Villa Maria sisters grow crops, faith on organic farm in Pa.

By ANN RODGERS

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

VILLA MARIA, Pa.

Standing in a field of cherry-red maize and ripening pumpkins, John Moreira spotted a large insect flying amid the cornstalks.

“See the praying mantis?” said Moreira, director of land management at Villa Maria, the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary in Lawrence County. Part of the Catholic sisters’ ministry is an organic farm, and the mantis will eat pests that eat crops.

“If we used pesticides, they would be the first to die. But they help us. They are part of our team,” he said.

The team is five paid farm workers, supported by an army of volunteers. They help the sisters accomplish their mission of feeding the poor and teaching how to live in harmony with God’s creation. At least half of the produce they grow is given to charity.

Villa Maria, which bridges the Pennsylvania-Ohio border near Youngstown, is a town with its own post office, a 300-acre farm and a 400-acre managed forest. Another 26 acres hold the convent, apartments for the elderly and a vast retreat-and-conference center with amenities ranging from an indoor pool to a 400-seat chapel. It was also the site of the first hospital the sisters founded after they arrived in 1864 and began using their knowledge of herbs to aid victims of smallpox.

“If you think of all the prayer and good works that have been done on this land, you can feel it,” said Juliane Arena, the marketing director for Villa Maria.

Farming and monasticism have been entwined for 1,500 years. In the sixth century. St. Benedict declared, “(T)hey are truly monks if they live by the labor of their hands.”

But the Sisters of the Humility of Mary never farmed in France, where they were founded a decade before emigrating in 1864.

“They knew how to do things like make lace and teach music,” said Sister Joanne Gardner, the archivist and director of communications. Their mission was to educate girls from French villages. But when a missionary priest begged for a few sisters to teach French settlers in the Ohio wilderness, the entire community of 11 sisters responded.

They accepted a gift of wetlands that neither the bishop of Pittsburgh nor the bishop of Cleveland wanted. They farmed it where others had failed.

Until the 1960s, novices worked in the field, tended cattle and collected eggs. Frank Romeo, now 76, began helping in their gardens as a 9-year-old, when his mother worked in the kitchen. In 1955 the sisters hired him to run the farm, where he still volunteers as land manager emeritus.

“It was always organic,” he said, because all farming was until the mid-20th century. In its heyday it had, in addition to vegetables, 12 acres of orchards, 11,000 laying hens, 500 meat chickens, 75 beef cattle and 500 hogs. The Villa Maria community reached its height in the late 1960s with more than 600 sisters. Those who lived at the motherhouse ate their own produce and sold the rest to support their ministries.

But the Catholic religious communities and American farms experienced separate crises, with both facing dramatic declines in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s the sisters couldn’t afford to raise livestock. They dissolved their farm corporation and laid off all workers except Romeo. They told him to grow potatoes and sweet corn for the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

“That was the beginning of our outreach,” he said.

Meanwhile, Sister Barbara O’Donnell was asking God what she should do next. After entering the community in 1965, she spent many years teaching school and religious education before taking a sabbatical in 1990.

During a four-month retreat in the Adirondacks, she became profoundly aware of the beauty of the earth and the changing seasons. She read books on the intersection of environmentalism and faith.

“I was praying for God to direct me for what would be next in my life,” she said. “I woke up one morning and said, ‘Education for the earth.’ I came home, having had what I considered a direct call from God.”

She began researching the history of the farm and learning about its operation from Romeo. She believed the sisters’ mission of cultivating the virtue of humility was directly tied to their cultivation of land, on which they were humbly dependent for God’s providence.

Each year the season ends with a public Harvest Day Celebration, which will be held from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday.