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Nuns Live Unconventionally

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By KELLI KENNEDY, The Associated Press

Published: December 10, 2007

MIAMI - Sister Veronica Rop heard Barry University's convent was unconventional, but a swimming pool?

The two-story building didn't even have a chapel or dining room big enough to fit the roughly two dozen sisters living there. But Rop, who came from Kenya, quickly came to love religious life at her quirky new convent.

The Roman Catholic university bought the old, beige Town and Country Motel for $300,000 in the early 1950s, about a decade after the school was founded. The nuns quickly nicknamed their eccentric convent "The Villa" and the Villa nuns or the Villains, as they're jokingly referred to, have become a beloved part of the university's history.

Little of the building's facade has changed, except sisters instead of guests now frolic in the swimming pool. The beige U-shaped building is covered in palm trees and tropical plants, not a cross in sight. A small statue of the Virgin Mary stands in the front courtyard. Many of the rooms, about 30 in all, have individual kitchenettes and small front porches.

Inside, part of the lobby was converted to a small chapel, though it's only big enough for eight.

"That Villa has had an interesting history," chuckles 85-year-old Sister Mary Arnold Benedetto, who was among the first to move in. "If that Villa could talk."

It might tell stories of the sisters' poolside parties, rowdy evening card games or the time they decided to throw their keys in a canal because they never locked their doors. A janitor was later sent to fish them out.

The Villa is a little quieter these days, with many of the sisters retired from teaching jobs at the school. But a small group of younger nuns from Africa have brought young blood and laughter to this holy hotel.

Barry, which has 7,000 students, first used the motel as a male dormitory, but later turned it into a convent so the nuns could live together instead of spread out in the campus dormitories.

But the sisters say their community has a peaceful reverence.

"Even though we live individually, but at the same time there is that close unity with the sisters that I admire so much," said Sister Emmy Choge, a Kenyan sister working on a nursing degree.

The sisters themselves are as different as the building from a traditional convent.

Benedetto and Sister Dorothy Jehle, who are graying and now walk with canes, grew up in more traditional American religious life, while Choge, 44, lived in an African convent with no electricity. She and the three other African sisters struggled to learn conversational English and South Florida culture. But the barriers have not divided them.

"It's not African sisters and them, but we felt the unity so close to us," says Rop, who came from Kenya and is finishing her master's degree in counseling and theology.

It's little things, like the way Benedetto asks Rop about her family and gives her phone cards so she can call home. Or the way Sister Marie Joannes helps them with math and chemistry.

Rop cleans the apartments of a few older nuns. She and the other African sisters have also taught them songs and dances in their native Swahili and Kalenjin.

In turn, the sisters taught them to swim.

"I remember it was Easter and I was swimming from one end to one end and I did it. I said, 'I am not going to sink,'" said Rop.

Everyone knows the Villa nuns on campus, says assistant vice president for mission and ministry Sister Arlene Scott. "They're like the living heritage of the place."

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