God’s beauty found outside and inside Santa Rita Abbey

Sister Clare
 
Sister Clare Renquin, 91, is one of the founding members of Santa Rita, arriving in Tucson in 1972. She was born to an Irish-Belgian family in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, and recalled how her grandmother raised chickens, rabbits and vegetables in the back yard to provide food during the Great Depression.
Her father “achieved the American dream” when he succeeded in the textile industry, drawing a princely salary of $35 a week. It meant living in Newton, New Jersey, for several years, before her family moved back to Rhode Island and she found her vocation. She entered Mount St. Mary Abbey in Wrentham, Massachusetts, in January of 1950, and took the habit on Sept. 8 that year.
She was with Mother Angela, Mount St. Mary’s prioress, who traveled to Tucson in the early 1970s to investigate possible sites for a new abbey. Sister Clare recalled a sense of disappointment upon their return, finding that potential sites were either too costly or lacking access to sufficient water.
“We hadn’t even unpacked our bags when Mother got a message to return, that another property had just become available,” Sister Clare recalled. So, Mother Angela returned to Arizona and was shown - and accepted - the property on 14200 E. Fish Canyon Road in Sonoita.
To start, it was just a small ranch house, with three bedrooms. Over the years, it was expanded and includes an infirmary, dorms, a chapel, a guest house and a bakery.
Before arthritis limited her dexterity, Sister Clare wrote icons – church teaching considers such pieces as divinely inspired, like the Gospels, hence written - and was a weaver in the community. She was glad that Santa Rita decided to make altar breads as its source of income, especially coming from the Wrentham community’s dairy farm that required cow-milking twice a day.
In Wrentham, she always seemed to draw Christmas duty, Sister Clare recalled. “I was fast because I wanted to get in out of the cold.”
 
Mother Victoria
 
Mother Victoria Murray, the youngest of the first founding six, currently serves as the superior of the abbey. She was born in Ohio, and her father was an executive at Nabisco. As he was reassigned to various sites throughout the country, the family relocated to Kentucky, Indiana, Long Island in New York and finally to “dinky Dumont,” a bedroom community in Bergen County, New Jersey.
It was there, Mother Victoria said, she felt a call to a religious community. Although she considered the Poor Clares and the Carmelites, when she opened the materials sent by the Trappistines, “it was like somebody played a chord on my heart.”
She was attracted by “the simplicity of life and the focus on life in God,” she recalled.
She entered the community in Wrentham in 1971. That August, Mother Angela asked the 60 members of the community if any would like to volunteer for a new abbey in Arizona.
“I had never been west of Ohio, but I felt very strongly about it, so I volunteered,” Mother Victoria said. Being a postulant, she never believed that a future in the Southwest was in the cards for her.
In September, she was praying and “deep inside, this voice said, ‘You’re going to be going to Arizona.’ It was as clear as a bell.”
Fast forward to Jan. 1, 1972, and she’s pulled aside by Mother Angela and asked if she was sincere in volunteering to be part of the founding team. “I very calmly said yes.”
A short time later, Mother Angela gave her a note that read in part: “I think Jesus wants to see you in Arizona.”
At Santa Rita, Sister Victoria shared a room in the original building with Sister Clare. Not long after moving in, an Arizona brochure fell out of Sister Clare’s prayer book and opened to a scene of the Mustang mountains – the scene that was live and real right outside their door. “It was right there,” she recalled.
Another time, she was looking out toward Fish Canyon Road, and it dawned on her that it was the same scene she had created - from her imagination - as a young artist between ages 5-7.
“God put that landscape in me,” Mother Victoria said, noting that all these signs “built on each other.”
Mother Victoria was elected prioress in 2012 and re-elected for a second six-year term in 2018.
 
Sister Pam
 
Sister Pam Fletcher was born in Boston and moved to Tucson with her family when she was five. The abbey’s website describes her as “the kind of person who does everything well, Pam, our almost-native Arizonan, is the great rescuer. From computer glitches to leaky plumbing to an exquisite voice as chantress in choir, to a cheerfully social disposition, our ‘tall Redhead’ is a gift of God to the needs of a monastic family.”
She grew up in a religious environment she described as “Methodist and Lutheran,” and attended Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five undergraduate schools in Claremont, California. She joined the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship during her sophomore year, went on a retreat and decided to “give my life to Christ.”
“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life” before the retreat, she recalled. She subsequently went to Japan on a mission but was disappointed that she could not win converts in a country where no more than two percent of the population considered themselves Christian.
“I was a complete failure as a missionary,” Sister Pam said. However, it brought one reality to the fore. “I didn’t want a career ‘in God.’ I wanted a whole way of life.”
In 1986, she took an independent study on monastic life, and the first three texts she reviewed were the Rule of St. Benedict, and books by Trappist Fathers Thomas Merton and Basil Pennington. Sister Pam admitted that she was floored by what she learned, especially because her Protestant roots came with a strong prejudice against Catholics.
She drew closer to Catholicism after meeting an Irish Presentation sister and attending Mass at a local student center. After graduation, she moved to Tucson and found herself at Our Mother of Sorrows. There, she met Msgr. Thomas Cahalane, who identified her as “a Protestant girl who wants to become a nun,” Sister Pam recalled. She was brought into the faith during the 1987 Easter vigil.
Along the way, she received as a gift a stained-glass butterfly, that came from Santa Rita. She visited the abbey for an extended retreat and met with Sister Beverly, the novice director, that fall.
Sister Pam said her family – especially her mother – was aghast. They urged her to meet with the local Lutheran cleric, Pastor Greg, to quell her Catholic urges. They were unaware that he was going through his own self-examination and would convert and enter the Catholic presbyterate as Father Greg Adolf.
It was Father Adolf who was able to explain to her the Catholic practice of eucharistic adoration, and “When I told him that I think I want to be a Catholic nun, he didn’t fall off his chair,” Sister Pam said.
Despite only having entered the faith in the spring, Sister Pam was accepted into the Trappistine formation program on Sept. 14, 1987. Mother Cecile wanted to see how the new Catholic grew in her faith before accepting her, but others in the community had a different perspective on the pre-postulant.
“You have to look at the person and the call,” said Mother Victoria, looking back on Sister Pam’s journey. “What can we do to help her? It was like, ‘Let’s see what God is doing here.’”
Although she had an uncle and aunt living in Phoenix, and they visited often, Sister Pam’s parents and siblings relocated, for various reasons, from Sierra Vista to places out of state in 1988. Meanwhile, she moved through postulancy and into her novitiate, professing first vows in 1991. When her final vows came several years later, “half of Sierra Vista” attended, Sister Pam said.
 
