Bethany J. Welch, SSJ, PhD is a Sister of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia, currently serving at a transitional housing program for college students experiencing homelessness. She is also a research fellow at Villanova University conducting a study on this program model that uses surplus church property to respond to the affordable housing crisis in the United States. Sr. Bethany “draws, paints, and collages her way through life’s big questions as a form of prayer.” Millennial editor Robert Christian interviewed her on her faith, vocation, art, and life.

What led you to make the decision to join the congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph?

I met the Sisters of Saint Joseph (SSJ) in 2003 in a neighborhood of Philadelphia that seemed forgotten or left behind by the rest of the city. As the archdiocese was closing parishes, sisters found ways to stay in the neighborhood through new sponsored ministries outside the institutional church. I was compelled by this authentic witness to the Gospel that prioritized accompaniment and presence. They truly lived what they said they believed.

In the two decades that followed, I had many overlapping connections with the Sisters of Saint Joseph. I developed a deep love for Ignatian spirituality, which is at the heart of our practice thanks to having a Jesuit founder. I came to understand that my desire to live and labor in urban communities was related to call and vocation. But I didn’t know which vocation! So, I explored many pathways. I occasionally participated in discernment activities with different congregations of women religious. I also had romantic partners, owned a home, and enjoyed a full, rewarding life.

However, as I approached turning 40, I found myself restless. There had to be something more. Not “more” in the sense of busier, but more in a way that surrendered fully to God’s dream for me. I was sure of my calling to be radically available—especially to those on the margins—and simultaneously clear that I couldn’t maintain the pace I had been keeping leading a Catholic social justice ministry. Was there a more sustainable option? Maybe I wasn’t looking for an individual partner to do this life with, but perhaps a group of like-minded people bound by a common vision? That’s when I called a friend and mentor who is an a SSJ to say I think I know what the more is. That was both the scariest and most freeing moment in my vocation journey. Finally saying out loud what my heart had known for a while.

Do you see this decision as a break from what you’ve done in the past, as building upon your past work (and life), or something in between? 

There is a prayer we used often in novitiate that describes the formation journey as another movement of life, not something discontinuous. That posture or distinction was important to me. I wasn’t less “me” before. Rather, religious life is another way to be fully, truly me. The weekend of my first profession of vows in February 2024 was a good example of this. We have a tradition where the novice shapes the vow liturgy and hosts evening prayer the night before. Yet, having little experience planning such things, I asked one of my closest friends to help me sketch out a plan that distinctively radiated the SSJ charism of unioning love while offering everyone there an entry point into this unfolding story of God’s project.

Being received into the Church as an adult means that most of my family and longtime friends are not Catholic, much less familiar with religious life. It was important to me that they have an experience of church that was inclusive and welcoming. I landed on Taizé for the evening prayer, which comes from an ecumenical movement, and an artistic expression for the intercessions. We concluded the night with a closing prayer from my parents that emphasized our family’s commitment to faith and social justice.

The liturgy the next day was celebrated by the priest who shepherded me through RCIA back in 2005 and who later invited me to help start an outreach ministry in a large immigrant and refugee community. The deacon from my current parish served alongside him. The song selections emphasized hospitality. The readings and intercessions were proclaimed in five different languages and prayed by my brother who also became Catholic, my godmother/sponsor for RCIA, a young woman whom I parented for a time, and several other dear companions from various ministries over the years. My goddaughter and her dad, fellow Millennial writer Mike Jordan Laskey, brought up the gifts. We concluded the liturgy with an act of gratitude to my patron, Our Lady of Guadalupe. The children in attendance brought roses to a vase placed in front of an image of La Virgen that was painted by a young adult from my current ministry with college students experiencing homelessness.

I am so grateful for the people around me who have been patient and generous as I have sought to integrate who I am with what I am becoming. My novice director and spiritual director have been particularly helpful with this as have other newer religious who entered in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

You recently wrote about art and your vows. How has art influenced your faith life throughout the years?

