On May 5th, we celebrated Sr. Maggie, Sr. Jen, and Sr. Mia receiving the habit and beginning the two-year period of formation known as novitiate. During this time, the new sisters will focus on deepening their prayer lives and learning more about religious life in preparation for professing temporary vows. Please enjoy the highlights below and keep our new novices in your prayers! New veils, habits, and cords for our soon-to-be-novices all lined up and waiting in the chapel Maggie before Morning Prayer begins Nervous, excited energy waiting for Morning Prayer to begin! The Novitiate Entr ..read more

We were blessed to be a host site for another year of St. Clement Parish’s Annual Service Day. This year, about 40 volunteers came in on a Saturday in late April to help us bag food for our food pantry and prepare the gardens for spring planting. Check out this article from Chicago Catholic for more details and to see pictures of the work at the Mission ..read more

Reflection by Sr. Jess Many people are often surprised to hear that we sew our religious habits (garments) in house. And yet – upon learning that some of us do exercise the homesteading / pre-modern skill of sewing – they often shake their heads in approval – as if they would have expected nothing less of such medieval-dressed people! It is true that our fashion has not changed in 800 years. In fact, we intentionally modeled the design of our habit after St. Francis’ own garment which is on display in Assisi. Thankfully, our habits get replaced before they are as patchy as his! Br. Matt ..read more

Sr. Alicia recently wrote a beautiful reflection on her experience of the connections between living Franciscan poverty and living a Eucharistic life. Read the full reflection here: https://review.catechetics.com/spiritual-life-poverty-purity-heart-eucharistic-living ..read more

This Easter season, Sr. Alicia will be helping to lead a 7-week video series aimed at helping people to enter more deeply into the mysteries present in each and every Mass. The series, “Beautiful Light: A Paschal Mystagogy”, is produced by the National Eucharistic Revival. You can tune in via livestream on the Eucharist Revival’s Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram accounts at 7pm CST, Thursday nights from April 4 to May 16. The Catholic News Agency ran an article highlighting this exciting new endeavor that you can read here ..read more

Happy Easter! Please enjoy these short video reflections from Bishop Bob, produced by the Archdiocese of Chicago for the Triduum 2024 ..read more

It has been a busy season of Franciscan hospitality this winter! We have enjoyed hosting a variety of groups. Here was the lineup: In January and February, we hosted two different young adult discernment retreats, one from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and another from the Kalamazoo diocese. We love supporting our young people to hear and heed the call of God for their lives! At the end of January, we hosted a weekend retreat for a longtime partner of ours, St. Agnes of Bohemia. They brought around 25 candidates for the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA) (formerly known ..read more

Reflection by Sr. Alicia I am not totally sure how my parents felt when I told them I’d signed up for the 3 AM hour of prayer on Good Friday when I was 16 years old. Our parish had invited us to “watch an hour” with Jesus, and I certainly didn’t want him to be alone for one minute. There was only one small detail I’d neglected to consider: I didn’t have a driver’s license yet! But I remember my father quietly driving me to church that dark New England night without any sense of tension, and to this day I have no idea what he was thinking as he watched from the back pew as I silently knelt befo ..read more

This January, we hit a community milestone and officially sponsored our first booth at a FOCUS SEEK Conference! This year’s conference was hosted in St. Louis and had nearly 20,000 attendees. Sr. Alicia, Sr. Jaime, Sr. Jess, and Sr. Laura represented our community and had the chance to encounter so many young people. They ran into old friends who had come on spring break or summer service trips to the Mission years ago and now were campus ministers, missionaries, priests, seminarians, priests, and religious! Our booth was situated right in the middle of a number of other religious communitie ..read more

Merry Christmas! The month of December at Mission OLA was been filled with so many preparations and special events to help our neighbors have a beautiful celebration of Christmas and hopefully enter more deeply into the true meaning of the season. Thanks to the generosity of so many supporters and volunteers, we estimate that this year we distributed over 7000 individual Christmas gifts to over 3000 individual people over the course of SIX different neighborhood Christmas celebrations! Please keep scrolling to enjoy some highlights of Christmas 2023: Donations and Preparing Christmas Gifts In ..read more