101-year-old St. Anne’s Convent to close

An old mahogany china cabinet. A manual typewriter. A life-size plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and St. Anne — yellowed and flaking.

As these and many other items were hauled down the front steps of the brick convent to a moving van last week, Sister Judith Mandrath remained in prayer inside the tiny chapel on the second floor.

For years, Mandrath and Sister Barbara Drell, who died in 2020 at 88, prayed for more sisters to join them at St. Anne’s Convent on a busy stretch of North La Salle Drive, but there were no takers.

And so it has come to this: the end of the 101-year-old Episcopal convent, Mandrath’s home for more than 30 years.

“We will handle taking care of Sister Judith,” said the Rev. John Heschle, the rector emeritus of St. Paul’s Church by-the-Lake in Rogers Park, referring to the nonprofit corporation that has overseen the order.

Heschle, Mandrath’s friend and the convent’s warden for many years, said the nun will be moving to the North Side by the end of October. He declined to give details.

Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times file

“There is always going to be a sense of loss. It just reminds you of what life is: Things live, they flourish, they perish, they die. But then also they re-form, and they live elsewhere. So all the work they did at St. Anne, it lives somewhere else — in all the lives touched,” said Michael Patrick Murphy, who directs Loyola University-Chicago’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage.

Murphy isn’t an expert on Episcopalian nuns, but he said the Order of St. Anne’s demise is similar to what has happened to Catholic convents across the United States. The church euphemistically calls such closings “completing its work,” he said.

“Orders rise and fall, convents come and go, and still things go on,” he said. “It’s a long tradition.”

Since Drell’s death, Mandrath has been the only nun living in the 3,600-square-foot building. But she isn’t moving out without first putting up a fight.

In March 2021, a church committee of bishops voted to withdraw recognition of the Order of St. Anne in Chicago, noting, among other things, that an order of one nun isn’t an order at all. The rector and wardens of the neighboring Church of the Ascension, which owns the convent building, then sent Mandrath a letter, saying she could stay only until the end of 2021.

Mandrath hired an attorney, who has argued in documents filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County the church is wrong: The Order of St. Anne isn’t extinct because, in addition to Mandrath, it has several sisters who live at a Massachusetts convent.

The church can take possession of the convent only if it’s sold and after giving Mandrath “reasonable time to find another suitable dwelling house,” the attorney, Richard C. Baker, wrote the church’s lawyer last year.

Mandrath has declined recent requests to talk to the Chicago Sun-Times. Baker did not return a call seeking comment.

“We are thankful for the Order of St. Anne’s century of ministry in Chicago, and we are saddened that they are no longer active among us. The Church of the Ascension strives to carry on the sisters’ tradition of care for our community, and we draw inspiration from the legacy they have given us,” the Rev. Thomas Heard, Church of the Ascension’s interim director, said in a statement.

Cook County Chancery Division Judge Anna Demacopoulos, who’s been handling the case, told the Sun-Times the matter was recently settled.

A 1946 trust that funded the convent, the Church of the Ascension and a religious school in Tennessee will now fund only the church and the school, according to a court order signed this week.

Heschle said Mandrath will continue her work as a hospital chaplain and at a North Side facility helping women who are overcoming drug and alcohol addiction.

And she will continue to wear her gray-and-white habit, “which is symbolic of the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in the rule of life in the Order of St. Anne,” he said.