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MugenOne
Guest
Outstanding news! My college buddie did just that. He heard the call and came a priest.
By John Thorne, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Wed Mar 1, 3:00 AM ET
ROME - In 2003, Cristina Pavone, left her Dublin, Ireland, apartment, her boyfriend, and her steady job with Hertz Rent-a-Car, and went home to Italy to join a Franciscan order. Last summer, she took her final vows and became a cloistered nun.
Today, Sister Cristina, 31, lives with 179 other monks and nuns at a small red-brick monastery north of Rome. She reads, does chores, meets visitors, and prays five times daily, starting at 3 a.m.
“I was far from God,” she says quietly, wrapping her hands around a hot mug in the monastery’s drafty dining hall. “I experimented with everything you can experiment with to find happiness. Now that I’ve left everything, I’ve found everything.”
She isn’t alone in her devotion. A small but burgeoning group of young Italians are turning to Catholicism with new fervor, suggesting a reversal of Catholicism’s decades-long decline in Italy.
Sister Cristina is one of 550 young Italian women who joined the country’s 7,500 cloistered nuns in 2005 - a dramatic increase from the 350 who became nuns in 2003. Vatican officials say the sudden rise in Italian monasticism mirrors a resurgence in Catholicism among young Italians during recent years.
news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20060301/wl_csm/onuns_1
By John Thorne, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Wed Mar 1, 3:00 AM ET
ROME - In 2003, Cristina Pavone, left her Dublin, Ireland, apartment, her boyfriend, and her steady job with Hertz Rent-a-Car, and went home to Italy to join a Franciscan order. Last summer, she took her final vows and became a cloistered nun.
Today, Sister Cristina, 31, lives with 179 other monks and nuns at a small red-brick monastery north of Rome. She reads, does chores, meets visitors, and prays five times daily, starting at 3 a.m.
“I was far from God,” she says quietly, wrapping her hands around a hot mug in the monastery’s drafty dining hall. “I experimented with everything you can experiment with to find happiness. Now that I’ve left everything, I’ve found everything.”
She isn’t alone in her devotion. A small but burgeoning group of young Italians are turning to Catholicism with new fervor, suggesting a reversal of Catholicism’s decades-long decline in Italy.
Sister Cristina is one of 550 young Italian women who joined the country’s 7,500 cloistered nuns in 2005 - a dramatic increase from the 350 who became nuns in 2003. Vatican officials say the sudden rise in Italian monasticism mirrors a resurgence in Catholicism among young Italians during recent years.
news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20060301/wl_csm/onuns_1
