A group of cloistered nuns in rural Pennsylvania who trace their history back to 16th-century Spain are building a sprawling monastery meant to last 1,000 years — and they’re doing it almost entirely by hand.
Expected to be completed in 2041 at a cost of $100 million, the 48-acre Carmel of Jesus, Mary and Joseph monastery in Fairfield, Penn., is entirely the vision of one woman — Mother Thérèse of Merciful Love, the 41-year-old daughter of a firefighter from Cape Cod, Mass.
“We had a vision, a dream, an interior kind of intuition that there was something that we needed to do different,” Mother, as she’s known around the compound, told The Post in an exclusive interview from behind an iron screen inside the monastery’s guest house. “We are building an authentic building.”
The nuns are laying the foundation brick-by-brick themselves, in between their daily spiritual duties and tending to the livestock and garden. For the heavier lifting, they’ve brought in outside help — renowned New York architect Riccardo Vicenzino and local contractor Joe Bonifate, who is also in charge of fundraising.
“They’re very good students. Good work ethic. They arrive on time, take instruction very well,” Bonifate told The Post of his holy labor force. “If I can just find more crews that had a vow of obedience and were working toward something greater than their next raise I’d be sitting good. We could build anything with a crew like that.”
For the next couple decades, the nuns will be living on a construction site as the project comes together, but that’s not an issue.
“It can be an amusing part of our day, when you’re trying to go to mass in the morning and you have to avoid being crushed by the telehandler,” Mother said.
Vicenzino’s Manhattan-based firm is working on sacred spaces as far away as Texas, as well as Park Avenue and West Village apartments, but this projects is an entirely different animal.
There’s no electricity, heat, A/C or running water in the monastery. Under Mother’s instruction, nothing made by machine is allowed in the building’s construction. That means even the nails must be hand-forged. Luckily, they found a guy in Kentucky who makes nails.
Other materials include Pennsylvania field stone, local timber, lime mortar, slate roof tiles, copper downspouts, and hand-made bricks from North Carolina.
“It’s been a process. We’re bound by Mother’s dictate of authenticity,” said Vicenzino. “To do something like this from scratch we really had to dust off our old books.”
He added, “Mother is making requests and we really have to roll up our sleeves and prove through precedence that these things are not crazy. It can be done. We’re using old concepts of thermodynamics that they used to know, this wisdom from back in the old days when there was no A/C. There are traditions of radiant floor heat that have been around for millennia — the Romans, the Spanish, the Koreans.”
The project includes a 22-foot-deep subterranean ice house, where blocks of ice will be stored year-round between layers of sawdust and transported to the main building using a pony and cart. It will be accessed via a custom-made steel ladder which Mother was initially resistant to because the steel was machine-made. She eventually relented.
“I’ve had bigger battles,” chuckled Bonifate.
The Fairfield Carmelites stem from St. Teresa of Ávila’s 16th-century Spanish reform, which opened its first monastery in what is now Puebla, Mexico, in 1604.
In the 19th century, reform laws nearly extinguished the Carmelites from Mexico. The 1910 Mexican Revolution and 1926 Cristero War forced further expulsions, with some nuns fleeing to Valparaiso, Neb.
The Fairfield community is an offshoot of the Nebraska order and continues its strict Teresian tradition of enclosure — a spiritual rule that strictly separates them from the outside world — and traditional Latin Mass.
This has caused friction with Rome in recent years, stemming from the 2018 instruction of Cor Orans, a Vatican document regulating cloistered nuns that reduces the autonomy of contemplative monasteries and requires them to join federations.
Mother is one of the few cloistered nuns who has been outspoken in her opposition to Rome’s meddling in their way of life, viewing it as a threat to their traditional worship.
After helping revive a declining Philadelphia order, the Fairfield Carmelites withdrew from Philadelphia’s Carmel in 2021 amid these disputes, triggering the removal of their chaplain and pressure to conform.
Today, the nuns remain under the relatively hands-off jurisdiction of the Bishop of Harrisburg while still opposing the mandates from Rome.
“This is something that is happening in many sectors of life, the struggle between the global and the local. Something like a monastery is by its essence a local thing. Its character comes almost from the soil. And that used to be quite easy because Rome was so far away,” Mother said.
“I understand the reasoning of it, but it’s kind of my job to remind the powers that be that sometimes the big rules that apply across the board have a way of squashing those unique cultures.
“It’s easy for big people from far away to have big answers that solve their problems. But sometimes little guys have to say, ‘Wait, what about me? I have something that’s beautiful.’ “
While the numbers are always in flux, approximately 14 women live on the site today between externs, aspirants and Sisters. Around 50 will reside there once completed.
The vegetarian order also keeps sheep for both wool and milk, cows, chickens for eggs, and a donkey named Fidelis. A diligent border collie named Noel follows Mother around like a furry guardian while a parcel of pigs are used for waste management — they eat the garbage — and are traded for feed and supplies with locals.
The monastery is loosely inspired by Spain’s historic medieval city of Ávila
“We’ve always been very adamant about regionalism. We asked ourselves, if St. Teresa of Ávila were in Pennsylvania what would she do? We looked to the 18th-century stone farmhouses that are all around us,” said Vicenzino.
“It’s not an exercise in nostalgia. It’s really an exercise in proven concepts.”
After a few years of site prep, construction began in earnest in 2018. Today six buildings have been completed — about one-third of the final project — and it’s mostly been funded by small donations.
“It’s slower work because of the nature of the work,” said Bonifate. “The fundraising too, that’s up to God. My job is to plan like we’ll live forever and live like I’ll die tomorrow. If we had all the money tomorrow it would still take another ten or 12 years to finish.”
The remaining price tag is about $94 million and most fundraising is done by word-of-mouth. “There’s a human element the Sisters are tapping into that everyone is yearning for again,” said Vicenzino.
Mother said young women from all walks of life come her way seeking to join the order, and she’s seen a greater interest of late in traditional religious life, including the building project.
“It’s connected to a deeper spiritual thirst and hunger for that authenticity,” she said. “Many of the young women that I speak to want a bigger world to live in, a world that opens up to values that are eternal and reach across the centuries, to be part of something that won’t die with them.”