Marian Sisters move to new Santa Rosa convent

Marian Sisters move to new Santa Rosa convent

A conversation with Reverend Mother Teresa Christe as the Marian Sisters of Santa Rosa approach significant milestones in their young history.

February 5, 2021 Jim Graves - Catholic World Report

Catholicism first came to northern coastal California, in what today makes up the Diocese of Santa Rosa, both from missionary priests and the Ursuline Sisters of Ohio, who came to establish an all-girls school in the 1880s. Upon arrival, the sisters recognized that a more immediate need was to catechize the children of the pioneers who inhabited the region. After they began, the bishop of San Francisco, who oversaw the area at the time, recognized the crucial work of the sisters and began sending his priests to establish parishes where the sisters had been. The Diocese of Santa Rosa would eventually be established in 1962, and today numbers 140,000 Catholics.

The Ursulines were the dominant women’s religious community in the diocese for decades, but today, other than a few retirees living independently in the area, have withdrawn from the region. Filling the void has been a new, rapidly growing community of nuns, the Marian Sisters of Santa Rosa, who view the first Santa Rosa Ursulines as their forebears and see their role as continuing the work of the Ursulines, related the Marian Sisters’ superior, Reverend Mother Teresa Christe. In fact, the Marian Sisters regularly go to the Santa Rosa gravesites of those first Usulines to pray the Rosary and connect with them.

CWR featured the Marian Sisters in 2014; click here to read the story of their establishment. Since their founding, the Marian Sisters have gone from four members to 18, with several more slated to enter the community in August.

In the upcoming months the Marian Sisters will celebrate two milestones in the establishment of their community: 1) in March, their relocation to a larger convent built in 1957 which they purchased and which once housed the Ursuline Sisters, and 2) in January 2022, the 10-year anniversary of their founding. Reverend Mother Teresa Christe recently spoke to CWR about the Marian Sisters’ work.

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