Anchorage monastery’s mission continues after 2 founding nuns die

CatholicAnchor.org

Two of the founding members of Alaska’s only Catholic monastery of cloistered nuns have died. Sisters of Perpetual Adoration Mother Maria Josefina, 96, died on Feb. 22, and Mother Maria de las Victorias del Sagrado Corazon, 84, died on March 3. They both passed away at the Monastery of the Blessed Sacrament in Anchorage, which they helped establish in 1985 and where they lived until their deaths.

Mother Victorias was born on April 22, 1930, in Guadalajara, Mexico. From age 22 she was a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, beginning her religious life in 1952 and making final vows in 1954. Born in 1918, Mother Josefina spent 78 years as a religious sister.

The sisters moved to Alaska on May 15, 1985 with six others to found the monastery in Anchorage. Mother Victorias was the first mother superior, serving in that position from 1985 to 2009.

Around the world, cloistered religious sisters spend their lives praying and working in sequestered monasteries. As their name suggests, the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration – known as the “Adoratrices” – have a particular mission to adore Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.

“Their work is to pray before the Blessed Sacrament,” Father Tom Lilly told the Catholic Anchor. “Their job is to pray for everyone else who’s too busy to pray,” he added. Father Lilly is pastor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in South Anchorage and chaplain to the sisters.

The sisters in Anchorage pray in the monastery’s quiet chapel, behind a tall cloister grille; local Catholics often join them for Mass and adoration on the public side of the grille.

“A very diverse yet tightly-knit spiritual family has grown up around the monastery,” explained Therese Syren, a parishioner of Holy Family Cathedral, whose family was instrumental in building the monastery 30 years ago. “Any given day one can find a half-dozen nationalities represented in the congregation at Holy Mass there,” she said.

The deaths of the monastery’s two eldest nuns are great losses, but their congregation’s mission is unchanged, explained Father Lilly. “Their work will definitely continue,” he said, now under the leadership of Mother Evelia Alicia and Mother Maria de la Milagrosa.

Since the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration usually commit themselves to one monastery for life, the nuns there are expected to continue on at the Anchorage monastery — though there could be new sisters entering or ones leaving “from time to time,” he said.

The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration were founded in the 19th century, and over half of their more than 80 monasteries are located in Mexico. In 1985, Anchorage Archbishop Francis Hurley, now retired, invited the sisters to establish a monastery in the Far North. The archbishop was first acquainted with the order while a child. From his elementary school in San Francisco, he and his schoolmates could see the nuns in their backyard playing volleyball.

Archbishop Hurley approached the Syren family and asked them to donate five acres for the monastery. An outpouring of community support and labor then went into building it. The Syren children grew up with the monastery. At the beginning, Wyn Syren served as general manager working from a shack on the construction site, Les Syren helped out in summers between law school terms, Karyn Syren helped the sisters learn English and become citizens, and Kermit Syren — now a priest — continues to provide spiritual support to the sisters. Still Therese Syren recalled how “many, many others worked extremely hard fundraising and actually building the monastery, which went up completely from, and is still sustained financially by, the blood, sweat and tears of a committed group of laity far beyond our family.”

Indeed Syren believes the sisters’ presence is important to all families in Alaska.

“A contemplative community centered in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament provides an absolutely vital spiritual oasis for families laboring under the really heavy burdens of modern secularism,” she observed, “and it is awesome that it was so clearly God’s merciful will that such an order come right here to Anchorage.”

Syren said that the sisters are grateful for the least assistance, but the help they need most is for people “to come and adore the Lord in his sacramental presence,” committing to a weekly hour if possible. One of the goals of the congregation’s foundress, Mother Mary Magdalene of the Incarnation, was “to provide a sanctuary where people may find respite to adore the Lord in his sacrament of love,” Syren explained.

Meanwhile, the recently deceased Mother Victorias and Mother Josefina, continue their prayerful work — from on high, Father Lilly noted, saying that in one sense, their deaths “strengthen” their fellow sisters’ mission: “They now have more intercessors in heaven.”

The Monastery of the Blessed Sacrament is located at the corner of Lake Otis and East 72nd Street in Anchorage. The public is welcome to visit the chapel, and prayer requests may be made at (907) 344-3330.