A Visa Battle Pits Homeland Security
Against Ohio Nuns

MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS / Wall Street Journal 19sep03

CLEVELAND—All day and all night, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration pray: That the sick will be healthy. That the warlike will be peaceful. That the hungry will be fed. And that the Department of Homeland Security won't deport Sister Mary Cecilia and Sister Mary Catherina.

The case of the South Korean novices pits a dwindling order of cloistered Ohio nuns, who see foreign recruits as their best hope of institutional survival, against a bureaucracy that insists Sisters Cecilia and Catherina haven't proved they qualify for religious-worker visas. "May the Holy Spirit guide you in all the urgent decisions you have to make," the order's Cleveland abbess, Mother Mary James, suggested in a letter to the department's Citizenship and Immigration Services in July.

There's no doubt that the Poor Clares are religious or that they are workers. The sisters send a steady stream of prayer heavenward, 24 hours a day. At least one nun in the order is talking to God at any given time, usually kneeling before the host in the screened-off choir of St. Paul Shrine church, hidden from view of the few regular churchgoers. Even those nuns not on adoration duty spend much of their time at prayer. Novitiates, such as the Korean sisters, rise at 5:30 a.m. and pray at least eight hours a day.

There are the usual Divine Offices, the novenas and the rosaries. But the Poor Clares' special obligation is to pray on behalf of others, in response to specific requests that pour in by phone, post and e-mail.

"My son Mark (age 14) who begins high school today," says one handwritten prayer request posted in the hallway outside the chapel.

"For Sam to find job," asks another note. "He's very depressed because of lack of work."

A third pleads for intercession on behalf of Julie, "on crack cocaine and in the street."

In addition, every hour, the sisters ask the Holy Spirit to guide President Bush's decisions. And there's a daily 10-minute prayer for Cleveland. The sisters rarely see the city they pray for: They leave the cloister only to see a doctor or on other urgent business. They survive on donations and by packaging holy wafers for other parishes.

Theirs is not a calling that many hear these days. Founded in France in 1856, the Poor Clares were named for a 13th-century saint who jettisoned her family's wealth for a life of pious poverty. The order came to America around World War I, and at its peak the Cleveland monastery had about 50 sisters. Today, it's down to 13 fully professed nuns, the two Korean novitiates, and two postulants preparing to be novices. Old sisters are dying faster than young sisters are enlisting.

"Our life is very hard," says Mother James. "Not many girls want to enter a cloister and lock themselves up for life." Especially in the U.S.: Eight of the sisters are Americans; the others are from India, Ireland, Japan and Colombia. A roster so short makes it difficult to fill the Cleveland order's prayer schedule, and that's one reason the sisters consider it so important to secure visas for the Korean women.

The Korean nuns, who are siblings, and the order's pro bono attorney, Donald J. O'Connor, worry that deportation is near. "Since Sept. 11, they're more careful about who they let in," says Mother James, who has been in the monastery for 38 years. "But I don't think two little nuns are going to do the government any harm."

Other religious organizations say they, too, believe the immigration authorities have been pulling up the drawbridge since the terrorist attacks two years ago.

"They've been requiring more documentation than they normally do for these visas—reams of documentation, requiring all sorts of information, such as what they get as compensation," says J. Kevin Appleby, director of migration and refugee policy at the U.S. Catholic Conference. "These nuns aren't even compensated."

Sister Margaret, director of religious immigration services for the Conference's Catholic Legal Immigration Network, says that in the latest five months, her office received 71 requests for further evidence on the 725 religious-worker-visa applications it is handling. She says her office now gets four times as many requests weekly as it did prior to 9/11.

Sister Cecilia, born 44 years ago as In Sim Yu, has been a nun for more than 15 years, previously with orders active in community work. But when the women's father died, she began thinking about a more contemplative life, and secured a visa to India, where the Poor Clares have several monasteries. "Through this way of living, we thought we could concentrate on serving God and serving life," she says from behind a white, wrought-iron grill in the Cleveland monastery's small visiting room.

Her sister, In Suen Yu, now 28 and called Sister Catherina, had worked in a blanket factory for a couple of years but felt the pull of the divine when her family donated her deceased father's eyes to someone in need. "I'm not educated," says Sister Catherina, with the help of a translator. "I don't have the background to succeed in society. I'm poor and simple, and I can use those qualities to help those in need through prayer." As she speaks, she wipes her moist eyes. "Upon your death, those things that make you pretty don't mean much—they turn to dust," she says. "I'd rather give more while I'm alive. Afterward, there's nothing to give."

The women lived in an Indian monastery until their visas expired, and then spent time in a Poor Clares hostel in Japan, where the order is down to one elderly sister named Mary Agatha. Their idea was to start the first Poor Clares monastery in Korea. That required further education in the ways of the order, however, so Sister Agatha helped them get tourist visas, renewable for up to 10 years, from the U.S. consulate in Osaka.

Mr. O'Connor, the lawyer, soon applied to the immigration service to have the visas converted to religious-workers' permits. Those applications included a letter from Mother James saying the sisters had been with the Poor Clares for a year and a half and a letter from the former bishop of Pusan, their South Korean hometown, saying they had been in the process of joining the order for two years.

In June, however, the immigration service rejected their requests, and spokesman Chris Bentley says that, as things stand, their appeals aren't likely to be approved, either. Mr. Bentley says the crackdown doesn't have anything to do with would-be terrorists. Rather, he says, the law requires religious workers to prove that they have been continuously employed in the field for the previous two years, and that the service deemed the letters from the abbess and bishop too vague and inconsistent to offer that proof. "We have no evidence ... that verifies that the two years of continuous ... employment have indeed occurred," he says.

Catholic Conference officials say the authorities often refuse to count the time religious workers spend preparing to take vows as part of the two-year requirement. A recent meeting with immigration-service officials has left them hopeful that the service will ease up on religious workers, Conference officials add.

But Mr. O'Connor says he can't get anyone at the service to tell him what documentation the service will accept. Mother James and Mr. O'Connor contacted the offices of Ohio's U.S. senators, who say the two-year law is immutable and the matter is in the immigration service's hands.

The senior nuns worry that the sisters, if deported, will have nowhere to continue the five-year process of becoming full-fledged Poor Clares. They have no home or work in Korea. They won't be allowed back into India. And Sister Agatha, the sole Poor Clare in Japan, recently had a stroke. So every day, Sister Mary Joseph, the novice directress, leads Sisters Cecilia and Catherina in what the Poor Clares do best. "Lord, may all the paperwork pass through so we can get the visas that will enable us to stay here," they pray.

--Marjorie Valbrun in Washington contributed to this article.