Inside the FSPA prayer changes with Sister Marleen
CJ: Start with what is the change as a general policy?
Sister Marleen: For 141 years the sisters have kept a vigil before the Blessed Sacrament exposed 24/7 365, and that’s quite an accomplishment. The change that we have made is to reduce the number of adoration hours from 24 hours a day to 16 hours a day. So our adoration now is from 6 a.m. in the morning until 10 p.m. at night. Basically the night hours have been eliminated
CJ: What is some of the decision making that went into this policy change?
Sister Marleen: I think the decision making started a long time ago. Maybe 20 years ago. Before I talk about that, I would like to say that religious communities of women are always looking at the way they live their lives, and especially one of the things we are always examining is: what is our root gift to the world? What is our gift of the spirit that has been given to the community by God through its founders and foundresses? And for us that has always been a very deep, deep reverence for the Eucharist. Not only in attending and celebrating Mass on a daily basis, but taking the gifts, the spiritual gifts of what we receive and pray about in Mass to continual adoration of the Christ in the reserved Blessed Sacrament.
Over the centuries, there have been many changes in how the church has promoted this, and for us we received that gift of reverence for the Eucharist through our founders who came from Bavaria in 1849 who had a very, very deep reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, the Eucharist. So much so that they began adoration the first Christmas they were here, and through their founders and successive leaders there was always a great, great desire—and I think God places desire within us—to keep adoring the Eucharist exposed. And so, to make a long story short, we were able to accomplish that after we moved to La Crosse from Jefferson, Wis. and we were given permission by the bishop to have perpetual adoration as a ministry of prayer and service to the world. We’ve been doing that for 141 years.
Every four years, or every six, depending on the way our governance is written in our constitutions, the community gathers to examine how we are continuing to manifest the spirit of our charism and our spirit in the church.
CJ: So like a ‘how are we doing?’
Sister Marleen: How are we doing, exactly. Are we faithful to the gifts we have received? Are we faithful in our ministries, and prayer is a ministry for the world, just as healing the sick and teaching those who need to be taught and serving those in many ways in their social condition. So, about 20 years ago, and probably before that, as we would prepare for these all congregation meetings—when everybody comes together—we had committees that were studying the issue of perpetual adoration and mission. We do that by looking at who we are and that is: how many of us are there, are we able to accomplish this promise that was made by Mother Antonia in 1878? And by the time we got to the year 2000, and even before that, we had experienced a great decrease in the number of our members, from about 1960 to the year 2000.
So we were seeing that we may not have the capacity to continue that 24 hour adoration that we had been doing for all these years. We looked at it, we looked at the implications, we were keeping abreast of the way our demographics were evolving and, in these more recent years, we continue to educate ourselves about the Eucharist.
We celebrated our 125th anniversary in great style and in beauty and just within these last couple of years at our very last general chapter in 2017 we began to say, “There may be a decision that will have to be made.” So we authorized the leaders of our community to make that decision when it became necessary. As we began seeing that more prominently, we began again to engage the sisters in how we think about this, to give us their opinions, to make suggestions about how we could alter it and as we looked at our data, we realized it was important to make a decision before it was forced on us. Forced in the sense that you hadn’t thought about it and suddenly there’s a crisis. So, FSPA has always been pretty good planners.
CJ: Better to look for where the gas stations are, rather than look down and realize you’re idling by the side of the road.
Sister Marleen: That’s right. That’s a good analogy. So we had a committee this past year to look at all of the data. I happened to be on that committee and as we looked at the data, then the committee came to the conclusion that we wanted to recommend to our leadership to put into effect a reduction in the number of the adoration hours that we were keeping.
CJ: What kind of data did you look at?
Sister Marleen: We organized focus groups in the congregation, and we asked everybody if they were able, if they had ideas how we could continue it differently, if there was a necessity to discontinue. So, a lot of focus groups, we had questionnaires that sisters answered, we looked at our demographics over a period of 10, 20 years and into the future. We have an analysis of our demographics as it they will evolve in the next 20 years based on, mortuality—what’s the word?
CJ: Mortality rates?
Sister Marleen: Mortality rates, oh yes, yes. We looked at all of that. We kind of know how big we’re going to be in 10 years, or in 5 years or in 3 years, we analyze that every year and that’s the kind of data we do. And so we said, “Now would be the appropriate time to reduce the number of hours.” We had, you know, there were some of us who were coming in from midnight adoration hours who were 70, 80, 85 years old and being on the streets at that age probably isn’t the most wise thing to be doing. And so we made a decision. And then we set a date.
