Laetare Sunday — the fourth Sunday of Lent, when the church allows a moment of joy amid the penitential season — might seem an unlikely occasion for a fundraising gala. In fact, it is the perfect one.
Almsgiving is one of the three pillars of Lenten observance, and the annual Laetare Benefit for the Dominican Sisters of St. Dominic’s Monastery in Linden, held March 15 in Vienna, insists that the obligation be met in the concrete. The sisters who live there have given everything to prayer. In return, they depend on the generosity of laypeople they will mostly never meet. And right now, with a chapel to build, permits expiring and costs climbing, they need more than they have.
The monastery sits atop Blue Mountain in the Blue Ridge, about sixty miles west of Washington. The sisters are cloistered Dominicans of the Order of Preachers, and on Sunday morning, before a single bid was placed in a Washington-area ballroom sixty miles to the east, they prayed specifically for the laypeople gathered there on their behalf.
Now in its 14th year, the benefit is organized by a host committee of lay Catholics from the diocese, with the support of Bishop Michael F. Burbidge and Honorary Co-Chair Archbishop Joseph Augustine Di Noia, a frequent visitor to the monastery. The guests ate, bid, laughed and gave generously. The sisters were nowhere to be seen. That absence was the whole point.
The evening began with a prerecorded video message from the prioress, Sister Mary Magdalene, filmed from within the enclosure, and it stopped the room. She was warm, direct and disarmingly joyful. Her tone was almost startling — the unshakeable confidence of someone whose certainties are not borrowed from the culture and cannot be revoked by it. Her message was simple: build the chapel, and more young women will come. Vocations follow beauty and beauty requires a proper home.
Dominican Father Aquinas Guilbeau, chaplain at The Catholic University of America and in residence at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, opened the evening with an invocation and led the room in grace before the meal. Father Guilbeau made the relationship clear: the work of the friars is sustained by the hidden prayers of the sisters.
Before the live auction, attendees participated in what the organizers called an “Angel Auction,” a chance to claim specific, identified needs of the monastery at a fixed pledge. The items on offer were modest yet quietly eloquent: a replacement circuit board for the chapel organ, raised garden beds for the sisters’ use, tuition for a sister enrolled in a theological formation program, a desktop printer.
Among the live auction offerings: a tour of the National Gallery of Art with a priest who brought along a renowned sculptor; a convivial evening of spirits and cigars with another; and dinner with the Dominican friars.
Hands rose at every giving level with an ease that suggested giving was the relief, not the sacrifice. The evening also recognized the St. Catherine de Ricci Guild, a body of benefactors who have pledged to cover the sisters’ monthly operating expenses — a steady financial faithfulness to match the spiritual faithfulness it sustains.
The evening ended as it should: with Night Prayer, the ballroom falling into the rhythm of the Divine Office alongside the sisters who, miles away in their mountain enclosure, were praying the same words. It is a strange and beautiful thing, this simultaneity — that the hidden life holds up something in the world that would otherwise sag.
There is urgency underneath the joy. The chapel campaign has not yet reached its full funding goal. With building permits set to expire and construction costs rising, the community has decided to move forward before the full sum is in hand. The goal is completion by summer 2027, dependent on generosity from those who believe, as the sisters do, that this house of prayer is worth finishing.
Every guest left with a bag of scones, baked by the sisters. I shared them with my children the next morning and told them about the Dominican nuns in the mountains to our west — women whose hands are never idle, whether at work or folded in prayer. We talked about going to visit when the chapel is finished. Some donors will make that pilgrimage, sitting with the sisters in prayer, separated by a grille. Most will not. The gift moves in one direction; the prayer moves in the other. And the church, somehow, holds.
For more information
To follow the chapel construction or to make a donation, go to lindenopnuns.org/new-monastery.
Picciotti-Bayer, a parishioner of St. John the Beloved Church in McLean, is a legal analyst for EWTN News.
