‘Jesus
is not going to let me down’
By Barbara Fitzgerald
Special to the CS&T
There was a certain glimmer to one postulant’s dress that was unlike
any other worn by the young women entering the Sisters of Saint Joseph
convent in the fall of 1920.
The convent’s instructions stated clearly that the dress of the
Philadelphia order should be made of “coarse, flax serge.”
But of course, Sister Florentine Scanlon, recalled recently, “my
father would have none of that.”
So 17-year-old Helen Scanlon entered the religious life garbed in a more
luxuriant French serge habit, hand-sewn by her mother.
“My fellow postulants called me ‘the rich postulant’
for fun,” she said. “I don’t know how I got away with
that.”
This September, Sister Florentine, now 103 and a resident of St. Joseph
Villa, will have given 86 years of her life to Jesus Christ.
She entered the order of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia in
the days when the sisters rose at 5:30 a.m. for morning mediation, ate
meals in silence, wore elaborate habits and taught classes sometimes bursting
with 100 students.
Now, although her sight is going and her hearing is not what it was, Sister
Florentine is still happy in her life.
“Only God can give real happiness, and I’ve experienced that,”
she said. “I’ve really experienced the peace of God in my
vocation, and that’s all that counts.”
Sister Florentine spent most of her life in the classroom, educating hundreds
of students. She can still recall many of them, with their unique joys
and trials.
When she reached the age of 70, and was no longer able to teach, she worked
part-time for many years in various school offices.
Now, her job is to pray.
“I can’t be active in an ‘active’ way. But I can
pray for people, and that’s charity,” she said. “And
that’s what I do.”
Sister Florentine decided at the age of 5 that she wanted to be like the
women she had seen in picture books of the saints — the women who
wore veils and dedicated themselves to “helping the Lord with His
work.” But it was not easy selling that plan to her parents.
Born to John and Frances Scanlon in 1903, Helen Scanlon was one of nine
children, She was the second daughter the Scanlons named Helen —
the first, a “precocious little, curly-headed blonde,” died
of the whooping cough at age 3.
“My father was walking her, She coughed, and he bent down to kiss
her, and she slumped. She died in his arms,” Sister Florentine said.
“My mother said she just had to have another Helen.”
Of course, as Sister Florentine recalls it, she was nothing like that
first little Helen. “I came along with straight black hair, and
big black eyes,” she said. “My father was shocked.”
As she grew older, she liked to sit in her sister’s room, reading
about the saints — especially the patron saints of all her siblings.
She went through them all, but when she got to her younger sister Irene,
she was stumped: “I couldn’t find a St. Irene.”
“‘I’m going right downstairs and tell Mom she did not
give me a saint’s name,’” Irene said, storming off in
a huff. Their mother had the perfect answer: “Irene, you were given
the prettiest name of all. You are Irene Marie. You’re named after
the Blessed Mother.”
Meanwhile, young Helen discovered that her own patron saint had been acclaimed
for finding the true cross of Christ.
Helen and Irene became so close that when it was time for Helen to leave
the family to enter the religious life, Irene tried physically to stop
her.
While their mother, father and older sister, Peg, sat stoically on a couch
downstairs in the convent, Irene held her hands and begged her to change
her mind.
“Helen, please don’t go,” Irene sobbed, as Helen struggled
to go up the stairs.
Earlier, their father had also tried to get Helen to reconsider her decision.
He asked her to think about marriage, and he insisted that she work outside
their home before entering the convent. She agreed to take a job as secretary
for a chemical company, and was so good at her work that when her boss
was promoted, he offered to take her to his new office in New York.
But Helen always had other plans, and they involved that postulant’s
dress, and a life dedicated to Christ. So, eventually, she turned down
her boss, her father, and even her dearly-loved sister, who still cried
and pleaded on the day she finally walked up the convent stairs to her
new life.
Her sister Peg told her later that her father had said to their mother:
“If only I had seen a tear in her eye.”
“What then?” their mother asked. “What would you have
done?”
“If I had seen a tear in her eye, I would have picked her up and
carried her out to the car,” he replied.
“God gave me the grace to do it,” Sister Florentine said.
“My heart was aching, but I had the grace to do it.”
