Sister Anne Condon lived much of her long, joyful, prayerful life apart from the world. But the cloistered nun saw more of the world, and helped more of its people, than most ever will.
Sister Anne died early on the morning of Jan. 11, just after the community of Franciscan Poor Clares she helped start celebrated its 62nd anniversary. She was 102, filled with gratitude to the end.
"If people only knew how wonderful it is to be a Poor Clare," she used to say, "the world would be filled with Poor Clare monasteries."
The Poor Clares are a contemplative order devoted to prayer, simplicity and hard work. Sister Anne — an adventurous and curious spirit — found herself called to that life after a crisis of faith in high school.
It was a calling that would take her from Minnesota, where she and five other sisters founded a Poor Clare monastery in Bloomington in 1954, and send her halfway around the world.
In 1960, Archbishop Harold Henry asked the Bloomington Poor Clares to help establish a monastery in South Korea. When the new monastery opened in the early 1970s, Sister Anne was one of the first volunteers.
"God asks, and that's where you go," said Sister Helen Weier, another of the community's founders who traveled to South Korea.
For several years, the sisters worked to get the monastery on Jeju Island up and running. They produced wine for the entire archdiocese. They ran a small dairy — until they realized that calving season is not compatible with a monastery prayer schedule and switched over to farming aloe. The Minnesota nuns returned home after a few years, leaving behind a thriving South Korean community, her sisters said.
