“Sisters return to Gallatin after 40-year absence”
Prayers were answered and a tradition was reborn when Sisters Martha Ann Titus Grace Mary Luc and Mary Martha Hetzler arrived in Gallatin six months ago to teach at St. John Vianney Catholic School.
The sisters relocated from the St. Cecilia Motherhouse convent in Nashville. St. John Vianney, which originally opened its doors in 1949, closed in 1965 due to the lack of sisters available from the St. Cecilia convent to teach.
Unable to hire lay teachers at the time, the parishioners were forced to close the school and the sisters went back to the convent in Nashville.
[...] Four decades and many prayers later, the school reopened in 2003 in a new state-of-the-art facility with an enrollment capacity for 250 students in grades K-8.Unexpected growth — 10 to 15 new sisters annually — at Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia was another factor that prompted the sisters’ return to Gallatin.
It’s a contrarian story about religious vocations and how the growth of a particular order is having ripple effects for the Church around them.
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I attended elementary school with these Sisters a few hours East of there, now in the Diocese of Knoxville, TN. I recently visited my former home parish (my parents have since moved out of the parish) over Christmas and found that they have more Sisters staffing the school than when I was there and they are all younger. This order is truly doing amazing things and I, as a seminarian, was warmly greeted by thanks for answering God’s call and by sincere promises of prayers from these women religious. The more I look at orders like these, and the Sisters of Life that I saw just last week in DC at the March for Life, the better I feel about the future state of affairs for the church. I recognize the challenges present in our current state of affairs; however, I can only be encouraged by the thoughts of a more glorious future based on my interactions with women like those of the St Cecilia Dominicans.