. It actually is not yet published, but it will be published next week is the plan, I think September 7th, 2023. So you can get a copy of it. I have an electronic copy of it. It’s great. It gets you to understand her life. And so the first thing I want to say is buy that book when it comes out. It’s from TAM Publishers. I’ll put a link so you can buy it in the show notes because I want people to get it.
But we’re going to talk about Sister Wilhelmina today. So what I want to do first is, I just want to ask you basically why don’t you tell us just the beginning of her life, what kind of family… because this is interesting to me as a parent and I know a lot of other Catholic parents feel like this… what kind of family life did she have growing up that led her to decide to become a religious sister?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, it’s a very important thing to consider and Sister Wilhelmina was born into quite an extraordinary family. She was born in St. Louis at a time of great racial strife, and she was born into an impoverished family. But what was unique about that family was their very vibrant Catholic faith. It had happened several generations earlier when one of Sister Wilhelmina’s great-grandmothers, who was a slave, was freed by her slave owner after she and her son were baptized. Her slave owner said to her, “I cannot keep you in slavery any longer. It would be like keeping Christ himself in slavery.” And so for several generations before Sister Wilhelmina’s birth, there had already been a very strong Catholic identity, more important to them than their cultural identity even. Sister Wilhelmina said, “Even though we were materially impoverished, we recognized that our faith was our riches.” And so they had a great dignity just in being children of God.
They didn’t need to be recognized or approved or given special consideration by other humans. It was their identity as children of God that they realized was their wealth. So being raised in that family was a unique grace for Sister Wilhelmina. She received her vocation quite early after receiving her first Holy Communion. When she was praying she heard our Lord say to her in her heart, “Do you want to be all mine?” And she said, “Of course I want to be all yours.” But she didn’t know yet what that meant. It was only later as she began to hear about religious sisters that she realized the religious vocation is the way that a soul can belong to Christ completely as a spouse.
And so she entered the religious life very early at the age of 17, right after graduating from high school. I might add too, that she was the valedictorian in the first graduating class of a Catholic high school for Black children that her parents helped to found in St. Louis. It was the first Catholic high school for Black children. And so you can see again the remarkable family that she came from that valued education, but especially Catholic education. So Sister Wilhelmina left a very beautiful family life and set off into religious life at the age of 17, and she served very faithfully and devotedly as a teaching sister for over 50 years.
Eric Sammons:
This is like the 1920s or so when she’s growing up, and was it possible for her as a Black girl to… Did she have a trouble finding a religious order that would accept her or was it not a big deal? How did she decide and how was it decided for her, so to speak, what religious order that she would enter?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, at that time even the religious orders were segregated, so there wasn’t as much choice from her perspective. She did join the Oblate Sisters of Providence, which had been founded in the 1700s by a Black woman, Mother Mary Lange. It was founded for Christian education of young children, especially Black children or people of mixed race, who didn’t have opportunities for education. So it was a very important order at that point. There were many young children not being catechized or not receiving an education because of discrimination. And so Mother Mary Lange very valiantly filled that gap with her heroic sisters.
So Sister Wilhelmina inherited that tradition by becoming an Oblate Sister of Providence. And on the one hand, she didn’t have a lot of choice in her selection of a religious family, but that in itself shows her abandonment to divine providence. As an Oblate Sister of Providence she learned that God allows circumstances that are best suited for our growth and holiness. And so we don’t have to worry about, well, I was disadvantaged at this point or I didn’t have this opportunity at another point. No, it’s all in God’s loving providence. And Sister Wilhelmina really interiorized that truth very early on.
Eric Sammons:
And so I’m sure she faced discrimination at various times growing up in that timeframe in St. Louis and different areas. How did she deal with discrimination? I know that’s a big issue of course, even to this day, of people being victims and things like that. How did she deal with discrimination when she faced it?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes. Well, she learned how to face discrimination very well from her mother. So when they were growing up in St. Louis, Black people had to receive Holy Communion after the white people in church. It’s unthinkable for us nowadays, but even the segregation extended to the order of reception of Holy Communion. And so when her mother was explaining that to Sister Wilhelmina when Sister Wilhelmina was young, her mother told her, “Now you don’t mind what place in line you have to receive our Lord, because before our Lord we are all nothing. We all are so far below the divine majesty, and the privilege is to receive Him no matter what place we have in line.” And again, I thought Sister Wilhelmina’s mother was hitting on the truth that our worth comes from God’s love for us and His adopting us as His children. And whatever the injustice of men around us, it doesn’t matter so long as we have the love and the divine adoption of sons.
