“Developing the habit of wonder:” Sister Maria Angelico (‘19) Passes on the Liberal Arts to the Next Generation
Ironically, discerning a religious vocation with the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist is what first brought Sister Maria Angelico Brooks, OP (‘19) to Wyoming Catholic College. “I had first visited the college when my oldest brother was in high school and was looking into attending himself,” said Sister. “I was familiar with the school community, the liberal arts education, the unique outdoor leadership program and the deeply Catholic culture. As a senior in high school, I began to consider entering the Dominican Sisters after graduation.” As things worked out, she was not able to enter immediately after high school and needed to wait a year. The vocation director recommended that she continue her education in college. “One of the first places that came to mind was Wyoming Catholic. It quickly became clear that this was God’s will for me and I ended up staying not just for one year, but all four years.”
Ever since she was young, Sister Maria Angelico sensed a call to religious life, “a desire to respond totally to God by giving myself entirely to Him.” Her understanding of discerning a religious vocation grew as she entered middle and high school. She recounts that she “encountered the Lord Jesus in a profound way through His Eucharistic Presence at my parish and retreats, and through the example of priests and religious my family knew. I encountered Him through my parish life, my studies, through reading lives of the saints.” All this eventually led her to the Community she would one day enter, the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. Their “very name sums up all the ways the Lord invited me to Him,” she says. “We are Dominicans, who study to know the Truth and to proclaim it, we have a special devotion to the Eucharist and to Our Lady…I was drawn to our Community and planned to enter as soon as possible. But the Lord had other plans, and He led me to Wyoming for the second part of my journey.”
At WCC, Sister Maria Angelico continued to grow in her love for the intellectual life, “according to the great tradition given to us – through the Great Books curriculum.” But the thought of religious life did not go away during her years in college, but remained. After graduation in 2019, it became clear that the Lord was again inviting her to take the next step “and to trust Him.” She attended her last discernment retreat with the Community in the fall and began the application process. “I was accepted and then began the next journey of religious life!”
In August of 2020, Sister Maria Angelico entered the Community as a postulant, where she spent one year living the life alongside the sisters and getting to know the Community. After this first year of discernment, the next step in the process of becoming a fully-professed religious is entrance into the novitiate. In the novitiate, Sister Maria Angelico received the Dominican habit and her religious name. After two years as a novice, she made her First Profession of the Vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in July of 2023 along with seven other sisters who entered the same year. At this point, Sister Maria Angelico explains that the sisters are then sent to begin serving in an apostolate or continuing further studies in preparation for teaching.
While being a part of the Dominican Order, which has been around for over 800 years, the Community Sister Maria Angelico belongs to is relatively “young” and was founded in 1997. “As consecrated women religious, our primary goal is union with God, lived out through a common life of prayer, study, and preaching or teaching. As Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, we seek union with our Spouse, Christ, through His Eucharistic Presence. Our day flows from a daily Eucharistic Holy Hour and Mass,” she says. They seek to imitate Mary, the Mother of the Eucharist, who received the mystery of her Son and contemplated Him in her heart, but also brought Him to the world. One of the mottos of the Order is “to contemplate and to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation.” From their life of prayer, community, and study, the sisters then serve primarily in the apostolate of teaching. “Our motherhouse is in Ann Arbor, MI, but we teach in many schools all over the United States, from kindergarten to the university level.”
Sister is now in her second-year of teaching at St. Agnes School in St. Paul, MN, a PreK-12 Catholic liberal arts school. “Our sisters have taught in both the elementary, middle and high school since 2018. What brought me here was firstly, obedience and that this was the assignment I received – of course, my Community knows of my liberal arts education in college and so it is a good fit! Based on my background and love for the humanities, my teaching certification is in 6-12 history and English.” This year Sister is teaching United States History to sophomores and Modern Western Civilization to 8th graders. “It is really a gift to be able to hand on the heritage of our country and also the story of Western civilization to the students. I especially love helping them see the patterns of God’s Providence at play even in the best and worst of times in history.”
“When I think of the non-technical skills WCC formed me in, I think of the integrated formation in community life we received as students in and outside of the classroom, in the backcountry, or even on horseback,” Sister says. This formation was “special and noticed by my religious community and colleagues in the apostolate, because it was so holistic and integrated.” Students at WCC learn to see how God uses every experience they have – from the classroom to backpacking in the mountains – to form them. This is the reality of a true Catholic education, which Sister says “is about forming the whole person for holiness.”
Sister muses on what she loved most at WCC: “I believe what I most appreciated was the integrated Catholic culture and the community that came from that.” Thinking of what continues to impact her most, she says that “developing the habit of wonder and searching out what is true, beautiful and good at all times, be it in what I read or study or when encountering the ‘gift of another’ in conversation” remains with her in a special way. “I would also say this habit continues to be formed as I live Dominican life.”
As far as WCC’s influence on her vocational path, Sister Maria Angelico thinks that if she had not been discerning religious life before, she would have after her time in “God’s Country” “simply because the education we received drew me even more to God’s goodness, truth and beauty. As I look back too, I can’t but see how Dominican my education at WCC was and am grateful for the many opportunities to study St. Thomas Aquinas and the great minds he influenced in the Western tradition.” She reflects on one of her favorite aspects of religious life: “One of the favorite things about our life is the gift of wearing the Dominican habit. It is the sign of my consecration to the Lord Jesus as His bride. Wherever I go, people see me, and they think of God. Wearing the Dominican habit is preaching simply by being and opens the way for others to encounter the Lord through me. Often the Holy Spirit works through these encounters in ways I could never plan or expect.”
Asked what advice she would give to college students discerning a vocation to religious life, Sister Maria Angelico had three suggestions:
First, go to Mass, Eucharistic Adoration and confession as much as possible! Live a life of grace –and receiving grace through the Sacraments the Church gives us. God is always working through the graces of the Sacraments and the Liturgy.
Then, make it a point to do some spiritual reading – lives of the saints, what the saints themselves wrote, and bring what they say to your prayer.
Sister also says that “I recommend starting a conversation with priests or religious you may know and looking up different religious communities. Conversation with the Lord – prayer – is obviously the first step in all discernment, but He also speaks through His ministers, through those whom He’s consecrated. He does not want us to be alone on the journey of discerning our vocation.”
One thing Sister would recommend about discernment in general is “asking God for the grace to trust – trust Him, the Holy Spirit, trust those people God places in your life to give you counsel, and even trust yourself.” Sister recommends asking God for the grace to trust and then “practice trusting Him in the day-to-day things. See how His providence is at work in what we would consider the smallest parts of our lives. Making daily acts of faith and trust can only build up our confidence in God and when He asks for something great, then we are ready to respond.”
