A Lifetime of Faithful Service

WOODLAND HILLS —  The girls of Louisville High School are tugging books out of their lockers and chatting in ponytailed clusters. As the school day ends, they spill out of neat brick buildings, a bright stream of teenagers filling the wooded campus with the hum of conversation and laughter.

Only an ivy-covered slope separates them from the convent overlooking the school, but the girls seldom venture up the hill. At the top is a modest cream-colored villa that houses a few of the women who built Louisville--Irish nuns who left their homeland decades ago to join the “gold-rush for souls in sunny California,” as a book recounting their mission put it.

This year, the Sisters of St. Louis are celebrating their 50th school year in California. They have taught thousands of students in more than 20 elementary and high schools here, including St. Mel School in Woodland Hills. They’ve also ministered to the sick, taught in colleges and seminaries, and even opened a mission in Brazil.

Their journey from misty Ireland to the land of sun-soaked canyons began half a century ago with a plea from an auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles: Could the convent in County Monaghan possibly spare any sisters?

The population was booming in postwar California, he wrote, and Roman Catholic parishes were scrambling to keep up with the demand for schools. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles badly needed teachers.

“I had to go to the map, of course, and find out where California was,” said Sister Maura Byron, a member of the first group of eight nuns, dispatched in August 1949 to the United States. “I was thrilled to find Hollywood there. We didn’t know much about California, but we all knew Hollywood.”

At Home in Woodland Hills

Trading Monaghan for far-off places with names such as El Monte and Santa Ana, the nuns streamed into classrooms across Southern California during the next decade. Each year, another handful of Irish sisters arrived to join them.

“The little ones are not very different from any 6-year-olds I’ve ever taught,” wrote Sister Ronan McDonnell in a 1949 letter about her first day teaching in California. “The little girls love to show off and . . . the boys are keenly interested in cowboy suits, guns, and Hopalong Cassidy, just like the little fellows in [Ireland]. They seem lazy, however, when it comes to getting down to work, but I should think the climate is responsible for that.”

By 1960, the sisters had founded their own high school, Louisville, on a former ranch amid the oak-speckled canyons of Woodland Hills. They opened a novitiate here, too, accommodating the American girls who wanted to become nuns.

Nestled in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, the convent is the group’s main house in the United States. About 14 sisters live here, with others scattered among other convents.

The two-story living quarters resemble a quaint motel with rows of tidy, sparsely furnished bedrooms. The nuns pray together daily in a small wood-paneled chapel in an adjoining building.

At a lively lunch in the convent’s dining room, about six sisters gather around the table while another nun bustles to and fro, urging everyone to eat more bread, more fruit, more chicken salad.

Sister Patrice Benson, clearly the ham of the bunch, pulls up a chair. “I’m the Reverend Mother!” she tells me in jest as the others giggle. “I know you’ve been waiting to meet me. Well, here I am.”

Several of the elderly sisters explain--with just a hint of Irish brogue--that as teenagers they were drawn to the Sisters of St. Louis when they had them as high school teachers in Ireland. The girls were struck by the nuns’ openness, their sense of vitality and excitement--not at all like the strict, somber nuns they had known in grammar school.

“They were so friendly!” one sister exclaims as the others nod.

The Sisters of St. Louis, a group of more than 500 women worldwide that is now based in Ireland, began in France. Named for King Louis IX, the patron saint of France, the group was organized in 1842 by a priest named Louis Bautain.

After World War II, the sisters branched out to Nigeria and Ghana, as well as California.

Today, the nuns are more likely to be found wearing floral skirts and sweaters than the boxy habits they once favored. They may have taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but that doesn’t mean they’re cloistered away from the modern world. They zap e-mail messages to former students. They eat mushroom pizza and drink beer on occasion. At least one has even seen “American Beauty.”

A Shrinking Sisterhood

Sister Margaret Fitzer said that when she entered the convent in 1966, the living quarters were crammed with novices freshly out of high school, adjusting to the rhythms of religious life.

Today, the Sisters of St. Louis have no novices in California. Their youngest member is in her 30s. The median age is 67, and the rooms that once housed teenagers are now reserved for sisters who are 70 or older.

The dwindling interest in joining religious orders is reflected across the country, where the number of nuns has plunged 51% from 1965 to 1997.

Out in front of the high school, beside a statue of the Virgin Mary, a group of girls dressed in blue skirts admits that, for them, the call to become a nun is faint.

“Oh God, I’d be the worst nun,” said Megan Farley, a 17-year-old junior, adding that giving up boys would be tough. “I don’t think that’s the goal on anyone’s mind. The goal is just to get good grades and go to college.”

There are plenty of ways to serve God besides joining a convent, chimed in sophomore Toni Feddersen, 15.

“People now can be Eucharistic ministers,” she said. “You have different ways of serving, but you can still have a family. It’s the best of both ends. I think you can see God a lot in your family.”

Twenty-five years ago, there were 112 Sisters of St. Louis in California; today there are about 75. Many of the Louisville teachers are laypeople, although the principal is a nun and a few sisters still teach here.

In the convent’s meeting room, a large, airy lounge with a television at one end, Sister Antonia Byrne sits on a couch and sighs.

“One of the girls said to me, ‘I’d love to be a sister, but I want to be a mom.’ A lot of them want a family,” she said.

One of three surviving nuns who came to California in 1949, Sister Antonia can understand the young woman’s reasons, but she still feels a sense of loss.

“I feel sad about it,” she said. “I was just talking to some parents I know who are very sad because they have no grandchildren. They want to pass something on and they want to have grandchildren. I suppose I feel the same way. I want to pass something on, too.”

Faced with their shrinking numbers, the nuns have begun sponsoring laypeople as “associates,” Catholics who commit to their ideals of healing and unifying the world around them.

The sisters are also making some gentle stabs at recruiting. Last month, they held a pizza party dubbed “Friday Night Live at the Convent” and invited about 10 students.

“One of the things they asked us was, ‘Is there anything you admire about the sisters?”’ recalled Jessie Dzundza, a 16-year-old junior. “I think one hundred percent of the girls said, ‘Compassion.’ They are just really sweet, sweet women who are constantly wanting to be little lights for God.”