So that’s what she learned from her mother. And I think Sister Wilhelmina, she took that into her own life in a very personal way, and so she faced discrimination almost with a sense of humor, with a sort of buoyancy. There’s a wonderful story that she used to tell us about her going through a white neighborhood on her way to the library. She lived in a Black neighborhood, but the library was only a walks distance away but it had to go through the white neighborhood, which they weren’t really allowed to be in. So when they decided to venture off to the library, she and her siblings would run as fast as they could through that white neighborhood or else they would get in trouble. And so one day, when she was running as fast as she could, she passed a little boy, a white boy, sitting on the porch of his home, and he shouted at her, “Hey, there, chocolate drop.” And she yells right back, “Hello, marshmallow.” And she said, “I kept running.”
Eric Sammons:
Oh my goodness. So there wasn’t-
Sr. Mary Josefa:
So I think because… Oh, I’m sorry.
Eric Sammons:
I was just going to say so there wasn’t really bitterness or anger. I mean obviously these things are unjust and this shouldn’t happen, but it sounded like she did not take it as a reason to be bitter and angry at God or at others.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes. In fact, she realized that it didn’t matter and from the perspective of eternity.
Eric Sammons:
Wow. Okay, so you said that as she becomes a sister in a religious life, and okay, correct me now, the first order she was in when she started, was it a Benedictine order?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
It actually had Benedictine roots, which is quite remarkable, again in God’s providence. So the order was founded by Mother Mary Lange, but she drew upon the order, or tertiary order I guess you’d say, that St. Francis of Rome had started many centuries before. St. Francis of Rome was a Benedictine tertiary. And so the order had a very Benedictine spirituality, and that was something that Sister Wilhelmina wanted to preserve in the new community that she ended up founding.
Eric Sammons:
So now she was a teacher I know for a while, this is like the 1960s, and I believe, if I remember correctly, she was a teacher in Baltimore, and I think there was some challenges to teaching during that time in that environment. So how did she handle teaching as far as what was her… I guess just what was her motives and how did she handle the children when there was problems and things of that nature?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
She had quite an interesting teaching career. She was in inner city schools up and down the East Coast, and so she encountered very troubled youth. There’s another story that she loved to tell us about the time when she was in a classroom with a group of inner city boys and one of them pulled a knife and threw it at her from the back of the classroom. And she said at that moment she happened to be standing up. She said, “I don’t know why I was changing my position at that moment, but thanks be to God the knife struck my wimple and bounced off it,” because they had a very heavily starched wimple back then. And so it bounced off harmlessly and didn’t hit her in the face as he had aimed it. So she was very grateful for her guardian angel on that day. You could see the challenges that she would face.
Eric Sammons:
You never would’ve thought of a wimple as armor, but I guess it was literally armor on that day for her.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, indeed, yes. So I think that she empathized with these young people who came from such a troubled background. At one point she served in a home for troubled youth, for young girls who came from broken families or had had some other challenge in their childhood. And I remember her saying very pointedly, “I learned that young girls have broken hearts.” And so I think that she found a point in her teaching career when she learned to be a mother too, in a very spiritual way, to these young girls. She never felt really at ease in the classroom. I think she was a very studious sort of person, and she did find it a little difficult to communicate some of that to the children, but her community recognized her other talents and appointed her as archivist, and she was a very devoted archivist of the community for a large portion of her professed years. And at one point, she was even compiling notes to write a history of the order, which shows her love and esteem for Mother Mary Lange and her spiritual children.
Eric Sammons:
So I want to make sure I get the dates right here, she entered this order in the 1930s, would that be what it was?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
It was actually the early 40s.
Eric Sammons:
Early 40s, okay. So she was in this order in the early 40s, and we’ll get to in a little bit her founding the order you’re part of in the 1990s, so that’s 50 years though she’s part of this order. Now I think most people who are listening to this, they know kind of what’s happening in the church in this timeframe from the 1940s through the 1990s. Clearly things in America, particularly, things radically changed in the church from the 1940s to the 1990s. Now, one of the most amazing things in reading her story is her basically doing what every Catholic had to do, which was how do you respond, how do you deal with these massive changes that happened in the church, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s?
Everything in how you practice the faith, it just all changed overnight. I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of people who… my father-in-law for example, others who lived through that… and it was difficult. I mean, there’s no other way to put it. How did Sister look at it when things started to change both in the church, but then even in her order in the 1960s and 70s? What was her attitude and what was her feelings about it?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, I think it was a source of grief for her when the experimentation in the 60s and 70s started to affect her order. It wasn’t that she saw the experimentation in a sort of nostalgic way, like we should always do what we’ve always done, but she recognized that the experimentation was touching very vital points of religious life. So the sisters started to put aside the traditional habit. They started to dress as lay women. They started to abandon communal prayer or silence in the cloister, and they became very engaged in lay activities, more social work activities, and because they remained a Black order, even racial pride sorts of movements. And so Sister Wilhelmina recognized that they were starting to lose their moorings. They were throwing aside the things that had safeguarded their identity as brides of Christ. So it was a deep source of grief for her.
