A lot of people like eating cake for their birthday. But peanut butter works, too, as one nun shows us in this week filled with milestones and farewells for several women religious.
She did it!
The 25-year-old Italian singing nun who has wowed audiences around the world with her soaring renditions of pop tunes won Italy’s version of “The Voice” on Thursday.
Sr. Cristina Scuccia’s performances on the show since March have been watched by millions of people on YouTube. Her versions of Alicia Keys' "No One" and Cyndi Lauper's “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” blew away both viewers and the show’s judges.
ABC News reported that during the finale, broadcast live in Italy, Sr. Scuccia looked surprised when she moved on to be in the final two and was overjoyed when she was announced the winner with 62.3 percent of viewer votes.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Sr. Scuccia said her superiors would decide her future if she won the prize – a recording contract with Universal. "I'd be happy to go back to singing in chapel with the children," she told reporters, according to the Associated Press.
But not even a record contract, she said, would get in the way of her vocation.
“I'd never renounce the biggest love of my life, the calling that I have had. Absolutely not,” she said.
She’s still waiting for the greatest prize of all, however: That phone call from Pope Francis that she’d love to get.
Surely she scored points with the pontiff with the way she ended her run on the show Thursday: she recited the Lord’s Prayer on stage.
Pass the jelly, please
Happy belated 100th birthday to Sr. Clare Naramore, whose milestone earned her some ink in her local newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, as well as USA Today.
Sr. Naramore belongs to the Sisters of Mercy in Burlington, a community that has been based in Vermont since 1874. Twenty of the order’s 5,500 members nationwide live in the convent near the University of Vermont; the youngest are in their early 80s.
One of Sr. Naramore’s colleagues, Sr. Beatrice Couture, will also turn 100 on June 27. The newspaper did the math and figured out that together, the women have been Sisters of Mercy for 151 years.
"When you think in 100 years what these people have seen and done, it just, as the kids say, blows your mind,” said Sr. Marianne Read.
Sr. Naramore planned to celebrate her May 28 birthday by enjoying peanut butter, one of her favorite treats, “morning, noon and night.”
Rejoicing in Canada
Now that Sr. Gilberte Bussière is safe, we’re hearing more of the details of her kidnapping nightmare.
Toronto’s The Globe and Mail reports that just six hours before being kidnapped in Cameroon on April 5, Sr. Bussière emailed a warning to her congregation in Montreal.
“It’s becoming more dangerous here. There are two groups afoot,” the 74-year-old wrote to the Congregation de Notre-Dame.
She and two Italian priests were kidnapped by suspected Boko Haram gunmen, the radical Islamic group that kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls a week later.
Sr. Bussière and the priests were released over the weekend, but details are sketchy about how it was arranged.
She had worked in Cameroon since 1979, devoted to improving the quality of education there, especially for girls, and was a long-time principal of a grade school in northern Cameroon near the Nigerian border.
It’s long-standing work for the congregation, which still has four members there, for now.
“We need to seriously reflect on it,” Sr. Josephine Badali, the order’s leader, said at a news conference on Monday. “We are concerned that [the nuns] be safe and secure.”
Sr. Badali said that her colleague is in good health. “She had a strong voice. She was happy,” Sr. Badali said. “She’s a woman of faith and that came through in her voice.
“It didn’t sound like she was afraid . . . now she must have been. But from what she said, she was not afraid.”
You can watch the press conference here.
A record-breaking life
The second-oldest living Irish person died last week at the age of 109 and glory be, her name was Sr. Mary Victor Waters.
Yes, she was a sister.
The Irish Independent reports that Sr. Waters died peacefully at the Lady of the Angels Convent in Tenafly, New Jersey. She had been ill since April.
Hundreds of people, including the local mayor, filled the convent’s chapel for her funeral on Saturday.
She was born on Sept. 14, 1904, in Cornamona, County Galway and moved to the United States in 1925, where she joined the Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in 1928.
As assistant mistress of novices at the New Jersey convent she worked with young women becoming nuns.
“She prayed and offered to pray for people right up until she got sick,” Sr. Pat Coyle told the newspaper.
Moving on?
The Sisters of the Divine Compassion in White Plains, N.Y., are on the move, according to the business publication Westfaironline.
The order announced last week that trustees and administrators for their grade and high school schools are working on relocation plans. The nuns have spent several years studying the future of the order and its 16-acre Good Counsel campus, which the order bought in 1890.
Twenty-four nuns live at the motherhouse there.
Members of the order have been teachers, social workers, health care professionals and pastoral care ministers at more than 40 schools, parishes and agencies in Westchester County.
The president of the order, Sr. Carol Wagner, said a move might be necessary “to assure that we continue our mission and that we are able to provide for the Sisters particularly in their later years.”
End of another era
Sr. Susan Wikeem has stuffed so many memories into several decades as an educator that she really ought to write a book now that she’s retiring.
For instance, there was that time that Hollywood used her school, St. Mary’s Academy in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for scenes in the movie, “Capote.” There’s still a sign on her office door marking it as the sheriff’s residence.
And a movie with Holly Hunter and directed by Kiefer Sutherland called “Woman Wanted” was filmed there, too. “We were Yale University. It was a terrible movie," she told the Winnipeg Free Press.
The only event she wanted to mark her retirement this week was a dinner scheduled for today at the school.
“I was going to lead a quiet, contemplative life and emerge once in a while to teach little children about Jesus,” she laughed while reminiscing about her career with the newspaper.
The director of St. Mary’s Academy has been student, teacher and principal there. Where once there were hundreds of nuns teaching in Manitoba’s Catholic schools, now Wikeem is one of the last four woman religious educators in the city’s parochial schools.
Before taking her leave, Sr. Wikeem, a member of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, dispelled a couple of urban legends about St. Mary’s.
“I have not encountered any ghosts, but the kids love to tell stories,” she said.
And the rumored tunnel running between Kelvin High, a boys’ school, and the girls of St. Mary’s? It led to a coal scuttle, not hijinks.
“She's our last administrator,” Robert Praznik, director of Catholic education for the Archdiocese of Winnipeg, told the newspaper. “At one point, all our elementary schools had principals who were sisters. All the parochial schools had convents.
“We still get people who say they want to bring their kids to a Catholic school because they want the nuns to straighten them out – we have to laugh. That's not unique to Manitoba; that's a North American phenomenon.”
[Lisa Gutierrez is a reporter in Kansas City, Mo., who scans the non-NCR news every week for interesting pieces about sisters. She can be reached at lisa11gutierrez@gmail.com.]