For a New Age: In Kentucky and Colorado Loretto’s Newest Members Set Strides

Original author unknown

This article was republished from the Winter 1964 issue of Loretto Magazine. It takes a look at the changes to the Loretto Novitiate in the 1960s. When available, the original photograph used in the publication was scanned. Where the original photos couldn’t be located, scans from the magazine were used. Photo captions have also been reproduced. Former members names have been redacted from captions to protect their privacy. Loretto Magazine is still being published and current issues can be viewed here.

Once again, on September 15 the Greyhound buses came up the winding blacktopped road to Loretto Motherhouse about five o’clock in the afternoon, bringing a crowd of college girls and a sudden burst of noise and color into the quiet dusk. The happy disorder of newly-arriving postulants lingered for a few days until the new-comers learned their way around. This fall there were some changes though. For the first time the postulants do not wear the usual black dress and white collar. The gay colors that appeared when the two Greyhound buses stopped in front of the novitiate building have continued to lighten and cheer grounds and halls. White blouses and short skirts, colorful pajamas, and light-colored coats and jackets are now regular items in a postulant’s wardrobe. No longer do the pegs in the auditorium corridor hold only black shoulderettes but brilliant sweaters.

This fall, too, the girls that stepped lightly from the buses did not come from the widespread areas of the country that formerly sent the new postulants. Most of those arriving in Kentucky represented states east of the Mississippi River, while those in the new Denver novitiate came from other sections, chiefly West and Southwest. Next fall there will be no Kentucky class of postulants. The 1965 group will spend their postulantship in St. Louis, in order that they might continue studies there. The southern postulants, by being the last group to enter in Kentucky, are closing one chapter of history at the same time that the western postulants open one in Colorado.

There has been much to unite the two groups these first three months of their new life. Both groups began college classes almost as soon as they arrived. Both groups adapted quickly to programs of study, prayer, the active apostolate, and recreation.

But there have been differences.

The southern postulants are aware of their privilege of starting their religious life in a place rich in the history of Catholicity in Kentucky. Everywhere they see monuments of early missionaries, the Reverend Theodore Badin, Charles Nerinckx, and Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget. They have also the example of the prayerful elderly sick and retired Lorettines, who kneel across from them in the chapel and live in nearby St. Joseph’s Infirmary. They have, finally, the wide freedom of the Motherhouse farm, attuned to the seasons and the quiet cycle of human activity there.

Their western classmates, by contrast, are pioneers, the first postulants in a new novitiate. Everything is light and new, the white walls and the smell of fresh concrete. There is the fun of helping with landscaping, of readying classrooms, of giving a homey touch to just-begun surroundings. Everything they do is a “first time” kind of experience.

Both Kentucky and Colorado postulants have magnificent scenery, but the panoramas are vastly different. The southern postulants find themselves near woodlands and streams and cone-shaped Rohan’s Knob. Long walks in any direction open out into clearings rimmed by tree-covered hills that in October exploded into color: deep copper, vermilion, rust and green. Nor do they have to go on walks to find the miracles of nature; from every study window they look out on them.

Denver postulants in their new home on a height overviewing the mile-high city on the east and north have a magnificent panorama of the front range of the Rocky Mountains on the south and west. Daily they are exhilarated by the fresh, invigorating climate, rarefied and dry, and the ever-present sunshine, the cobalt-blue skies. Long walks take them to the lovely Bowmar lakes just below their grounds; or, after a bus ride, to the Rocky Mountain Park areas where, at closer range, they see the snow-capped peaks and clear blue lakes. Three months old, Loretto’s postulants are opening a new chapter of history for the congregation. In everyday attire and at home in their new homes in the West or South, they look ahead to their year of study together. Next spring the Colorado postulants, newly dressed as novices, will journey to Kentucky to join their classmates for a further year of preparation for their future work. Both groups, united for the first time, and for the first time in religious garb, will range over Kentucky hills to discover the miracles of spring.