And she suffered and prayed for many years to try to bring her sisters back to the traditions that they had set aside. And she even tried to form a traditional branch of her order that would preserve those things. She realized if they just lived and acted like lay women, lay social workers, they would lose that identity of bride of Christ that made the religious life so worthwhile, that constituted its essence. It turned out that it’s harder to reform, it’s easier in some ways to start afresh, and so after over 50 years in religious vows and at over the age of 70, she decided to leave her community, which had been her religious family, and start a new one because she recognized the value of the religious traditions that had been lost.
Eric Sammons:
I think we should not underestimate what a big deal that is. I mean, she lived there for 50 years. This is her family for 50 years. This is her way of life for 50 years. She is in her 70s at this point. And most people, I mean I’m not there yet, but I think most people in their 70s are pretty much set in their ways and they don’t really want to make radical changes in their life. But let’s go back a little bit for a second. And so when this is happening, a lot of religious sisters sadly left the religious life in the 1960s and 70s. If you look at the numbers, a huge number just left.
Why did she stick… I mean, so the changes happened in the late 60s so it wasn’t until the 90s, so we’re talking almost 30 years she is trying to live out what she believes is the fullness of the religious life in a more traditional form, and everybody around her is kind of abandoning that. Why did she stay so long, I guess, is one question? Why didn’t she just do this in the 1970s and say, okay, I got to start something up new, then?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Right. Well, I think as you said, the Oblate Sisters of Providence were her religious family, and you think about she was 17 years in her natural family, but over 50 in her religious family. And she loved so much about it, the Benedictine spirituality, the history of Mother Mary Lange and her successors, and she realized how precious that was. And so I think it was unthinkable for her to set aside her identity as a bride of Christ on the one hand, but even in addition to that, it would be unthinkable for her to just leave that family that had made her what she was, that had formed her as a religious. So it was a very, very difficult time. If you read through her notes at that time, you can see the tension in her heart. Do I leave my religious sisters, my family? Do I set aside even my ethnic background?
Because she realized starting afresh, she wouldn’t be in the community of Black women with that shared heritage and cultural history, she realized that all that she would have to set aside. And quite poignantly, she ended up doing just that because when she started afresh she only had white sisters joining her because they were the ones at the time who valued the traditional Catholic liturgy and religious observance. So it was a struggle for her. It wasn’t something that she did lightly. And I think also Sister Wilhelmina had a great sense of loyalty so she hoped that rather than start afresh, she could actually reform the community that she loved. And she appealed to different sisters in that community. She even wrote to the hierarchy in Rome asking them for help and guidance in the situation. So there were many avenues that she tried before she went to the last extreme of leaving the community. So it was not a decision that she made lightly, and I think that gives it all the more credibility that she took the right step in the end.
Eric Sammons:
Right, she didn’t just cut and run at the first opportunity, but she really wanted to try to reform what she had. So now, during this time, the late 60s to the 90s, the traditional Latin Mass was not very commonly said. It was mostly the Society of St. Pius X of course existed, and that was pretty small. Until the late 1980s there wasn’t really that many approved by Rome, traditional Latin masses. And so during this time, she has this deep love of the old mass. She’s not a priest where she can just keep saying if she wants to. She’s kind of stuck with what she’s… I mean, she’s a sister, she’s got to do what the sisters are doing. How did she continue to have a love for the traditional mass when obviously from 1970 or so until the 90s there’s no way she could have had that much access to the traditional Latin mass? So how did she deal with both having to go to the Novus Ordo for so many years, but then also not having access to this liturgy that she loved?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
I think that was an extra cross during this time. And as I said before, she appealed to Rome on different points. One of them was the liturgy, and she wrote a very strong letter to Rome saying, “We don’t need an African rite. We don’t need an American rite. We don’t need an African-American rite. We need the Roman Catholic Latin rite.” So unfortunately, she had to suffer and wait for many, many years for that. But at some point in the late 80s, she was reintroduced to the Latin mass at an indult parish in Washington DC and she remembered all the graces that came with the old liturgy, and how appropriate it is to the religious life, and she really determined to try to attend that mass as much as possible.
