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PHILIPPINES. Since the war, when sisters spent three years in internment camps, six large schools and a hospital have been built up. HAWAII. Six schools, a children's home, a social-service bureau, and release-time religious classes of thousands of schoolchildren.
CAROLINE AND MARSHALL ISLANDS. Three schools.
KOREA. A dispensary at Pusan, treating 2,000 refugees daily.
JAPAN. Five missionary centers, with the special task of making converts.
FORMOSA. One dispensary, one catechetical center.
BOLIVIA. A hospital, six schools, three dispensaries, a home-visiting program.
U.S. Schools, social-service and catechetical centers in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, California, Arizona and Texas for racial-minority groups, novitiates at Topsfield, Mass. and Valley Park, Mo.
The "Lifers." That is the active side of Maryknoll. There is a contemplative side, too. For monasticism has always been a blend of Martha and Mary,* of the temper represented by Vincent de Paul, the great fighter against poverty, and the spirit of Francis of Assisi, who considered it more important to live in poverty than to fight it. From time to time, a Maryknoll sister will disappear from her mission rounds and make her way to a secluded farmhouse close to Maryknoll's main building. That is the Maryknoll cloister, where 18 sisters (there will ultimately be 24) selected from the active side of the order lead a separate existence of lifelong austerity and devotion.
Their rule is strict. They rise at midnight for Matins and Lauds, and rise again at 6 for Prime and Mass, and the day's routine. Meals are meager (no meat ever allowed). The sisters fast from Sept. 14, the Feast of the Holy Cross, until Easter Saturday. They maintain strict silence at all times, except for the evening's hour of recreation. (Every now and then, the chaplain at Sing Sing comes over from nearby Ossining and asks how "the lifers" are doing.)
The Mysterious Stirring. What kind of girl enters a religious order? The drawn visage and sunken eye are not encouraging signs to a Mother Prioress interviewing a prospective postulant. High-spirited, happy girls make the best sisters—the ones who enjoy parties and have dates. Such a girl was St. Teresa herself, who told a Spanish swain who admired her pretty feet at a party: "Have a good look, caballero, for this is the last time you will see them."
Such girls are just the kind whose friends say: "Oh, but not you! You're not the type for a nun." Why, then, do they choose the life? The answer, in the Catholic view, lies in the mysterious stirring called "vocation." A vocation is not to be measured in mere piety or a ready turning to prayer. Nor is it usually revealed in a traumatic spiritual experience, like Paul's blinding light on the Damascus road. A sense of vocation for the religious life is the insistent conviction that the decision represents God's will, not one's own. Many of the most successful religious have struggled against this inner prompting at first, only to capitulate in the end.