Sister Mary Frances climbed into her office, careful to avoid broken glass. The floor was covered in muck from floodwaters that had raged through after Hurricane Ian hit two weeks earlier.
Among the debris, Frances found six small, sacred relics she’d kept in her office.
This summer, three years after the storm destroyed the cloistered nuns’ home in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, Frances brought the dirty, damaged treasures to their trusted local jeweler — desperately hoping he could save them.
Mark Loren had over the years cleaned the sisters’ jewelry and repaired their watches. But the cases holding the relics, called reliquaries, presented a new challenge. They were old and excruciatingly intricate, made of a mix of metals and kept closed with a wax seal, obscuring the artifacts inside.
Loren was cautious. He told Frances that he and his team would try their best to restore the reliquaries but didn’t make any promises.
“It’s like disassembling a puzzle that you’ve never seen before and laying out the pieces,” Loren told The Washington Post.
He also had a deadline. With the Church of the Ascension still rebuilding, Frances and the sisters were set to move to a monastery in the Philippines in a couple of months.
After weeks of meticulous work, Loren returned all six reliquaries, their silver and brass shining like “almost new,” he said. On Saturday morning, Frances and the sisters will take them to their new monastery.
“It will be a continuation of our life,” Frances said.
She first met Loren more than a decade ago, when she went to the jeweler’s shop seeking new batteries to put in a few of the sisters’ watches.
Loren, who hadn’t known there were cloistered nuns in the area, still remembers seeing Frances in her all-white habit at the front of his store, introducing herself with a wide smile.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he recalled. “Am I allowed to hug her? Can I shake her hand?”
From then on, she occasionally visited the business when the nuns needed small fixes or polishes of their rings and bracelets. Though other nuns lived at the church, Loren only ever saw Frances, who had been charged with the tasks that required leaving the monastery.
Before Hurricane Ian made landfall in 2022, Frances thought the church would be safe. Past hurricanes had left the grounds largely untouched, and she figured this storm would pass the same way.
But on Sept. 28 of that year, Frances and three other sisters huddled in the monastery’s second-floor dining room watched as the water rose — and kept rising. It broke through the parish’s windows and rushed through the monastery’s walls. Ian would go on to become one of the deadliest hurricanes Florida had seen in eight decades, killing more than 150 people in the United States.
Frances stayed in the monastery for days before strangers came to the rescue. It would be weeks before the sisters went back to see what was left of their home. Outside the church, Frances saw wrecked houses that the floodwaters had ripped from their bases. An alarm clock was still ringing inside one of them, she recalled.
“You just don’t understand the power of the water,” she said. “It emptied the church.”
Slowly, Frances, the other sisters and the parish’s priests picked through the debris, taking the belongings and accoutrements that were still intact. The six reliquaries that Frances had kept in a box in the cupboard of her office fell out during the hurricane. Relics stored elsewhere in the church were taken with the floodwaters or rendered unsalvageable.
Looking at the corroded and discolored reliquaries she recovered, Frances worried they might suffer the same fate.
“They were in bad shape,” she said.
But somehow, the cases had stayed shut, each tied with red thread and the wax seal of the cardinal or bishop who had sanctified it. Frances wrapped them and placed them in a box.
Years passed before she would bring them to Loren’s workshop. There were other priorities — the sisters had to find places to live while they tried to work out their next permanent home.
When she handed them over this year, it was a job unlike any other Loren had.
It took weeks of research for Loren and his staff to figure out how to help. They spent one month alone examining each reliquary and considering how to undo the saltwater’s damage.
Slowly, they began cleaning each one. Then, they took some apart, laying out the components to restore them.
Finally, when each reliquary was finished, Loren’s team covered them in bubble wrap while they waited for Frances to come back. They were giddy, Loren said, knowing they could return them in a condition well enough to fly with the nuns to their new home.
In late October, Frances returned to the store — this time with two of the other sisters. They came together to meet Loren and reunite with the reliquaries he had restored.
That day, there were hugs and smiles all around.
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