Eric Sammons:
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, that’s amazing. I think that’s probably St. Mary’s in Washington DC.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
It was.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, yeah, yeah. That was my first ever Latin mass I ever went to was at St. Mary’s in Washington DC.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Really?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, in like 2006 or something like that. Yeah, so it’s a great place. And so now we come to the moment, this is 1995, when she has made a decision. She’s starting up a new order. I know the Fraternity of St. Peter was involved somehow, there was somebody… I’m forgetting some of it to be honest… but I know she wasn’t the only founder really, and there were some other people involved. How did that come about that she finally did make this, what was a major change in her life, how did that come about?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Right. Well, as she was discerning the possibility of starting a new order, she came into contact with actually two other religious sisters who were also looking for traditional religious observance again. And she also got in touch with the Fraternity of St. Peter and they broached the idea of beginning a community of active sisters who would assist the priests in their parish work and catechesis. And so it began to come together. It had the Latin mass, it had the possibility for traditional religious observance. There were a couple of companions who could assist Sister Wilhelmina with the beginnings of the order. And so in a leap of faith she left her community on May 27th, 1995, and joined two other sisters in Pennsylvania near the headquarters of the priestly Fraternity. And the priest who took them under his wing, so to speak, was Father Arnaud Devillers, a French Fraternity priest, and he recognized Sister Wilhelmina’s fidelity, her devotion to religious life, and so he made her the superior of this tiny community, entrusting its guidance, its spiritual direction to her.
She only had the superiorship for about a year because at that point, she was advanced in age, and she ended up asking one of the younger sisters to take the burden of leadership on after about a year. But I think that first year was quite crucial in setting the beginnings. At that point, they had determined they would have a Benedictine spirituality. They determined that their life would emulate the life of Our Lady Queen of Apostles in the Cenacle after the ascension of our Lord when she was gathered with the apostles, the first priests, awaiting the coming of the Holy Ghost. And Sister Wilhelmina said, “I want my sisters to be in the presence of Our Lady just like that, praying and sacrificing for the priests, perpetuating that life of Our Lady on earth.
She originally named the community the Oblates of Mary Queen of Apostles. I think she took that name Oblates because of her previous religious family, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, but she gave it a Marian character dedicated to Our Lady Queen of Apostles because the Oblates intended to be at the service of the priests. As time went on, we did discern a more contemplative call, just jumping ahead a little bit, but a more contemplative monastic call, so we did part ways with the Fraternity in terms of everyday life. We decided that we wouldn’t have an active ministry but we would support the priests in the more hidden way, and we took formation to become full-fledged Benedictines. And I think in God’s province, we actually became closer to the Fraternity as a result of that because we’ve been able to support them through our prayer, our sacrifice, and our way of spiritual motherhood.
Eric Sammons:
So are you classified as a contemplative order instead of an active order? Is that how you’re classified now?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, yes.
Eric Sammons:
But still, your ministry, your apostolate, is primarily supporting priests, is that correct?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, but because we’re contemplative now our apostolate has taken a spiritual dimension. So originally we were going to have a more active apostolate of assisting at parishes and doing catechetical work, but now we have a spiritual apostolate of prayer and sacrifice. It’s more hidden, but in a way it’s more vital, just the way the hidden parts of the body like the heart and the lungs are just as, if not more, important than the hands and the feet in helping the body to stay alive. So that’s how we think of our ministry now as prayer and sacrifice for priests. We do have a couple of ways that we express it in a more exterior manner. On the one hand, we like to have a place for retreat for priests where they can come and find some spiritual refreshment, and we also make priestly vestments to support ourselves. So it’s not strictly speaking apostolate, it’s our means of self-support. But while we’re sowing those vestments, we pray for the priests who will wear them. And so it gives us, I don’t know, an exterior aspect to help fuel the interior fervor.
Eric Sammons:
Right. I mean, I’ve always been convinced, well, not always, but I’ve been convinced in as a Catholic that I think the world basically stays afloat because of the prayers of religious contemplative sisters. And I think that the priests needed, I mean, my goodness, our priests are so under attack from every single angle. Inside the church, outside the church, it doesn’t matter, they’re under such attack, and we all are called to pray for them. I mean, every one of us. But I think having you all devoted, dedicated, to that as your apostolate, I think is just amazing. I’m willing to guarantee that, God willing we get to heaven, there’ll be a lot of priests who will be like, “I’m only here because of these sisters.” And others will say, “I’m only here because this priest helped me and he’s only here because of these sisters.”
