Local cloistered nuns make communion wafers for papal Mass

WHEN MORE THAN 1,500 priests and deacons descend from Pope Francis' altar on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway next month to distribute Communion, some of the wafers they carry will have been made by the Poor Clares, a group of cloistered nuns in Langhorne who've been baking altar breads for 98 years.

"You never think: 'Who produces these things? Where do they get them?' They just appear magically," says Sister Anne. "So it's a very humble way to participate, which is part of our life, to sort of be hidden."

The 13 sisters (Poor Clares) of the Franciscan Monastery of Saint Clare in Langhorne live contemplative lives dedicated, above all, to prayer. They rarely leave their monastery, which is tucked away behind St. Mary's Medical Center, surrounded by rolling hills and frolicking deer. It's a sanctuary of spiritual peace in stark contrast to the frenzy surrounding Pope Francis' visit.

If Philadelphians see Pope Francis as a hurricane bearing down on the city, these sisters are the calming eye of the storm.

The Rev. G. Dennis Gill, rector of the Cathedral Basilica of Ss. Peter and Paul and chairman of the World Meeting of Families liturgy committee, said he has fielded many questions about how Communion will be distributed during the papal Mass, where crowd estimates range from 1 to 2 million.

"It's so different than what people know on a Sunday in a small crowd of 500," Gill said. "They're just asking 'How will this ever work out?' "

Gill said about 500,000 communion wafers have been ordered for the papal Mass from various religious communities and wholesale manufacturers. The Poor Clares said they were asked to make 100,000 wafers for the Mass.

"We want to make Holy Communion as widely available as possible," Gill said. "You may have a million people there but . . . not everyone who's coming is a Catholic and not everyone who is coming is able to receive."

As is practice in the church, all altar breads will be consecrated during the Mass.

Once Pope Francis transubstantiates the altar bread into the body and blood of Christ, as Catholics believe priests have the power to do, more than 1,500 priests and deacons will receive their Communion before fanning out along the parkway to distribute to others, Gill said.

The priests and deacons, both those from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and those from around the world, each will be accompanied by an usher carrying a white-and-gold umbrella, to protect the Holy Communion and to signal where the Communion stations are, Gill said.

Pope Francis, who is expected to say the Mass in Latin, typically does not distribute Communion himself, Gill said.

While priests must and will consume wine at the Mass, it will not be available to the crowd, which is "too huge," Gill said.

"We're doing everything we can to ensure that Holy Communion will be distributed in a most reverent and careful way because we believe it's the body and blood of Jesus," Gill said. "It's not ordinary food."

For the Poor Clares, the process of making this not-so-ordinary food begins in several hot, second-story rooms at their monastery.

After waking for 5:30 a.m. prayer and attending a 7:15 a.m. Mass, several of the sisters head upstairs about 8:30 a.m. five days a week to make the altar breads.

The first stop is the mixing room, where Sister Mary Holy Spirit mixes flour and water - the only two ingredients that can be used in altar bread. She then hands the mix off to Sister Tereza in the baking room.

Hanging out in the baking room with Sister Tereza are Raphael, Maddalena, Vincent and Benny - the sisters' four stoves. Despite being nearly 40 years old, the stoves' interior plates still sparkle like the star of Bethlehem.

The secret? Cameo cleaner.

The stoves look more like large panini presses than conventional stove tops. On the top plates are various Catholic symbols that get imprinted into the wafers, including a dove, a fish, the Jerusalem cross and the alpha and omega symbols.

Sister Tereza pours a thin layer of the mix onto the stove and after just a minute or two between the presses, the stove - seemingly possessed by the Holy Spirit, but actually possessed by an air compressor that regulates baking times - pops open on its own.

The air smells of freshly baked bread.

Sister Tereza pulls the thin embossed sheet off of the stove, slices it in half and sends it over to Sister Eden, who places it in a humidifier.

"After we bake the breads we put them in here to dampen because if you cut them right away, they'll just shatter," Sister Anne said.

The altar breads dampen in the humidifier over four sessions spanning two days.

After that, Sister Eden sits at a large multihole cutter press and pops the wafers out of the sheets. She then sorts them by hand, searching for wafers that may be too dark, too bumpy or too oily.

The wafers are then heated again to dry before the sisters package them in bags.

"If you put them in the bags when they're the least bit damp, they kind of get chewy," Sister Anne said.

