By Simon Caldwell/Catholic News Service
LONDON (CNS) — In the silence of St Joseph’s Convent in Leeds each morning, Sister Catherine dresses herself in a gray habit. She fixes a black veil on her head and fastens to her waist a cord tied into three knots — representing the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience — and she slips her feet into the sandals of a Franciscan nun.
Twelve years ago, when she was Kirstin Holum, she was reaching for her skates instead. In 1998 she competed for the United States at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. After placing sixth in the 3,000-meter and seventh in the 5,000-meter speedskating races, the 17-year-old was recognized as a prodigy racing against older women in their prime.
Instead of continuing her speedskating career, she joined the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal, an order founded in New York in 1988. In September she arrived in England to work with the poor, with youth and to evangelize. She is a member of a community of four nuns — three American and one English — based in a house that, until last year, was owned and occupied by the Sisters of Mercy.
“I could have gone on” with speedskating, Sister Catherine told Catholic News Service in a Feb. 22 telephone interview. “I was thinking this (Vancouver, British Columbia) could have been my fourth Olympics, but I am so grateful the Lord led me to where I am now.”
When speaking to youth groups Sister Catherine makes no secret of her past as an Olympic speedskater because it opens up the possibility of a religious vocation to young people who would never have thought about it.
“Usually you get a shocked look,” she told CNS. “It is hard for children sometimes to picture you as anything else than a nun. It is definitely a starting point for evangelization, for bringing them closer to Christ, because they can see there is a real person standing in front of them and not just a nun.”
Kirstin Holum grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee. Her mother, Dianne Holum, was a speedskater who won an Olympic gold medal in 1972 and became a successful coach. She also was a fervent Catholic who conveyed to her daughter the importance of her faith; in 1996 she paid for her daughter to make a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine in Fatima, Portugal.
There, Holum, at the age of 16, felt a powerful sense of vocation and, she said, the “powerful experience of realizing Jesus’ presence in the Blessed Sacrament.”
She said she prayed to Mary for guidance about her future as a speedskater and, after she had competed in Japan, decided to give it up.
“I was not feeling in my heart that I would be skating the rest of my life; I knew there was more to life than sports,” she said. “I never regretted that decision. I think it was just a grace from God to bring me to something else.”
“I saw people making sports into the most important thing, and I didn’t desire that,” she said.
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