So I think there’s this ripple effect that everybody is very thankful for what you’re doing. Now, so that was 1995, and now it’s about almost 30 years later. And so the community eventually, it was in Pennsylvania and then eventually it comes out to Missouri. And how has the growth gone from… because it is a somewhat very particular thing, apostolate, you have there, first of all just praying for priests, but contemplative, and also a dedication to the traditional liturgy… so what has the growth been like? Was it slow at first, it took off immediately, or how has that gone?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
I think it was slow at first but it’s gained a lot of momentum. So when we first moved to Kansas City, Bishop Finn had invited us there to pray and sacrifice for his priests. And we had just a few sisters, maybe 12 at that point, and we did have some growth initially when we moved to our permanent monastery in Gower in 2010. We started to receive a few sisters every year. Though of course some always discern out, it’s part of the process of formation. But recently it’s really picked up and started to gain a lot of momentum. So we outgrew the abbey, even though it was built for 48 sisters, we outgrew that five years ago. And Mother Abbess sent six of us down to southern Missouri to the Diocese of Springfield, Cape Gerardo, to start a daughter house. But here we are five years after that and we’ve outgrown the abbey again. They’re starting to burst at the scenes. They’re building cells in the basement with boxes.
The temporary home that we’re in here in southern Missouri is also, I think this house is probably built for about 10, well, five in the main part of the house and then there’s some guest quarters we’re turning into cells, but so far we have 12 and we’re hoping to fit 16 in here in the fall. So we’re starting to really have space emergencies as well. But Mother Abbess foresaw this. She could see the number of applicants increasing every year. And so she decided to break ground on our permanent monastery last year on the Feast of the Assumption. And please God, with concurrent funding, we’ll be able to move in next fall.
Eric Sammons:
And where is that going to be?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
It’s near Ava, Missouri, so it’s in the Ozark Mountains, a very secluded location as you can tell by our internet service.
Eric Sammons:
Now, did you say that’s going to be the mother house eventually?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
No, it will be, I guess, the mother house but it will continue to be a daughter house for the time being. So our mother house is the abbey in Gower and has about 50 sisters.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Okay, so do you just celebrate the traditional liturgies, like for example the mass and then obviously the Divine Office, or is it more of a mix, or how does that work there?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
We’re very blessed to have the full traditional liturgy, the Latin mass and then the full Latin Office. I’m always touched that we recite the Psalms in the order that St. Benedict prescribed over 1500 years ago. And we use the books that were used, say they were published back in the early 1900s, the 20s or something like that, but even those books are drawing on the tradition from centuries before. So we can read spiritual authors from the 1800s and they speak about the liturgical year, the Mass, the Divine Office, just the way we pray it every day. And I think that the continuity is a source of strength for us, and the integration is also a great source of contemplation.
It’s very difficult to try to separate the Office from the mass. It’s like the Office is the crown that surrounds the mass, it perpetuates it throughout the day. And so to have, on the one hand, the new calendar or the new mass, it would present a disconnect in our life. But the way we have it, as we’re blessed to have it, the mass just flows into the rest of the day. It’s like the whole day progresses toward Holy Communion and then comes away from it.
Eric Sammons:
Wow. Now, the sisters that have joined the order, do typically most of them come from families in which they already were used to attending the traditional Latin mass? Or do you get Catholics who just attended their local diocesan parish or converts to Catholicism? Are they mostly… I just kind of want to know the demographics, this is kind of something I just thought of… are they mostly coming from homeschooling families, from Catholic families? What makes up a typical sister of your order? Maybe there isn’t a typical sister, I don’t know.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Well, I’m surprised more and more by the variety that we encounter. We do have a number of sisters who grew up in homeschooling families. I’m one of them, but not all of those homeschooling families had the Latin mass. I, again, am one of them. So sometimes we’ve had sisters who had nothing but the Latin mass. But I think the larger demographic is actually those who grew up without the Latin mass and discovered it on their own in their teens or early twenties. And we’ve had some, especially these past few years, some they started attending the Latin mass during Covid when that was the only one available, or they were wondering what all the fuss was about with some of the documentation about the Latin mass so they went off out of curiosity and then they fell in love with it that way.
So there is a very large percentage of the sisters who found the Latin mass on their own in their teens or their twenties and realized, “Well, if I become a religious, this has to be the source of my contemplation.” And then as far as education, there’s again, the wide range, a lot of homeschoolers, some entered right out of high school. I think that’s quite a large number now. A few of us have gone on to college, a few TSUs, a few Christendom graduates, but quite a lot are hearing the Lord’s call early these days. So it’s not unusual for us to have a number of young women in there who are 18 or 19 coming to try out the postulancy.
Eric Sammons:
Right, and there’s not many religious orders in America that do celebrate the traditional liturgies. I have six daughters, and so this is always a question in my own mind of, okay, what’s available? And things like that. So I think that makes it very attractive for, like you said, especially women who come to it themselves and they recognize how important it is for their own spirituality, for their own life, and they do feel called to religious life. There’s limited options, frankly. I’m glad that they’re growing though, and I think that’s good that they’re growing.
