Nuns on the Net
Source: David Monniaux - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
Spain's barefoot nuns put faith in YouTube to find new convent recruits
For the 11 remaining "Barefoot Carmelite" nuns at the San Jose convent in Ecija, near the southern Spanish city of Seville, the future looked grim.No young novices had joined the convent for three years and, as is happening in convents all over Spain, their numbers were dwindling so fast as the elder ones died that it looked as though it may have to close after almost 400 years.
Now the nuns have found salvation by breaking out of their cloistered world with the help of internet video site You Tube.
The convent's mother superior, Mother Isabel, was persuaded by friends that the best way to recruit new nuns would be to put up a video on YouTube to show how life was lived inside Ecija's 14th-century Mudéjar palace-turned-convent.
Thousands of YouTube visits later, not only has the phone been ringing almost continuously, but the first new novice has walked through the doors after seeing the video online.
"These days there are very few people who know what it is like to be a cloistered nun," explained Mother Isabel. "If the rest of the world is on the internet, then why shouldn't we be there, too?"
The video shows footage of the nuns praying, sewing and baking cakes, while a series of uplifting messages tell viewers about the joys of a cloistered existence.
Silence, solitude and the grilles that allow them to talk to, but not see, visitors, are not so bad, the nuns claim. They suggest, however, that potential novices ask themselves just how convinced, and tough, they are.
"We want people to know what we do here and if that means someone else wants to join us, then all the better," said Mother Isabel. One thing new novices cannot see, once they have joined up, however, is YouTube.
"We don't have internet in the convent, nor time for it," explained Mother Isabel. "We trusted friends to make it. We haven't seen the video ourselves."
Vocabulary:
barefoot -
grim (adj) -
to dwindle -
look as though -
to break out of (jail) -
not only .... but .... -
footage (n) -
to sew -
uplifting (adj) -
the joys -
the grilles -
to claim -
tough (adj) -
all the better -
to join up -
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