This may sound like something out of the Weekly World News, but you'll just have to trust my journalistic integrity: There are a bunch of nuns in Jamaica Plain who carry beepers, use e-mail, rollerblade, run an e-commerce site, and occasionally appear on the Game Show Network. I promise, there's a logical explanation for all of this.
The church's Corporate Communications Department?
The Daughters of St. Paul congregation was founded in 1915, making it "kind of a baby in the Catholic Church," says Sister Christine Salvatore. Its mission is and was to spread the gospel through the media such as books and magazines. They formed a choir in 1988, then started selling CDs and appearing on the occasional movie soundtrack like "Lorenzo's Oil." They made an infomercial for their last CD -- that's where the Game Show Network comes in -- and their producer loves it when they bless the sound board.
Their international congregation numbers 2,600 sisters in 50 countries, but the Daughters of St. Paul publishing house and recording studio are at the Boston Motherhouse in Jamaica Plain. Raise your hand if you knew there was a convent in JP! Put your hand down; lying's a sin.
E-commerce nuns! No, seriously.
The sisters' Web site, www.pauline.org, sells their books, CDs, magazines, and videos (not -- as one of my friends guessed -- rent-a-nun services like singing nun-a-grams). The Daughters of St. Paul also provided content for Coffee Break with the Pope, a computer "desktop companion" of writings, daily blessings, and nightly prayers from Pope John Paul II.
One of the convent's directors uses e-mail to communicate with young women who are interested in becoming nuns. Sister Christine just started using e-mail for fundraising, though she's had an account "forever." They mostly use AOL and Juno. So listen up, AOLers: Watch your step, or you may wind up flirting with a sister.
Maybe you're thinking that the Web -- that bastion of porno and bomb-making recipes -- isn't the ideal place for nuns. "You have to be selective," explained Sister Christine, who also uses the Web for weather updates and health research. "The most important things we can do are use it responsibly, always remember its potential for good, and trust it." Spoken as well as any techno-libertarian.
Sisters are doing it for themselves.
The sisters' PR person told me "nuns can be hip." Yeah, right. But I've got to admit, they are. Sister Christine is automatically cool for liking the movie "Affliction." ("A film like that is going to do more than 100 sermons against alcoholism," she noted.)
The sisters at the publishing house are longtime e-mail users and have been selling online for a year. That makes them early adopters, especially in the field of religious e-tail. The site iBelieve.com, created by the U.S.'s biggest Christian retailer, just launched last week. Interestingly, iBelieve and the similar site iChristian.com are backed by venture capitalists and other business types.
The sisters of Pauline.org are hip because they don't call themselves iPauline, and because they're not just another business deal. They'll never have an IPO, but they believe in what they're doing. Even if you don't share their faith -- for the record, I don't -- you've got to admit that in a world of get-rich-click commerce schemes, these singing nuns are pretty refreshing.
Jen Muehlbauer's column appears every Friday in digitalMASS. Her e-mail address is jen@englishmajor.com.