Now, okay, let’s get to what is the big reason why everybody’s talking about Sister Wilhelmina of course, she was great her whole life but she was mostly unknown. I mean, most people did not know who she was, and then all of a sudden everybody knew who she was overnight. And so you’ve been a sister there while she was there, obviously you knew her, and so tell us a little bit… Well, let’s take one step back, tell us a little bit about her death. I know at OnePeterFive, our sister publication, we had an article when she died about her funeral, about her mass and everything because it was such a beautiful liturgy.
Tell us a little bit about her death, because I know in the religious life there’s a certain, I don’t know, certain… I mean, obviously everybody’s death is sacred in a certain sense, but I feel like in the religious life there’s a recognition of that more. So tell us a little bit, first of all, about her death in 2019.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Her death was a signal grace, our Lord’s providence just arranged every detail of it in a very beautiful fashion. So as I said, we had just outgrown our Abbey in 2018, and so in early 2019 Mother Abbess sent six of us south to start the daughter house in southern Missouri. But we had only been there maybe three weeks when we received the call that Sister Wilhelmina was in her last days. And so it was hard for us at first to think, “Oh, she’s going to go without us saying goodbye, without us being there.” But Mother Abbess said, “No, you do have to be here, come up.” And so within an hour we were in the van and back home. It was several days waiting though and so all the sisters took turns in her cell. We sang her favorite hymns. And I will add, her last word was actually not spoken but sung.
We were singing the Salve Regina around her bedside, and she had her eyes closed. She couldn’t speak at that point or respond very clearly, but as she heard us singing the Salve Regina her lips started to move. And her last words were, “Oh, Maria,” sung in the Salve Regina. Very beautiful for us. We were preparing ourselves. We kept saying, “Well, we’re all here at the abbey, but it could be that she slips away while some of us are taking care of the household shores.” But day after day went by and nothing happened. So one day, on the eve of the Ascension on May 29th, the whole community gathered in her cell, all the sisters from the abbey, all the sisters from the daughter house, all gathered around her bed and we sang again her favorite hymns. We prayed the rosary, her favorite prayer. We had a little time of recreation.
Mother Abbess read aloud messages from Sister Wilhelmina’s friends of their messages of support and love, and we shared our own familial memories together. And then at the very end of this recreation, Mother Abbess led us in the last prayer of the Divine Office for the day, the Office of Compline. And that Office concludes with Mother Abbess blessing all the sisters with holy water. So she blessed Sister Wilhelmina first, and she noticed a change in Sister’s face. So she kept her eyes on Sister Wilhelmina as she sprinkled the rest of us with holy water. And it was at that moment that Sister just breathed her last and it was the most peaceful passing that I think many of us had ever seen. We were additionally struck by the fact that Sister Wilhelmina’s favorite saint, her favorite Benedictine saint I should say, was Saint Bede the Venerable. She always said, “He’s my favorite Benedictine saint because it was on his feast day, May 27th, that I became a Benedictine of Mary.”
So she had this devotion of Saint Bede, but she passed away not on May 27th, the day that he died, but on May 29th which was the eve of the ascension and the liturgical anniversary of St. Bede’s passing, because he also died after Compline on the vigil of the ascension. It was very remarkable, all of these little things. And yeah, we continued to marvel at God’s providence in disposing things so beautifully for her. And we also think it was a grace for her for sure, but what a grace for us as a young community of sisters to see fidelity all the way until the very end, and to see how precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.
Eric Sammons:
Amen. Oh, that’s beautiful. Now, normally I wouldn’t ask this question of anybody, but I’m asking you because it matters here, after she died how was she buried?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, it is important in this circumstance. So I was one of the four sisters who prepared her body for burial, and we didn’t use any sort of embalming. We simply washed her, put on a fresh habit and placed her in a very simple wooden coffin. It was actually made by a Fraternity priest. We had lined the coffin with some synthetic material, kind of a satin, so it would be beautiful. And we dressed Sister her in her full Benedictine habit and just put the lid on the coffin and buried her directly in the ground. There wasn’t any sort of protection against the elements there. And so it was all the more amazing what happened almost four years later. So at that point, four years later, fast forwarding, we were putting the finishing touches on our abbey church and were in the process of making a shrine to St. Joseph at a side altar.
And we thought this would be an appropriate place to preserve Sister Wilhelmina’s remains. It’s the custom in Vatican houses to have the relics of the founder or founders in the abbey church. So Mother Abbess started the exhumation process. We had sisters out there digging up the grave, and we weren’t expecting anything extraordinary there. Some people told us you’ll probably just find bones. But when we opened up the coffin, the first thing that Mother Abbess saw was a very intact foot, just as it had been when we put her in the coffin originally.
