The nuns of the Order of Preachers came into being when our Holy Father Dominic gathered women converts to the Catholic faith in the monastery of Blessed Mary of Prouille. These women, free for God alone, he associated with his “holy preaching” by their prayer and penance. Our Holy Father drew up a rule to be followed and constantly showed a father’s love and care for these nuns and for others established later in the same way of life. In fact, “they had no other master to instruct them about the Order.” Finally, he entrusted them as part of the same Order to the fraternal concern of his sons.
—Fundamental Constitution of the Nuns 1.1
I WAS PREACHING AN Advent retreat at one of our cloistered monasteries and the readings at Mass for the Monday of the Second Week are from Isaiah and the Gospel of Luke. I wondered how a cloistered nun would reflect on these reading and how they pertain to the life of a cloistered nun. And so Sr. Mary Baruch of the Advent Heart was born. I “discovered” a journal she had written with her own reflections on these readings and shared them in my homily. The nuns seemed to identify with her, and so she would appear in homilies thereafter. Through her journals, we eventually got to know her family and the story of her own conversion from Judaism. Here the full story can be told.
Sr. Mary Baruch was originally written for Dominican nuns, as I had been chaplain to two of our cloistered monasteries, and familiar with most of the others. But her story has entertained, and I hope, inspired, many beyond the cloister walls: Dominican laity, priests, Sisters, Brothers, Catholic and non-Catholic friends alike.
We welcome a new and revised edition of Sr. Mary Baruch, O.P. The Early Years. There have been a few factual errors in the original which have been corrected, while the storyline remains the same.
I am especially grateful to two of my Dominican brothers, Jonah Teller and Henry Stephan, for their editorial expertise, desire, and diligence in editing and reformatting the entire novel. I am also grateful to the many Sisters who have come to know Sr. Mary Baruch and welcomed her into their hearts, and have offered their personal reflections.
Sr. Mary Baruch is completely fictitious, as is her monastery of Our Lady Queen of Hope in Brooklyn Heights, New York. The Sisters, priests, family, and friends of Sr. Mary Baruch are also completely fictitious, while the churches and places in New York are factual (except for Tea on Thames).
If you have not met Sister Mary Baruch before, the early chapters will introduce you to her and her family and friends, and her coming into the Faith of the Holy Catholic Church. If you are reacquainting yourself with her, you will follow her again into the monastery and the grace-filled life of a Dominican nun. Whether you are reading for the first time or renewing the acquaintance, may you be moved to laughter, to tears, and, most of all, to prayer. May you find something of yourself in Sr. Mary Baruch, who has found that loving God with all one’s heart is “such a blessing.”
Fr. Jacob Restrick, O.P.
October 31, 2015
Vigil of All Saints