Besides being a big sister to two younger brothers, being someone who makes and creates is my earliest memory of identity. My parents and my maternal grandparents were significant supporters of every form of creative expression I undertook from two years old onward. They ensured I had materials to create with and fostered connections between beauty, faith, wonder, and truth. As such, art was very often my way of making sense of the world. In college, I began studying western art history and learned how much of the tradition and schools of work were funded by the Catholic Church. I dove eagerly into iconography—hugely at odds with the austerity and iconoclasm of my faith affiliation at the time—and fell in love with the material dimensions of the Catholic faith. Church art was my primary entry point to Catholicism, yet it lived on a very intellectual plane.

It wasn’t until the novitiate, some twenty-five years later, that I started to use art to make sense of my interior life. I began noticing the movement of the Holy Spirit in tiny shifts of seeing and being that were demanding a material or visual expression. Then last summer, I was asked to study theology at Boston College and was not pleased about it. (Even before the vow of obedience is professed, you are living it in novitiate!) In my mind, I had already done all the studying I ever needed to do and was eager to be out in ministry. This attitude was a roadblock to my understanding of the course content. And to hearing God.

I found myself doing the first assigned reading, putting the journal article down, and picking up an oil pastel. I scribbled on a large sheet of paper on the dorm floor and sat back stunned. I could not make sense of the ideas in those pages without first working through my interior response to the theology presented. The mark-making was prayer. It was creative expression. It was my way of integrating what was going on within. It was the way I finally reconciled the study of the nature of God with my own experience of God.

Sometimes proponents of Catholic Social Teaching seem to focus exclusively on big picture national and global issues, but you seem very attentive to local communities and fostering solidarity on that level. Do you think that is something some of us should think more about, and can you explain why these more local concerns should matter? 

Great question! The principle of subsidiarity comes to mind. The local matters because it is the smallest unit of engagement and participation. I would argue that we cannot skip over that unit on our way to do the bigger, grander thing. Catholic historical figures like Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton were advocating localized involvement through distributism back in the late 1890s following the release of Rerum Novarum. Modern Catholic social thought spread by Pope Francis and even Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ invite us to act in our own community because it is where we both know the dynamics in play and have a direct responsibility to our neighbors. The Culture of Encounter, the Revolution of Tenderness, and the Economy of Francesco, all shaped by the Holy Father, have influenced my way of proceeding locally. As have Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and modern-day saints like Sr. Norma Pimentel, M.J., who emphasize working right where you are.

Truthfully, I think it can be more difficult to “live” social justice at the neighborhood level. It costs more of my heart and of my time. I must get into the messiness of someone else’s life. I must be vulnerable enough to show them what is going on in mine. Advocating for a piece of legislation can feel safer—more objective. Yet, if I welcome a stranger into my home, as we are exhorted to do in Scripture, I can be transformed through the encounter in a way that no nightly news report or public radio story can do. I face my own biases and prejudices. I feel the pinch of the distance between what they experience and what they might need to be free, safe, and thriving. I am impelled to act on what I learned.

Why are you Catholic in 2024? 

I am Catholic because the Eucharist is central to my understanding of God’s love for me and for the world through Christ. The Catholic liturgy and practice flows from the Eucharist. Christ challenged human structures and systems that did not root themselves in justice. Christ’s suffering unites my own brokenness with that of every person who does not have what they need to thrive.

Going up to the Eucharistic table helps me remember that truth and then go out into the world and live the Gospel as fully as I can each day. It also invites me back when I have failed to treat my neighbor well. The body and blood of Christ re-member my own being. The elements sustain my best hopes for who we can be to each other—and to the earth—while we share this common home together. For me, being Catholic is about internalizing a universalism and a shared set of language, principles, and ways of understanding that are remade (albeit slowly) in each age. I am here for the remaking, the reimagining, and the co-laboring.