They aren?t priests.
They aren?t monks.
They?re friars, and they opened their doors Sunday for their third open house after more than a half-century of seclusion at the friary on Folly Quarter Road in Ellicott City.
Dressed in their traditional black habits, cord belts and sandals, the Conventual Franciscan Friars of the St. Anthony of Padua Province in Ellicott City invited the public to view their Italian Renaissance courtyard, Christmas trees, nativity scene and a shrine with a reliquary featuring St. Anthony?s skin tissue.
“We?re sharing spirituality with a bigger population who never even knew we were here,” said Father Friar Noel Danielewicz, who also is ordained as a priest.
Saints are holy people the Roman Catholic Church officially recognizes. St. Anthony, to whom many Catholics pray when they lose something, was a follower and contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi, a rich, 12th-century Italian who said God told him to rebuild his church.
Francis renounced his wealth and founded a brotherhood of clergymen who ? unlike priests who are assigned to parishes, or monks, who are cloistered ? now serve as missionaries and teachers to emphasize St. Francis? teachings of poverty, chastity, obedience, peace, hospitality and treating all animals as sisters and brothers, said Brother Vincent Vivian, who is not an ordained priest.
After 60 years of closed doors, the friary opened to the public a decade ago for Masses and prayers and has continued to encourage outsiders to visit, starting a yearly holiday tour in 2005 and holding its first Christmas midnight Mass in December, said Danielewicz. Eventually, they?d like to host retreats.
The open houses also can help spread the word about a dwindling order to men seeking a holy life that offers more options for service than priesthood, said Brother Brian Newbiggin.
Danielewicz, for example, served as a missionary in Alabama and Vivian worked to spread Catholicism in Ghana.
The friary was built in the 1920s as a “novitiate,” or religious boot camp for novices, on an estate Charles Carroll ? a state and U.S. senator and the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence ? built 100 years earlier for his niece.
