San Francisco socialite Ann Russell Miller spent her early adult years chairing benefit galas, vacationing on yachts along the Mediterranean. But when her husband died, Miller took vows of silence and poverty to become Sister Mary Joseph.
When Brother Frederic Collins arrived at the abbey of Gethsemani, he was a product of his upbringing. A businessman with a degree in business, he was uncritical of U.S. free-market capitalism. Then he met Merton.
Around the Felician world, gripping news trickled out from their convent in Livonia, Michigan, last March, of sisters becoming sick and being hospitalized.