Welcome, Sister Rebecca!
This past Saturday, we welcomed another new postulant to the monastery, Sister Rebecca Derks! Sister Rebecca comes to us from Wisconsin, and was a teacher at a Catholic school before entering the monastery. She also plays the oboe, which will be a welcome addition to the growing monastery orchestra. Please keep Sister Rebecca in your prayers as she begins her monastic life!
We are incredibly grateful to the Mater Ecclesiae Fund for Vocations for making Sister Rebecca’s entrance possible by providing a grant which covered Sister Rebecca’s student loan debt. You can learn more about this wonderful organization at their website, fundforvocations.org. They describe their mission as follows:
Our mission is to increase vocations to Catholic religious life by eliminating the obstacle of student loan debt that prevents otherwise qualified young men and women from entering formation.
Canon law requires that a person entering the novitiate of a religious order be free from any debts they cannot pay. This flows naturally from the vow of poverty. Without financial assets, vowed religious have no way to make monthly payments on loans. Most vibrant religious orders have no assets to spare for assisting their aspirants with their debts. What little they have must be allocated to feeding and housing their members. Many religious orders are mendicant and beg for their daily sustenance.
Most aspirants to religious life have no trouble clearing their personal debt: selling a car to pay off the car loan, working to pay down credit card debt. But student loans are different.
The average aspirant to religious life who has attended college faces a student loan balance of $30,000, which must be paid in just months rather than the 10 – 20 years originally intended.
As a result, an aspirant’s entrance is delayed, sometimes for many years, or lost altogether. And the Church is weakened.
Please consider helping to support their mission to allow young men and women like Sister Rebecca pursue their vocations. Sister Rebecca is now the fourth sister in our community whose entrance was made possible through the generous support of the Mater Ecclesiae Fund for Vocations and its donors, and it is hard to imagine what our community would be like if, without the grants they received, student loan debt had prevented these sisters from entering the monastery.
