Religious sisters

A newer religious faith community has marked steady advances in growing membership, planning a new home in central Bismarck, and shaping future academic and faith educators.

The St. Mary Sisters were dedicated as a new public association on June 1, 2020, by Bishop David Kagan. Since then, three young women have completed their year of postulancy, donned new white habits in the novitiate, taken new religious names and are moving toward their first commitment as brides of Christ next summer.
  
This fall, the women began their second year as novices. Their first profession of vows will be July 22, 2025. They intend to make their final profession in 2030. Its prioress and co-founder with the bishop, Sister Mary Joseph Campbell, took on a new title, when she became Mother Mary Joseph. When the association builds to 25 fully professed sisters, naming the mother of the community will be voted on by the members, mother said, and someone else will likely carry those responsibilities.
                                                                                                                      
The first sisters
 
After careful discernment, visiting and partaking in the prayer life, work schedule and customs of the new order, the three women started their year of postulancy. Postulancy is a period where the young women participate in the full schedule of the sisters, attending formation classes, liturgy, prayer, the lives and spirituality of Dominican saints and a life rich in prayer, and growing awareness of what it means to give themselves fully to Christ. The sisters come from three states, only one from North Dakota. Now novices, they continue to be inspired and led by the faith and actions of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine and St. Dominic de Guzman.

Sister Mary Elizabeth, a Killdeer native, previously worked for the Bismarck Diocese and a parish in Dickinson. She completed degrees in philosophy, English and Catholic studies from the University of Mary. Sister Gianna Marie comes from Enfield, Conn., and earned a high school degree before entering the St. Mary Sisters. She joined the St. Mary Sisters after her sister, a University of Mary student, shared information about the upstart religious community. Sister Maria Bernadette, formerly a resident of Tennessee and New Jersey, garnered a master’s degree in system engineering before her vocation led her to the St. Mary Sisters.
 
Mother Mary Joseph said in their first year, novitiates are more secluded in the canonical period where there is more prayer, less worldly interaction. This contemplative period is intended to draw the novices to a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.
 
“This is an apostolic year for them,” she said of the coming months in the second year. “They will teach catechism classes Tuesday and Fridays.”
                                                                                                                             
Sacrifice
 
They are completely cut off from the world, Mother Mary Joseph said. “They interact with family through letters and their family can visit them four times a year.”
 
She likens the lifestyle and self-discipline to the military. “This attracts women who want to give their whole being to Christ. It is rigorous. We hustle in the morning.”
Still the women are committed as they model their lives after St. Dominic and deepen their relationship to Christ. “There are no cell phones, no emails or texts to check. We don’t watch TV. They comment about how much they are getting done.”
 
A 25-year veteran of teaching, Mother Mary Joseph recently resigned a teaching post that she had for four years at Bismarck’s St. Mary’s Academy to concentrate on teaching the novices courses in Dominican philosophy, St. Thomas’ philosophy, Dominican spirituality and prayer life, Dominican history, canon law and Latin. After making their first profession of vows next summer, the sisters will study at the University of Mary for three years for a teaching degree.
                                                                                                     
Building projects  

Mother Mary Joseph said the new community is progressing as she would like, but space is limited for existing novices and future women visiting and discerning the faith life. Since the St. Mary Sisters started, she said women have come for four or five days to mimic the life of the community as much as possible. It starts with phone conversations.

“Next, we will build a convent. The sisters can be around other girls. There is interest, but nowhere to put everybody,” she said.
 
Its construction will be parallel to when the sisters start their formal teaching education in 2025. The convent project will be located at the intersection of Raymond Street and Rosser Avenue in Bismarck and construction is set to begin in June.
 
Attached will be a teaching institute to teach sisters, she said. Religion classes for some home-schooled children also are planned. The attached building will be an institute to teach sisters how to teach.
 
Mother Mary Joseph has worked with city departments to ensure building plans meet the city code to proceed. Its name will be Lepanto Convent, named after the battle of the same name in which Christian sailors joined Pope Pius V (a Dominican) in praying the rosary and defeated a much larger Turkish force.

“It will be a convent for 12 sisters,” said Mother. She explained that two houses were torn down, and two more older homes will be taken down once their leases are up.
 
The convent will consist of a kitchen, dining room, laundry room, chapel and shared bathroom and library. The Lepanto Convent will be designed to house and train the young sisters to prepare them for teaching, according to the traditions of St. Dominic. 

Cost of the project is $5 million, including demolition of the old properties, she said. The Bismarck Diocese is helping, but more funds must be raised to complete it. “I am doing fundraising by word of mouth. We have some benefactors. People want to give."

She does distribute and send out newsletters to supporters and people she meets often ask about the St. Mary Sisters’ progress.

 The bigger picture

The Lepanto Convent is the first phase of a series of long-term building projects planned. Plans include the St. Joseph Convent to be built on the same property as the Lepanto Convent. It will house 16 sisters. The largest long-term plan involves building Our Lady of Rosary Motherhouse in Bismarck for 200 St. Mary Sisters.
 
After the Motherhouse is built, the St. Joseph Convent will become the house of studies for studying and teaching sisters. Timelines are pending on these larger projects. Though membership is small now, the potential for growth of the order is there, insists Mother Mary Joseph.
                                                                                                                               
The mission

The current four women of St. Mary Sisters aspire to become saints and bring as many souls as possible to heaven through the apostolate of teaching, Mother Mary Joseph explained.
 
“It was the monastic customs, community life and the clear identity of the work/apostolate in education,” said Campbell, of what brought the young women to the religious community in its infancy. 
 
“You are not mutated into something else. You work on the rough spots,” she said."What we have accomplished is getting in place an outline of formation. The level of formation stages is in place,” said Mother Mary Joseph.
 
For more information about the St. Mary Sisters' progress, visit www.stmarysisters.org