Sisters speak out against Rosemont mine
 
The Trappistine nuns are involved in a large community fight against the proposed Rosemont mine, “five miles away as the crow flies” said Mother Victoria.
Despite the distance, she is worried about how the dust, detonations and lights will impact the environment on the abbey and the surrounding environment. She is especially concerned about the impact on groundwater, including the wells that supply Santa Rita.
The original well hit water at about 120 feet, she said, but as the property was developed, an additional one was drilled to nearly 500 feet and serves as the facility’s primary source. In the event the new well fails, the water supply can be tapped from the older well, she said.
The concern comes if mining operations draw down the local water below current levels or if those aquifers are somehow polluted or contaminated with waste products from the mining activities.
Mother Victoria emphasized that its not just about the abbey, but the entire surrounding environment. The Trappistines are committed to proper stewardship of the land and “that’s so important that ‘stewardship’ is written into our constitution.”
Sister Pam noted that the silence and beauty of the area, which has always been a draw for people coming there for retreats, would be seriously impacted by mining operations. She cited a recent retreat for women who were considering joining the community. Five came from Phoenix where city lights are bright. One woman, seeing a full-starred night sky for the first time, said “‘I have never been in such a quiet place,’” recounted Sister Pam.
Mother Victoria agreed. “You can feel the connection to God. To be in nature brings you back to God.”
If the abbey were to lose its water supply from contamination, the unthinkable might occur: the abbey would have to be abandoned. “All our houses are autonomous,” Mother Victoria explained. “If it becomes impossible to live in a place, we would have to abandon it.”
 
On formation and altar bread
 
Formation had been about six years for women considering a cloistered Trappistine lifestyle. However, recently Pope Francis extended that to nine years in formation, with one year each as a pre-postulant and postulant, two years as a novice and five years with temporary vows. Temporary vows can be extended an additional three years, up to 12 years total in formation.
The abbey follows the traditional Rule of St. Benedict. It follows seven hours of prayer according to the Daily Office. It includes Lectio Divina,  a traditional monastic practice of reading, meditation and prayer on Scripture.
It also includes some form of manual labor, which at Santa Rita means making altar breads.
Some abbeys make fruitcakes; others make candy. Traditional monastic living involved farming but Sister Pam noted, “You can’t survive on farming” because large corporate farms dominate the marketplace.
A short time after the abbey’s founding, Mother Cecile, the first superior, turned to her young 30-year-old novice and asked her to set up an altar bread business. Sister Victoria had memories as a young child, visiting her aunt, a Sister of the Poor of St. Francis, and watching the members make altar bread in a dark, dreary basement.
“It was dark, cold and boring. I thought ‘This is really awful,’” Mother Victoria recalled. “I have to say that I had a few words with God on this one.”
Determined to create a different environment, the Trappistines bought the equipment and set up shop in the kitchen, filling orders for 26,000 hosts a week. As business increased, new buildings were constructed – with an abundance of windows – and an increased production of about 200,000 a week.
“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Mother Victoria said.
 
 
Bullet points

• Santa Rita was established as a foundation in 1972, and Mother Cecile Jubinville was the first Mother Superior. She became its first prioress in 1978 and was re-elected to a second six-year term in 1984. She took the unusual step of returning to Wrentham in 1990. She died there Dec. 31, 2017.
• Santa Rita was the second foundation, or expansion, of Mount St. Mary’s, following Our Lady of the Mississippi in Iowa. It was given the name Our Lady of the Santa Rita Mountains, which rise to the east. It is located in the Coronado National Forest.
• Building projects included a small church and dormitory in 1973, followed by a craft building for creating ceramics and glass art. In 1980, the bakery was added as the altar bread business continue to grow. A church expansion and dormitory were added later. A retreat house was added in 1995. In 2018, work on a new family guest house was completed.
• On Sept. 14, 1978, Santa Rita was elevated from a foundation to a major priory, with full autonomy.
• Besides poverty, chastity and obedience, the nuns also take a vow of stability which ties them to Santa Rita. All things being equal, they will all be buried there.