Singing Nuns need a little intervention
Sisters have the entrepreneurial spirit. They just need an investor, Bert Caldwell writes.
By Bert Caldwell
When the utility bill hits $13,000 a month, they sing.
When their classes fill with more and more low-income students, they sing.
When quotes soar for insurance on their 85-year-old building, and their own health, they sing.
For the Marian Sisters of Mary Immaculate Queen, keeping body and soul together takes more than daily service to the Lord. Maintaining their refuge atop Mount St. Michael requires earthly rewards.
St. Michael’s Academy is their biggest enterprise. The kindergarten through 12th-grade school enrolls 165, of whom 19 board.
Just inside the front doors, a bookstore and gift shop attract a small but constant daily flow of customers for religious texts, rosaries, artifacts and statues. And “the Center” houses a bustling mail order operation selling all those same goods, and more from a catalog 75 pages long.
The congregations’ 36 resident sisters may be cloistered, but they understand cash flow. Hence, The Singing Nuns.
“We would like The Singing Nuns to balance the budget at St. Michael’s,” says Sister Mary Bernadette, who manages the group’s affairs. Right now, she adds, “We’re on the Divine Providence plan.”
Like any group, The Singing Nuns are looking for the big break that will take them national, or even international. What the troupe needs, says the Reverend Mother Mary Katrina, is a promoter.
The order’s leader says she has envisioned big things for the singing troupe since 1979. On a visit to Phoenix, she saw a boys’ choir raise money performing for a luncheon group. A patron suggested the sisters rent a choir and stage similar events. Rent a choir? Why, if you already have one?
Mother Katrina recalls a group of about 20 nuns practiced all summer for their first performance. They rented a ballroom in the Olympic Hotel in Seattle.
They drew an audience of 67.
Sister Bernadette says she thought they could do no worse, but one subsequent performance in Eugene, Ore., was solo — audience-wise, that is.
The numbers gradually increased. The group sang in malls. The nuns would perform in airports and pass the hat. “We started marketing,” the sister says. “We didn’t even know the word at the time.”
The following summer The Singing Nuns did a six-week tour down the West Coast, sometimes performing for as many as four hours a day. They did Disneyland. Appeared on PM Magazine. They sold dolls and other religious items on the side.
They came home with $15,000, but Mother Katrina says the wear and tear, and time away from their other chores, was too taxing.
For the past 20 years, The Singing Nuns have stayed closer to home, making about five major appearances a year, including an annual Christmas series at The Met. They travel if a patron is willing to cover expenses. Remarkably, it was at such a performance last summer in Dublin, Ohio, where they first heard of another group using the same name.
But members of that group were not nuns. Sister Bernadette adds that many who hear The Singing Nuns are surprised to find out they really are nuns.
Yet concert-goers and buyers of The Singing Nuns’ nine CDs are moved by the convergence of performers and music, Sister Bernadette says.
“To us, this is a gift from God,” she says. “The uplift is tremendous.”
Sharing that gift could sustain their other works. “The whole business of the sisters is for people,” Sister Bernadette says.
With an investment, the order could make that connection with a far broader audience, Mother Katrina says.
She says selected, well-promoted performances could boost sales, much of which are made on the group’s Web site, www.singingnuns.com.
Look, Sister Bernadette says, at the response to the “Gregorian Sampler” released a few years ago by the Monks of Solesmes. Sales rocketed.
Film and video makers have shown interest in an “On the Road with The Singing Nuns” tour, perhaps in Europe, Mother Katrina says.
“The sisters have taken this on as an entrepreneurial plan,” Sister Bernadette says. “We know we have a product to sell.”
•Business columnist Bert Caldwell can be reached at (509) 459-5450 or by e-mail at bertc@spokesman.com.
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