Reminds me of Dolores Hart (who is now an abbess, IIRC). I can't say the comments here shock me, exactly, but they certainly are revealing. Specifically, so ma

Reminds me of Dolores Hart (who is now an abbess, IIRC). I can't say the comments here shock me, exactly, but they certainly are revealing. Specifically, so many of them pass judgement on this woman as if she had done something terrible and project their own categories onto her, characterizing this, without the slightest shred of evidence, as somehow sad. How lost one must be to claim such a thing! Sister Mary Joseph had only chosen to be a Carmelite nun after her husband had died and her children had grown up. She had no dependents or husbands for whom or to whom she was responsible anymore. She was not a single mother who had somehow abandoned her children. Would she miss her children? Probably, but she found a higher calling for which she sacrificed such contact and there is no higher calling than the religious life. In her case, she clearly felt called to devote herself in this particular way. I have no reason to presume that she didn't know what she was getting herself into (besides, religious orders do not simply let anybody in who isn't serious or even qualified in basic ways). Do her children miss her? Arguably, yes, but if they remain in the faith and see the world through a Catholic lens, they are likely to be joyful about having pursued this calling. There is nothing sad about it. It is a very joyful and wonderful thing. It is inspiring. Catholics (not of the cafeteria variety, anyway) find happiness in sacrificing lesser goods for higher goods and in the sanctification that comes with the suffering life will inevitably inflict on us. So let's just say she didn't join the order to be comfortable, but to grow spiritually in a particularly austere order. If you aren't Catholic, this may not make much sense to you. Someone who is a slave to comfort and whose horizons are severely limited and parochial will think this is downright crazy. But the Catholic understanding of reality, of Man, and of God imparts a vertical dimension and a breadth that is absent otherwise. Catholic anthropology is not reductive, and Man, after all, does not live by bread alone.