Behind the walls from Hunts Point on Vimeo.
By Andrea Callard
Early on a recent Sunday morning, Hunts Point was quiet enough to hear the difference between the sound of a candy wrapper and of a plastic bag scudding across the street in the wind. Very few people were out and about, but the starlings and the sparrows were singing.
Though it was still wintry, just outside the entrance of the Corpus Christi Monastery on Lafayette Avenue a mature magnolia tree displayed large furry buds. The bells rang, as they do several times each day, to signal transitions in the inner life of the monastery.
Contained and secluded in their compound of old stone buildings with stained glass windows, a cloister and gardens, 16 Sisters of St. Dominic live a communal life. They maintain a practice of prayer, work, and penance.
St. Dominic was a visionary who protected poor women from heresy 800 years ago. In return, they prayed for preaching friars, a tradition that continues in the monastery to this day.
The nuns say their effort focuses on lifting hearts. (Requests for prayers may be e-mailed to corpuschristiny@bronxop.org).
Sunday mass at 8:15 a.m. is open to the outside community. It is celebrated with songs and prayers in a sanctuary that is full of light. On a recent Sunday, a visiting priest connected scripture with the news of violence carried out in the name of God. The prayers included people suffering in Iraq.
Sister Mary Grace has been cloistered for 43 years. The Corpus Christi Monastery is her third monastic community. A religious and liturgical artist, who makes prints, paints, and sculpts in stone, her work has gradually developed in tandem with her spiritual practice in a daily rhythm of prayer and work.
Moreover, Sister Mary Grace is an artist with a marketing plan. She has acquired the digital skills necessary to reach beyond the walls of the monastery and to share her gifts with communities that buy art through the Internet. Members of her family in Cincinnati maintain her website and sales effort. As sales increase, she hopes to make a greater contribution towards sustaining the monastery, and she is considering possibilities for future exhibitions.
Sister Mary Grace came to Hunts Point a year and a half ago, after her two previous monasteries closed. She said Corpus Christi seemed the right community for her, and it also offered a large studio.
The Corpus Christi Monastery has plenty of space. It was built with the idea that 70 nuns would live there. As times have changed and the numbers have shrunk, new activities have filled the rooms where nuns used to sleep.
Now the monastic community visualizes a future linked to the vision of a thriving Hunts Point. The sisters are considering the best ways to share their spiritual power, their central location and their long history in the area. They will be opening a gift shop for art works. A plan to build a spiritual retreat center is also under consideration.
There are plenty of obstacles, however. Truck drivers and prostitutes carry on noisily just outside the walls, disturbing the peace. And funds are scarce.
Commanding a high point on seven acres, the compound and gardens were designed to demonstrate the power of beauty. The buildings of stone and wood with many arched and stained glass windows were built to last, with the kind of workmanship that is now only affordable to the extremely wealthy institutions and individuals.
The monastery is large and expensive to operate. Once it had wealthy patrons. Years ago, the wife of the Mayor Hugh J. Grant was one. The nuns produced beautiful designs for her Christmas card every year. Today, buy replicas of their designs are included in Sister Mary Grace’s line of note cards.
Now, though, because it is situated in an extremely poor area, the neighbors do not contribute greatly to the costs of operation.
This summer 11 of the Sisters from Corpus Christi will travel to Michigan to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the Dominican Order and the long tradition of cloistered nuns in Christianity.
The order came to the United States in 1880, after New Yorker Julia Crooks joined it in France, becoming Mother Mary of Jesus. She founded the Monastery of St. Dominic in Newark, N.J.
Nine years later, when Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan sought the a contemplative community of nuns to pray for the seminarians and priests of the Archdiocese of New York, Mother Mary of Jesus and five other sisters moved to the Hunts Point.
The Newark Monastery closed recently, making the Bronx compound the oldest Dominican monastery in the nation.
A version of this story appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of The Hunts Point Express.