c. 2006 Religion News Service
MENDHAM TOWNSHIP, N.J. _ For the sisters at Mount St. John convent, murmurs of the past echo from every corner of the shady, hilltop campus.
From the convent’s chapel frescoes and the dining room’s dark wood paneling. From the dorms where orphans once slept and the classrooms where teens learned the faith.
“The sense of history is in the bricks,” says Sister Lois Darold, a member of the Sisters of St. John the Baptist and the chronicler of the Roman Catholic order’s past.
Most of all, the nuns’ history rests in the little cemetery, its 100 or so granite cruciform headstones tucked away in wooded seclusion far from the campus center.
But soon all of it _ the cycles of prayer, the changing of the seasons on this bucolic campus _ will be no more. The Mount St. John convent will shut down after 80 years, officials said recently.
All of the order’s belongings will be moved during the next year: the relics, the statuary, even the cemetery.
The transfer of the sisters’ graves to Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, N.Y., will allow the order to sustain its annual prayer celebration around All Souls Day, said Sister Ann Marie Damiani, provincial secretary in the order’s headquarters in the Bronx.
Each year, the sisters walk from their chapel to take roses to the headstones. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful way to recall our dead sisters and pray for the repose of their souls,” Damiani said. “We don’t want to leave the cemetery there because nobody will be attending it.”
Moving the order’s final resting place is a bit unsettling for some.
Sister Eileen Clarke, who studied at the convent’s schools, taught there and now lives in the provincial residence in the Bronx, said she “was not too happy” about transferring the cemetery.
“We used to joke about being able to look at the mountains,” she said, noting that the grave plots have a view of some beautiful vistas.
The closing of the convent comes on the order’s 100th anniversary on American soil. Its antique furnishings, classical harpsichord and portraits of hallowed forebears suggest a place time forgot.
But the convent’s numbers shrank from 30 to less than a dozen. Keeping up the huge estate got too expensive, order officials said.
The Trust for Public Land, a conservation group, brokered a $13 million deal to preserve the campus, and the buildings will likely be resold to a school. Most of the 144-acre estate will be run by Mendham Township as a park.
In the 1930s, the nuns began expanding the main estate building, built by sugar baron George R. Mosle in 1906, according to the order’s written history.
Founded in 1878 by Blessed Father Alfonso Maria Fusco in Angri, Italy, the order was sent to perform charity as Italian immigrants flocked to America.
Beginning in 1926, the sisters ran the orphanage on the site for more than a decade until the state took over the management of orphans. Then the sisters ran an elementary and high school, until enrollment dropped.
Some young women who began as boarding students joined the order. “The nuns were my mothers. They dried the tears,” Clarke said
The convent’s brick-and-stone walls bring back memories for her.
Sneaking out of her room to see friends. Riding the dumbwaiters in the convent’s big kitchens. Seeing former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and her young children, who lived down the road in Peapack.
These shared experiences and “a lot of fun” brought students and nuns together, Sister Clarke said, adding, “We were family.”
Last month, the sisters closed an elementary school in Newark after 100 years. They sold a retreat center in 2002, and closed a women’s junior college in 1980.
The order is a vestige of a turn-of-the-last-century movement, when religious women once took up the cause of ministering to society’s ills, according to Kathleen Cummings, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who is an expert on American Catholicism.
“There was just an explosion of women’s groups at that time,” she said. “It was before there was welfare. It was largely women like this who took care of the poor and the sick.”
Now, the nuns who work and reside at the convent will be reassigned by year’s end to other parishes. News of the closing has hit the community hard.
“It’s very painful emotionally,” Sister Clarke said. “There’s a lot of tearing and a lot of soul-searching. When I go up there, I can sit in the chapel and remember the day when I came as a kid.”
(John Wihbey writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)
KRE/PH END WIHBEY
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