Sacred Space

The Sacramentine Sisters have had three homes in the past 30 months but, like the Israelites in the desert, they have carried the Lord with them on their journey.

The cloistered community dedicated to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament moved in June 1996 from the monastery in Yonkers where it had been for 74 years. The nuns spent almost two years in temporary quarters in Warwick before settling last May into the former headquarters of the Paulist Fathers on a scenic 6.7-acre plot in Scarsdale. Their new home houses traditional religious objects in contemporary surroundings.

The center is the Blessed Sacrament, which is exposed and worshiped at different times of the day by the 13 sisters.

They are preparing a two-bedroom guest house on the property for lay persons seeking a private retreat, and they welcome visitors and prayer groups to their chapel any time during the day. A basement library with some 10,000 volumes on the Church and spirituality will be open to the public soon.

"We want to make this a center where the Lord welcomes his people and where his people can come to meet him, relax or study," said the prioress, Sister Mary Veronica Kiley, O.S.S.

The motto of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who were founded in France in the middle of the 17th century, is "To love for those who do not love; to adore for those who do not adore; to praise for those who blaspheme."

The congregation was founded to combat the spread of the Protestant disbelief in the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament and the Jansenist tendency among Catholics to refrain from frequent Communion. Today, the sisters have been given the duty by Cardinal O'Connor to pray for a revival of faith in the Real Presence among Catholics, Sister Mary Veronica told CNY. Some surveys report that as few as 35 percent of Catholics believe Church teaching on the Eucharist.

"We would like to do whatever we can to pray and change this statistic," she said.

Sister Mary of the Annunciation, O.S.S., who is 93 and radiant, said in a soft voice as she sat in chapel, "We hope to get more people to come here for adoration. The Blessed Sacrament is an inspiration and it sustains us through all these years. Nothing else in life means so much and helps me more than being here with our Lord."

She grew up in Ascension parish on Manhattan's upper West Side and joined the Sacramentine Sisters soon after they moved to their location at 23 Park Ave. in Yonkers. Most of the seven French sisters who established the community here in 1912 were living there at the time.

Looking back on her years with the community, Sister Mary of the Annunciation described her life in terms of the Sacramentine motto.

"You feel that you're doing for others what they need to do for themselves, what they should do, but what they can't always do because they do not have the time," she said.

The monastery grounds are adjacent to the Greenburgh Nature Center, on Dromore Road. The original building has 15 bedrooms, and the sisters added a chapel, a library, two parlors and a garage. The chapel has large bay windows and glass panels in the roof to allow panoramic views of the outdoors.

"There's so much light, there's so much beauty," said Sister Mary Devereux, O.S.S. "Sometimes we get visits from a hawk or a prairie dog."

"One time the nature center next door told us that one of its pythons had escaped. We weren't too happy to hear that, but they managed to capture it again," Sister Mary Veronica said.

The main work of the sisters is buying Communion breads wholesale and packaging and selling them to parishes throughout the archdiocese. They used to bake and cut their own altar breads but the process became too difficult as the number of sisters declined over the years. In time, the sisters hope to return to activities for which they were well-known in Yonkers: making and selling preserves and religious art and holding a Christmas sale of jellies and assorted baked goods.

Lack of vocations also was the main reason for the sisters' move. The monastery in Yonkers was too large and expensive to maintain, with its many rooms, large chapel and high dome topped with a replica of a monstrance, which still stands out on the Yonkers horizon.

A number of items from the old monastery have been moved to Scarsdale: two stained-glass windows, Stations of the Cross which were brought early in the century from France, and a mosaic of the Last Supper. The large monastery bell, which for decades called the sisters to prayer, is mounted outside the chapel.

The tabernacle is new but symbolic of a previous era. The natural blood color of the wood is a reminder of the 13 Sacramentine Sisters who were executed during the French Revolution. The tabernacle is in the shape of the chest in which the sisters hid the Blessed Sacrament after they were forced from their monastery. A painting of the martyrs entering heavenly glory hangs near the monastery's front door.

The sisters have inherited the love for the Eucharist for which the martyrs died.

"Our prayer before the Blessed Sacrament and our community life and work feed into one another," Sister Mary Veronica said. "We seek to take the Lord with us wherever we go."