Once dry, the wafers have a shelf life of about a year and half, although the sisters make theirs shortly before they send them out.

After about four days, the wafers go to the order room, where Sister Isabel processes orders, answers the phone and packages shipments.

Even Sister Constance, who at 95 is the oldest nun at the monastery, helps by shredding paper that's used as packaging material for the wafers.

The Langhorne nuns are the only one of 22 monasteries of their branch of the Poor Clares in the United States that still makes altar breads, Sister Anne said.

"As they had fewer sisters, they made a decision to not bake anymore," Sister Anne said. "It is an investment in equipment and you have to have enough sisters that are young enough that can do it."

According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, the number of nuns in the U.S. has fallen from a peak of more than 181,000 in 1965 to 49,883 last year.

Mary Gautier, senior research associate for the center, said statistics are not kept on the number of cloistered nuns, though she speculated it was, at maximum, only a few hundred.

"They really don't keep track. They're so small and they don't get out much," Gautier said. "It's always been tiny though, that's the nature of a cloister."

Most of the Poor Clares' wafer orders come from churches, 95 percent in the Philadelphia area. They have about 200 active accounts.

Sister Anne estimates that the cloister makes about 150,000 wafers per month. They also buy from outside vendors to keep up with demand, especially for whole-wheat wafers, which they do not make in-house.

The Poor Clares make a modest profit on their wafers - they sell a bag of 250 for $2.75 - but Sister Anne said the cloister relies mostly on donations to get by.

The Poor Clares first settled into southeastern Pennsylvania in 1916, in a small house on Girard Avenue near 19th Street in North Philadelphia. They sold their first altar-bread order in 1917. In 1918, the sisters moved to a brownstone up the street on Girard. Their final move came in 1977, when they went to Langhorne.

Sister Anne, a native of Baton Rouge, La., who previously worked in business development for a large phone company, said she'd always wondered about religious life. When she was about 30, she began exploring it.

"I had dated a few people and it had never really worked out," Sister Anne, now 50, said. "But as soon as I started looking into this life, everything fell in place so quickly, I just knew it was meant to be."

Sister Anne had visited other religious communities, but the Poor Clares of Langhorne were the first cloistered sisters she'd encountered.

"You can't go and look up the Fortune 500 of religious communities, they don't have that," she said. "It's more of a function of the heart than of the mind. It's just God speaking in your heart."

Once in the cloister, the sisters dedicate their lives to prayer. While all religious orders take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the Poor Clares take a fourth vow: enclosure, which means they don't leave their monastery except for necessary trips like doctor visits.

"We really try to limit it because the enclosure is a great aid to us to avoid distraction and to keep our lives focused on prayer," Sister Anne said.

The biggest misconception about the nuns is that they're totally isolated, Sister Anne said.

"You know, my mother she was so afraid for me, she said 'Oh, you're going to be so lonely, you're going to be so isolated,' and it's the complete opposite," Sister Anne said. "We're not isolated at all . . . we don't go out and make contact with people, but many people come to us, asking for prayers."

Sister Mary Holy Spirit, who transferred to the Langhorne monastery in 2013 from a Poor Clare monastery in her native Tanzania, agreed.

"The people, they were saying in Tanzania, 'Oh, you know in America, they are not praying,' " she said. "But we have good surprise here. The people are coming to pray. More than in Tanzania. Every day. Every day."

The sisters said they receive many calls and visitors requesting prayers. Some people come just because it's a peaceful corner on a loud planet.

"Really, the world is such a noisy place, and people need the quiet and a lot times people will just come to our chapel to have time to pray and gather themselves," Sister Anne said.

The sisters do have a television - Saint Clare is the patron saint of TV, after all - but they tend to only watch it at dinner time and usually it's a religious or educational program.

"On birthdays or Sundays or big feast days we'll watch a movie, but they're always like Hallmark or family-friendly," Sister Anne said. "It has to be nun-safe."

For the Poor Clares of Langhorne, who have received permission from Archbishop Charles Chaput's office to attend the papal Mass, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Knowing that they played a small part by preparing 100,000 of the Communion wafers is, for them, a profound way of taking part behind the scenes.

"It just makes us feel more united with the pope, with the whole celebration and with all those people," Sister Anne said. "It's very humbling because humanly speaking, we're just 13 women, but we affect so many people without realizing it.

"That's really God," she said.

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