When she entered the order, she recalled, one of its superiors said to
her: “You’re intelligent, you’re beautiful and you’re
healthy — and may we get many more like you.” Life as a postulant
and as a young sister was not easy, but it was full of new things for
her to do, and learn.
Shortly after she entered the Sisters of Saint Joseph, she compiled a
list of names she might like as a new member of the order. She suggested
Helen, Francis, John — all names of the beloved patron saints that
she had researched so earnestly as a child. She especially liked the name
Gertrude, which she had taken at her confirmation —she remembered
a nun preparing the confirmation class had said Jesus promised that anyone
with that name “will never see the flames of hell.”
But when she was called to receive her name from the mistress of novices,
she was given the name Florentine.
The young woman who had studied the lives of the canonized saints was
named after the best friend of the mistress of novices, a friend who had
died young: “She said that Florentine was a saint — but that
she would never be canonized, She said, ‘I’m giving her charge
over you. She’ll take good care of you.’”
As a lay sister of the order, Sister Florentine’s namesake had been
hard at work when the influenza epidemic of 1918 hit Philadelphia —
an epidemic so pervasive that the seminarians were asked to go out and
help dig graves. Florentine accompanied the young men, serving them coffee
and hot chocolate, until she, too, contracted the influenza, and died.
After her death, other Sisters of St. Joseph asked the mistress of novices
why she did not immediately give the name Florentine to one of the novices.
“When I meet the right person, I’ll give it out,” she
replied.
“I guess I was the right person,” Sister Florentine said.
Since she did not have an official feast day, the mistress of novices
told her, “I’ll give you the Little Flower’s [St. Thérèse
of Lisieux’s] feast day.”
She believes that St. Thérèse has been looking after her
ever since.
Once as a young sister, for instance, when she was asked to ready the
dining room for Christmas, she saw that the table-covers needed cleaning,
but could not remove the stains.
In an act of faith and desperation, she put the cloths into a sudsy bucket,
unclasped her necklace with the medal of the Little Flower on it, and
placed the medal in the bucket, imploring St. Thérèse’s
help in getting the table-covers clean.
Then she had to leave for school. When she returned, she rushed to the
basement to check on the table cloths — and found “they were
as white as snow.”
Life in their community was different then, Sister Florentine said. The
sisters kept a schedule almost as rigorous as cloistered nuns, rising
at 5:30 a.m. to pray for an hour before attending Mass.
“My years in the convent were — like my childhood and girlhood
— very, very happy,” Sr. Florentine wrote in a brief personal
history for her community.
“In spite of the ups and downs, I never regretted entering religious
life. Teaching had become my delight, and I’ve enjoyed cordial relations
with the children’s parents, especially when mothers came for advice
and I could help them,” she said.
She went on to tell her convent sisters: “Unforgettable are the
countless times I met the father of a sick child, or arranged a Mexican
Christmas play, or visited an ailing parent.”
She knew she had a talent for teaching, and she wanted to join the Sisters
of Saint Joseph from the time she encountered them in elementary school
in Chester.
She attended public school until the fifth grade, when the sisters came
to the local parish school. Then, she said, “I begged to go there.”
The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia were founded around 1650 in
France, and were among the first orders to provide religious life for
women outside the cloister, according to a published history.
The French Revolution dispersed the congregation, five of whom were guillotined.
The sisters later regrouped, and they came to America in 1836, originally
settling in St. Louis, Mo.
A group of St. Joseph sisters headed to Philadelphia in 1847 to run St.
John’s Orphanage for Boys. With the advice and support of their
bishop, St. John Neumann, they bought their first novitiate and academy
in McSherrystown in 1854.
They bought the residence in Chestnut Hill in 1858 that would become the
site for the first Mount Saint Joseph Academy. The order continues to
grow.
From the time Sister Florentine entered the community, her love for books
and teaching were a perfect fit.
Now, she said, she waits patiently for whatever God has next in mind for
her: “I love the part of the Mass that says, ‘We wait in joyful
hope for the coming of our Lord. …’
“I am waiting until He beckons for me. ... I wait in joyful hope,”
Sister Florentine said. “It takes trust. I trust our Lord. He has
brought me this far. He is not going to let me down now.”
Barbara Fitzgerald is a freelance writer and a parishioner of St. Ignatius
in Yardley. She can be reached at babsfitz@earthlink.net.