And one thing that struck us, that lining I mentioned that was on the sides of the wooden coffin, that had completely disintegrated. You couldn’t even tell there had been any cloth in the coffin. But Sister Wilhelmina’s body, remarkably intact, still had the full habit, and it had no wear or tear, no sign of moss or disintegration of the natural fibers. It was all perfectly there. And for us sewing sisters, we work with fabric all the time, we realized this is quite unusual, not what you would expect after four years in very damp ground.
Eric Sammons:
So this was back in May of 2023, you are planning to move her body and you find it is in a state that is not expected. I mean, I believe very strongly it was incorrupt, it’s a miracle, and I’m sure you do too. And we of course wait for the church, for official declarations of that nature, but at the same time we’re allowed to believe what we want about it, unless the church tells us not to. So you find it in this state, and was there recognition from the sisters like, okay, this is a miracle, this is abnormal? I mean, what were the next steps at that point? Because obviously the news got out pretty quickly, and if I remember correctly, it wasn’t like you guys were trying to tell everybody, it was just simply one of these things where you couldn’t control it, the news, is that kind of how it happened?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes. The exhumation actually was completed on April 28th in 2023. Mother Abbess called the daughter house immediately and told us the good news, but we realized this is an extraordinary thing. It might be just a grace for our community so we kept it very closed, and it got out almost by accident. And then as you said it was completely out of our control. It spread like wildfire.
Eric Sammons:
God was like you’re not keeping this one secret.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
No. Yes, it was certainly a grace for our community but he wanted to share it with the rest of the world too.
Eric Sammons:
Right. So then obviously, I think most people… I’ll also link to the other podcast I did where we talk about people going to visit… but what was then the reaction of the sisters when all of a sudden you realized, wow, this is way beyond us at this point? And the Catholic world, I mean, there were so many people, I don’t know how many, I don’t know if you guys counted, I don’t know how many people came, but tens of thousands I believe, right, that came to visit her in that first week before you put her… I can’t remember where you guys ended up putting her… but when she was open to the public. I have friends who went, my goddaughter went. And so what was that like for the community? I mean, obviously this is a huge disruption of your life, but then what was the reaction of the sisters?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Well, we were very blessed. We had a lot of friends in the neighborhood who stepped up as volunteers to control the crowds in a certain respect. So our life remained pretty much intact. There were thousands of people, as you said, but they were parked in a very orderly fashion in our fields, but also in our neighbor’s fields. There were Knights of Columbus directing the traffic. We had volunteers who would stay with Sister Wilhelmina’s body so that there was always a guardian there. For a while we had her in the parlor, but then there were too many people so we put her in the basement of the church. But I was struck by the reverence of the people who came, that many people you expect crowds to get disorderly or out of control or to do unusual things. There was none of that. There was a lot of silence despite the number of people, a lot of reverence.
And again, our friends were there to help. So the sisters, we were able to keep the daily schedule pretty much intact. And our friends said, “Well, that’s what Sister Wilhelmina would want. She would want you to keep the prayer and the silence and the contemplation going even with this extraordinary event.” So we were grateful for that. We were grateful on the one hand that we could share Sister Wilhelmina with the rest of the world. But we also were struck by the supernatural awareness that the crowds had, the reverence, and I think that was a sign too of God’s blessing on the whole event.
Eric Sammons:
Now, where is her body now? I know it was out publicly. You could touch it and everything, venerate it directly. Where is it now?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Well, on May 29th the sisters from the daughter house, again, we went up to our mother house and we had a solemn rosary procession around the grounds of the monastery carrying Sister Wilhelmina on a bier. We sang her favorite hymns. We prayed the rosary. And we brought her into the abbey church and placed her in the side altar dedicated to St. Joseph. It has a Plexiglas cover so that even now visitors coming into the church can still see Sister Wilhelmina intact. Of course the cover, she’s protected, so we don’t have to have a guardian there all the time anymore. But she’s still very much present, not only for the sisters but for the visitors as well.
Eric Sammons:
And is her body still basically in the same state it was when she was first discovered, first removed from her coffin?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, it is.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, great. So now, one of the reasons, I believe at least that it was such a big deal, obviously we all know… well, we should know… that incorruptibility is not common, it’s also not a requirement for sainthood or anything like that, but it is a sign of the incorruptibility of body that we will receive one day. But I think one of the reasons is because she really kind of checks the boxes of a lot of things going on in the church today, in the world, and I hope that’s not too crude of a way of saying it. But she’s African-American and there’s obviously a lot of racial strife in our country still to this day. She was devoted to the traditional Latin mass, which is very controversial today. And so I will just state, you don’t have to, but I will just state I feel like it was God kind of saying, okay, I like this way that she did things and I think more people should follow it.
