Meeting Mary Magdalene: From Prison to the Religious Life—The Sisters of Betania Bear Witness

In June 1864, Father Jean-Joseph Lataste preached a four-day retreat to the women prisoners at the jail in his hometown of Cadillac-sur-Garonne, France. It was the first time such a thing had happened in that prison, where nearly four hundred women lived in the most degrading conditions.
Father Lataste was a Dominican who had been ordained little more than a year before. The figure of Mary Magdalene had inspired him since his novitiate. When he stood before the prisoners, he called them sisters and told them that God loved them as He loved all His other children, and that from the moment they reconciled themselves with Him, they would be innocent.
He said: "God does not ask us what we have been, but looks at what we are." He went on to say that if instead of suffering the violence of prison, they were to *choose* it for love of the Lord—transforming the evil they had done and the evil they had endured in their lives into something good—they could be more precious than cloistered nuns. The prisoners' response was total, passionate, overflowing with joy. At the end of the retreat came a night of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. "I could not convince them to go rest," Father Lataste wrote in a letter. "Not until well past midnight, when I sent in the second group of two hundred women, who had been waiting so eagerly for their turn. Many confessed to me the next day that they had not slept—they were too happy." From that moment on, Father Lataste had a single vision: to create communities where these women, who in those days were barred from entering any religious order, could offer their entire lives to the Lord. He envisioned a contemplative order—the Dominican sisters—and a particular community: the Dominicans of Betania. Here, sisters from ordinary backgrounds would live alongside sisters who had suffered the deepest forms of marginalization: imprisonment, addiction, prostitution, alcoholism. All would leave their past behind. It would never be spoken of again, not even known among their sisters. Only the Prioress would know if an old wound ever returned to bleed.
All would dedicate themselves solely to learning to love, to placing the Gospel of the Beatitudes at the center of their lives. "You do not start from zero at Betania," they say there. "You can begin again as new." The first foundation was established in 1866, amid enormous difficulties—an audacity without precedent for those times. From those days forward, the communities have multiplied, and their spiritual search has spread far.
Today some sisters go out to visit prisons and the marginalized. When they return, they place into the hands of their sisters all the sorrows, sufferings, and injustices they have encountered, laying them all together before the Lord and sharing together in the work. A spirituality entirely new has emerged—one of action and contemplation together. It flows from those silent convents into our world as challenge, as song, as encouragement.