Threshold - Winter 2004

Sister Suzanne Fitzmaurice Makes Monastic Profession

“I had all the things that the world says are signs that you’ve made it, but there was a deep part of me that wasn’t being filled.”

Sister Suzanne Fitzmaurice, who made her monastic profession on June 27 at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas, sees her decision as a simple one. She had everything she needed materially, a satisfying job, good relationships and the possibility of marriage.

Raised in a solidly Catholic family in Omaha, she attended Catholic schools and participated in youth retreats and church activities. She eventually chose a career as a youth minister herself. While working at a parish in Clear Lake, Texas, she often found herself thinking about giving more of herself. However, the message she thought she was hearing was not one she was eager to heed.

“I’m really stubborn,” she laughs, “and managed to ignore it for many months.” After a dream in which everything she had was stolen, she knew she could not continue to avoid such thoughts. She eventually decided to visit some communities. Because of her love of parish ministry, she assumed that she was called to an apostolic community. “I didn’t think that Benedictine life was for me,” she admits. “My uncle, who is a Benedictine monk in Illinois, made me promise to at least look at one monastery.”

A visit to Atchison changed everything. “It wasn’t what I thought I was looking for, but it turned out to be everything I couldn’t name. The first time I prayed in the chapel, I was not just full but overflowing with a sense of all I could be.” After further prayer and more visits, she came to the community in 1998. The perpetual monastic profession this summer is the final step in the long process of deciding that this is the place and the people that will be hers for the rest of her life.

The ceremony was attended by many loved ones, including students and teachers from Notre Dame de Sion High School in Kansas City, Missouri, where she currently teaches. She frequently brings the young women from there to the Mount for retreats at Sophia Center. She believes that she can show them important values to take back into their own world. She sees this as exposing them to a counterculture within the culture, not separate from the world but another way of living in the world. “Our monastic life demonstrates balance and reverence in a world which keeps telling teenagers that excess is the norm. I try to give them an appreciation for silence in all the noise, to pray and get to know God. The girls see that I, and the other sisters they meet, are happy and they see our love.”

She is optimistic about the future of her community and of religious life. “If this lifestyle were to die, it wouldn’t be because kids don’t appreciate it or aren’t spiritual, but because they just haven’t been exposed to it. That’s why I want to bring them here to see a new way of life.” Sister Suzanne herself shows them by her joy and enthusiasm that her monastic commitment has changed everything for her and that now she knows what she really needed in life.

Photos of Sister Suzanne's profession