Former Protestant takes final vows as cloistered nun in Spain

Segovia, Spain, Jul 8, 2021 / 11:50 am (CNA).

Sister Evelyn of the Child Jesus took her final vows as a cloistered Dominican nun at the Santo Domingo el Real monastery in Segovia, the community’s first vocation in almost 30 years.

Sister Evelyn was born in Singapore and worked as a flight attendant, according to El Adelantado de Segovia. 

“I had all the luxurious life I wanted, but I realized that nothing could really fulfill me. I was always looking for God, I was looking for the truth, although I was not very religious,” she said.

Evelyn was Protestant and converted to Catholicism through a Catholic friend. She understood that she “wanted to live her whole life for God. Not just to do something good, like a work of charity, but to offer my whole life in union with Jesus.”

Her sense of having a vocation was slowly growing, and at first she thought that she would become a Carmelite sister and enter the Carmelite monastery in Singapore.

However, finding her vocation as a Dominican was a gift from the universality of the Church.

Being a flight attendant allowed her to travel frequently to Rome, and she took the opportunity to pray at the tomb of Saint Catherine of Siena, who is buried in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. 

She also frequented the Missionaries of Charity, who introduced her to the Dominican priest who said daily Mass for them. It was he who put her in contact with the Dominican community in Singapore, where she met some Spanish Dominicans, one of whom was from Segovia and put her in contact with the women’s branch of the Order of Preachers in Spain.

Sister Evelyn explained how responding to her vocation has made her happy: “When I make my response to God and agree with his will, I feel happy. I’m a sinner, but God wants me to act as a sentinel before the world to say ‘God is there, God exists, there is eternity’. I don’t have to talk much, but the existence of a cloistered nun can do more than if I were in the world, for her life of prayer, her life of charity with her sisters … And although many people neither understand our vocation nor know of our existence, the vocation of the cloistered nun in the monastery is like the heart of a man, it’s not visible like the hands, the eyes… but it is vital for the man to live.”

Although it wasn’t easy for Evelyn’s family to accept her vocation, “they do now because they know I’m happy here.”

“The important thing is that God seeks us out, until we realize it … when we begin to feel that something is missing because what we have doesn’t fulfill us, we must be very sincere with ourselves and know what we really want. The call is from God, our part is to pray a lot for them [those who may have a vocation],” she said.

The ceremony for perpetual vows took place in Saint Dominic’s church and was presided by the diocesan vicar for consecrated life, Fr. José Antonio García Ramírez, together with diocesan and Dominican priests.

According to El Adelantado de Segovia, Fr. García stressed that Sister Evelyn’s courage to take “a definitive turn to her life” can only be explained “because God has touched her heart and has come out to meet her, and she has set out on her way.”

Currently the monastery has one postulant who is in the process of discerning her vocation.

The last postulant who entered the monastery and went on to make perpetual vows did so in the 1990s.