Growing up, Catherine Addington lived minutes away from Pauline Books and Media Center in Old Town Alexandria.
Year after year, she watched the blue-and-white clad Daughters of St. Paul at work in the shop. She loved to browse the shelves and to pray in the little chapel above the store.
These days, she’s no longer just an admiring visitor of the bookstore. After taking her first vows with the “Media Nuns,” Addington, now known as Pauline Sister Catherine Lucia Phoebe Addington, is living back in the place where it all began. “I love being able to serve in the diocese where I’ve received so many graces,” she said. “It’s an opportunity every day to put my gratitude into action.”
Sister Phoebe was born June 9, 1994, to David and Cindy Addington, the second of their three daughters. The family went to St. Rita Church in Alexandria, and Sister Phoebe attended the parish school from kindergarten through eighth grade. Studying about the lives of saints and visiting the convent of the religious sisters who then worked in the school first sparked her interest in religious life. “I just remember I saw the sanctuary lamp in the (convent) corner, and I was like, ‘If nuns get to live with Jesus, then sign me up,’ ” she said.
Sister Phoebe later attended Bishop Ireton High School in Alexandria and graduated in 2012. During those years, she often attended discernment events with the Pauline sisters. But at the end of high school, Sister Phoebe began to feel disconnected from the Catholic Church. “The crisis that the church was facing in the United States really hit home for me,” she said. She had a difficult time reconciling the beauty she saw in the church with the clergy sex abuse scandal.
For college, she attended New York University, studying in both London and Buenos Aires before graduating in 2015 with a degree in Latin American Studies. During that time, friends invited her to attend Orthodox services and eventually she wasreceived into the Orthodox church. “People really welcomed me in a time where I really needed a place to belong,” she said. “Naturally, I found the reality of sin there, too. But by the time I discovered that again, my relationship with God was strong enough that my faith didn’t crumble.”
After college, Sister Phoebe returned home to work at a magazine. When Pope Francis came to Washington that fall, she was eager to cover the papal visit. “If you’re that enthusiastic about the pope being in town, you have to really ask yourself if you’re an Orthodox Christian,” she said with a laugh. “The pope was very much speaking this message of belonging, of healing and embracing those who felt themselves on the outside for whatever reason, which at the time I did. The door just kind of opened for me to return.”
Witnessing the St. Rita community support a grieving family also made a powerful impression. “It reminded me how much of God’s love I had experienced, not just in the Catholic Church in general, but specifically in that church, the church that God had entrusted me to,” she said. Soon, she was a Roman Catholic again.
In 2021, she earned her doctorate in Spanish from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. During her graduate school years, she frequently returned to the Pauline sisters’ Alexandria convent as well as their provincial house in Boston. At school, she attended daily Mass and spent an hour daily in adoration, modeling her prayer life after the life of the sisters. By the time she was working on her dissertation during the pandemic, she had applied to enter the convent.
The Daughters of St. Paul, the order she joined, was founded in 1915 by Blessed James Alberione and Venerable Mother Thecla Merlo. The sisters have a three-part mission, said Sister Phoebe. They communicate Christ’s message by living holy lives, share his truth through the media, and spend time in prayer as reparation for sins committed using the media. Ultimately, it was their spirituality that drew her to the sisters. But Sister Phoebe also jokes that she loved the bookstore so much she had to move in.
After four years in formation, Sister Phoebe took her first vows on the last Saturday before Lent, which this year happened to be Valentine’s Day. It was a beautiful experience to give her life to God, she said, surrounded by her family and the many members of her community who had come to truly know and love her. “That’s really what I dreamed — that it would be a celebration of God’s love,” she said. “My parents cried, my sister cried, everybody cried.” Her religious name, Phoebe, honors the woman who delivered St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Now, Sister Phoebe is working in her hometown book center, expanding its Spanish-language offerings and serving with other nuns to educate about media literacy. In her spare time, she enjoys watching soccer, reading, writing, translating and quilting. She loves sharing the written word, but also meeting with customers face to face. After all, she said, God didn’t just give humanity his word, he gave them his son.
“It’s extremely exciting and extremely busy,” she said of this new chapter in her life. “I feel very blessed to be here.”
Maraist is a freelancer from Reston.
