c. 2008 Religion News Service

EASTON, Pa. _ Sister Dorothy Fabritze had some free time on the last day of a missionary convention in 1996. She came upon a booklet about priests and nuns who travel with the circus.

“I had never known priests were in carnivals,” Fabritze told a recent meeting of the Serra Vocation Club, a lay group that works to foster vocations to the priesthood and religious life in the Catholic Church.

“Oh, sister, are you interested?” asked a nun returning from lunch to her station.

“In what?” Fabritze asked incredulously.

“You’re holding the book,” the other nun said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fabritze said. She looked at her watch and said, “Sister, I’ve got to go.”

Now, 12 years later, she knows exactly what that nun was talking about.

Fabritze and her longtime missionary companion, Sister Bernard Overkamp, are members of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. After years spent spreading Christianity in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, the pair now serves as traveling nuns with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Aside from Fabritze and Overkamp, there are only two other traveling circus nuns, according to the Rev. Jerry Hogan, chaplain for circuses and other traveling shows across the country.

“They’re like pioneers,” Hogan said of circus nuns. “There’s a need for more sisters. But it’s hard to find them. We get a few people who get all excited. Then they see the lifestyle _ it’s a 24/7 lifestyle _ and they say, `Oh, that’s not for me.”’

At first, it wasn’t for Fabritze and Overkamp. After 15 years in Papua New Guinea, the idea of working with the circus didn’t seem to fit. Living in a cramped trailer? Traveling the country with performers and animals? Working circus jobs? As nuns? That sounded foreign.

But Fabritze kept the booklet the other nun had given her. She tucked it in her cabinet, where it stayed for four years. And every time she opened the cabinet, there was that word. It grew more irresistible each time she read it until, she said, it appeared as though it was written in blinking lights.

“Circus,” it flashed.

Fabritze now was considering the job that four years earlier she couldn’t understand.

Fabritze called Overkamp. She suggested they scout the circus together. Fabritze convinced her friend to go to a show in Hershey, Pa. They started raising money for a truck and a trailer, and bought them. They turned the trailer’s master bedroom into a small chapel, complete with a miniature wooden sculpture of Jesus.

“It’s not a huge chapel but it’s very nice,” Overkamp said.

Then they hit the road. In 2000, they joined the Roberts Bros. Circus. In 2002, it was Circus Chimera. In 2004, they hit the big time: Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, where Fabritze teaches performers’ children and Overkamp is a wardrobe manager.

But they didn’t join the circus for those jobs. And they didn’t join to perform. The extent of their performance is the time Fabritze spends raising and lowering curtains.

They joined to ensure that wherever this transient show goes, a church will follow. They pray for those who tease the lions and take to the trapeze. They find priests to squeeze in sermons between shows. They reassure the performers headed to the ring. They listen. They advise.

When it comes to the circus, the elephants, in a sense, have it better than the people. They get food, water and heat at every stop. Fabritze, Overkamp and all the other humans are responsible for their own heat and nourishment.

“For the animals,” Fabritze said, “people are there around the clock.” Then she laughed. “Nobody’s there for the sisters.”

(Douglas B. Brill writes for the Express-Times in Easton, Pa.)

KRE/PH END BRILL

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