05 Mar Former UB Church Becoming a Nunnery

In 1980, the Grayston Avenue UB church in Huntington, Ind., bought the former St. Felix Friary. They changed their name to Good Shepherd UB church, and moved into the former monastery for the next 20 years.

Good Shepherd left the property in 2009 and began meeting in temporary locations. Now using the name The Well, the congregation holds services at the Huntington YMCA while looking for a permanent location.

In 2010, they sold the friary to the Mary Cross Tippman Foundation, run by a Catholic businessman in Fort Wayne, Ind. The foundation poured over $1 million into renovations. The foundation modernized the kitchens and restrooms, upgraded the wiring, painted, brought the facility up to code, and added new pews, statuary, an altar, and other items.

And now, it will become a nunnery. The Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, an order founded 15 years ago and based in Ann Arbor, Mich. They will place about 40 novices in the west wing, which Good Shepherd used a a retreat center. The order states, “Our community exists for the salvation of souls and the building of the Church throughout the world.”

The order, which has about 100 sisters, focuses on teaching. Women joining the order go through an eight-year process before taking their final vows; they all earn a teaching degree during the formation process. The Huntington center, by providing housing for novices in the second and third years of the process, will relieve overcrowding at the main center in Ann Arbor.

The sisters serve in Catholic schools around the country, and currently work in six states: Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, California, and Arizona. According to a local Catholic spokesman, they are very much in demand.

The friary was home to Father Solanus Casey 1946-1956, a Capuchin monk who has gone through the first of three stages toward sainthood in the Catholic church. His second-floor dorm room in the east wing has been kept the way it was when he lived there.