In a day filled with grace and community, family and friends and after 10 years of discernment – one as a postulant, two as a novice, and six under temporary vows – Sister Philomena Clare made her final profession June 10 as a member of the Franciscans Sisters, Third Order Regular, of Penance of the Sorrowful Mother.
“I wasn’t prepared for it to be as glorious as it was,” Sister Philomena Clare, the community’s vocations director, told the Catholic Review. “I was so disposed to receive grace and (God’s) love for me, but also ready to give my whole life to him. I was running on grace the whole day but never felt tired.”
Sister Philomena Clare, born Judith Christa De Hitta, first experienced a vocation call when she took part in Mount2000, a Eucharist-focused weekend retreat for high school teens hosted by Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg. There she learned to pray lectio divina and develop a personal relationship with God through Scripture.
Her parents were participating in a charismatic community in Frederick at the time, and she was starting to experience the Holy Spirit at the charismatic prayer meetings she attended.
She attended Church of the Resurrection in Ellicott City and taught fourth-grade religious education for a while. She was homeschooled through high school, where she also learned about Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
“We are made to give ourselves away, to be a gift,” she said. “Either vocation would require grace,” she said of marriage or the religious life. “I needed to know what God had called me for.”
Initially she thought she would attend college and live in the world for a while. She entered community college, but after the first semester decided to take a break to discern her vocation. “I knew the Lord was calling me to choose the better part,” she said, referring to Luke 10:42.
Friends and family were largely supportive of her decision to become a religious sister, she said.
She looked at communities in Baltimore and a friend gave her a catalog of communities put out by the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious. It was then that she had a “eureka” moment. She saw a picture of her now-community of sisters worshiping in the Spirit before the Eucharist.
“I had a desire to worship before him in the Eucharist, heaven on earth,” she said, “and I saw these sisters doing that. I was absolutely captivated by that picture.”
She visited other communities, but she could feel a difference with the Franciscan Sisters Third Order Regular in Toronto, Ohio. It felt like home. She was drawn to the community’s spirituality of being with Our Lady at the foot of the cross and its emphasis on contemplation, harkening back to the early days of the Franciscan order.
The highlight of the Mass was making her final vows. She and Sister June Benedicta placed their hands in the hands of Mother Della Marie, and after the profession, Bishop Jeffrey Monforton of the Diocese of Steubenville, Ohio, spoke to them and prayed over them.
“Every reading had meaning for me,” she said. “I really felt at that moment that the Lord was professing his vows to me. ‘I will continue to help you with these vows.’ I was overcome with emotion at this point.”
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