So, important in this decision was this ritual that we decided. When you make a huge change in an organization like that, it’s very, very important to have a very strong ritual to celebrate what has been accomplished but also to re-commit to our reverence for the Eucharist. We keep saying: we haven’t quit entirely. We still are sisters of perpetual adoration, we still have it every day in a continuous fashion during 6 a.m. to10 p.m., and so we don’t have to change our name it doesn’t change our identity and we believe that we can pray wherever we are. So if we’re in India, or Africa or Mississippi or Iowa or Minnesota, or Wisconsin or Washington, we pray, we hold that bond of prayer between us all the time and we believe that every work of mercy we do—corporal work of mercy, spiritual work of mercy, any ministry we have through the action of God in our lives, that is a way of adoring our God.
Being in the adoration chapel is a very special time, and so this is why we chose this symbol of the world [refer to flier]. We still pray for the world and for the universe and this monstrance that holds the exposed Eucharist happened to be the very first one that the community owned in the late 1870s, so we brought that forward as a sign of the tradition. This is the lard light that Mother Antonia made when she made the promise to God that we would establish perpetual adoration. When she made it, they didn’t have any candles, and so they had to make a candle out of tissue paper for the wick and lard. They were that poor. And so she said, “We will establish perpetual adoration, and build as beautiful a chapel as our means would allow.” So that’s how this came about, as the result of a promise of a leader as God spoke to her. [Talks about the flier]
So we prayed, we read scripture, and we renewed the promise that Mother Antonia made, and that promise is right here, [refers to flier] re-stating our promise. So we had to re-write it a little, promising again to God, that we would continue this adoration. Then, we had all of the sisters sign on a scroll their names, like we often do when we make our profession of vows. Or when people sign when they get married. Signing your commitment is always very important, a physical signing is extremely relevant to an external way of showing our commitment. So those scrolls with the sisters’ names on it are rolled up and they are in the reserved, in the tabernacle in the Adoration Chapel next to the reserved Eucharist. So we’re there in name and in spirit, maybe not always bodily, but we have committed to that for time to come.
Will there be more changes in the future? Well not the near future, I don’t think, because we have made this commitment for now, and if there are necessary changes in the future, our leadership and our community members will continue to study that and make the decision when the time is right. [Discusses almond cookies and Lady Jacoba]
CJ: I remember that when you were making this decision, there were conversations with the Vatican or higher up in the church hierarchy on whether or not you could keep the name ‘perpetual.’ Would you mind telling me a bit about how those kind of conversations went?
Sister Marleen: Yeah. It was in, I believe, 2008, when we were preparing for one of our general assemblies, and we had a committee studying mission and perpetual adoration and how we could continue this, and I was president at the time, and I knew that the question would come up sooner or later of could we remain sisters of perpetual adoration if we changed the practice. So, I wrote to Rome, to the Vatican, and asked. The reason we have to do that is because our constitution are approved by the Vatican congregation which oversees religious life in the world so if we want their approval, we need to have the approval of our constitutions by that Vatican congregation. And when we change our constitutions we have to ask if that’s possible.
So, I was asking would our name change, and do we have to ask to change our constitutions in order to make a change in the practice. Luckily, our constitutions were written in a general enough way—it didn’t say 24/7 365 it said “perpetually” and so the Vatican wrote back and said they did not believe it was necessary to make a change in our constitutions, and if we wanted to we could, and they suggested even the words: “extent possible.” That we would keep perpetual adoration to the extent possible—those were the words, and that it would not be necessary to change the title of our congregation.
So, that was very comforting to us, and we also told them at the time that we had developed a way in which we could invite the laity to share our adoration with us. So we have about 170 lay people who take hours during the day, mostly, on maybe a weekly basis or every other week or when they’re in town. Obviously, if there are snowbirds that go South in the wintertime, they’re not here for a few months but they still come back, and the Vatican was very pleased that we’ve promoted adoration in that way as well. So there was no problem with that at all.
And then the other things is, when a community has a tradition that is long-long term, which we certainly have for over 100 years, the Vatican isn’t going to ask you to change your name, just because you change a few things about how you live and do your mission.
CJ: Is there anything else that you think is important for people to know? Or that I haven’t asked about?
Sister Marleen: I think I’ve covered it all. What we want to emphasize is that we are continuing our perpetual adoration even though some of the hours have been discontinued. We keep adoration in a continuous way, the same hours every day 365. Maybe you could say that we have redefined the word “perpetual” a little bit. We’re taking a different definition of perpetual, which even in Webster’s dictionary means “continuously.” And you can define that hourly, daily, weekly, or whatever. We very much still are Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, in the definitional sense of perpetual.