And also the religious stuff, because if you remember, actually you might not even know this, but there was a big controversy because the Los Angeles Dodgers were honoring this blasphemous group of men who dressed up as religious sisters and did terrible things, but the point is there was an attack on the religious life, and there’s obviously an attack on the traditional Latin mass, and there’s racial division. And so He picks her as a witness of a life. And so can you speak to how you believe what this means for the church and for the world that she has been singularly kind of chosen for this moment?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Yes, yes. Again as you said, it’s remarkable how many issues in today’s culture she addresses. And I think in a way our Lord chooses the small to confound the proud. She had no blog, she had no podcast or anything to try to get her opinion across or to sway people to her side. And she didn’t even see herself as having a side. She wanted what God wanted. If you asked her at any point in the day, “What do you want to do Sister Wilhelmina?” She’d say, “I want to do what God wants me to do. What does God want me to do right now?” And it was that fidelity to the will of God that I think brought her so close to Him. And her hidden and humble life of prayer and sacrifice, we don’t see the fruits of that normally in this world, we wait until the next world.
But I think that our Lord had this as a little sign that the humble hidden life is extremely fruitful. It is the way to get things done, to put it kind of bluntly. It’s not about the way movers and shakers in this world would try to get a popular opinion or to project their views, but it’s rather that hidden self-ablation, self-gift to God, trying to be faithful to His will that is the real mover in this world. Our Lord said if you have the faith of a grain of mustard seed you’ll move a mountain. And I think that this humble sister was able to move so many mountains, we’ll only see in heaven perhaps how many, because she lived such a hidden and faithful life. She didn’t have to see the results. It was all in faith.
Eric Sammons:
I think it is such a beautiful witness to us today because we all talk… I mean, look at me, I talk all the time, and we all do that and yet sisters’ witness of, and all of you, your witness of prayer and sacrifice quietly for priests, I think it is a good example for all of us, even us lay people, that sometimes we’re called to say things publicly. We all have different vocations, a different state of life. I get that. But for every single one of us, there is a call to be quiet and let God speak. At least that’s what I take away from it is that, I mean, one of many things, is that like you said, she didn’t have a social media presence. She wasn’t doing video. She just simply lived a faithful life, and God is telling us that’s what I’m looking for from everybody.
Yes, some people might be out in the public, some people might not, but everybody just needs that faithful life. And like I said, it’s the biggest story to me in the Catholic world because it says so much to us. And I’m very happy that your order is growing. I want to encourage people again, the book is coming out next week, I believe, The Life of Sister Mary Wilhelmina, from TAM Publishers. I’ll put a link to it where you can pre-order it. I’ve read the book and it is amazing. It’s inspiring. I’m going to have my daughters read it because I think it’s great. Is there anything else, Sister, that you want to tell us about your order, about Sister that we didn’t address already?
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Well, I’d like to direct our audience to our website because there’s a lot more information there, at www.benedictinesofmary.org. You can find a whole gallery of pictures of Sister Wilhelmina, even some videos of her. So there’s more information on our website about her and about our community, our way of life. And I would like to also encourage everyone-
Eric Sammons:
And I will link to that website as well.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
… the spiritual legacy… Oh, thank you.
Eric Sammons:
I was just going to say I’ll link to your website to make sure people know about it as well.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Oh, thank you very much. And then Sister Wilhelmina’s spiritual legacy to us, her sisters, was a very tender and feeling of love of our Blessed Mother. She said, “If they have nothing else, I’d want them to have this very strong devotion to Our Lady.” So I would like to encourage our audience also to realize the motherly presence we have in our Lady. She’s there for us every moment of every day. She has the particular grace that we need right now as we pray the Hail Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. And so I encourage everyone to turn to her whatever trials they have in life, reawaken that devotion to the daily rosary and to calling upon Our Lady at every moment of our life.
Eric Sammons:
Amen, amen. So get the book, check out their website, find out more about them. Donate to them if you can, if you’re able to. And I have to bring this up because I’m a Bitcoin guy and you guys do accept donations in Bitcoin. That’s actually how I first found out about you, is Andy Flattery, who was my guest, he did a podcast with one of your members. I think it might have been Mother Abbess, I’m not sure, but about Bitcoin as well. So you guys are involved in everything, I think.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Okay.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, so thank you very much, Sister. God bless you and your order, and we’ll keep praying. I have a holy card of Sister Wilhelmina on my desk asking for her intercession. I think we all should do that in this time in our church and in the world today. And God bless everything you’re doing.
Sr. Mary Josefa:
Thank you, Eric. God bless you all. So be assured of our prayers for your important work.
Eric Sammons:
Thank you. Okay, until next time everybody, God love you.