Nun Holds World Record: 84 Years of Cloistered Life

GUADALAJARA, Spain, JUNE 30, 2011 (Zenit.org) - She entered the Cistercian Buenafuente del Sistal Convent the day that Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) was born, and today Sister Teresa is 103 years old and the world's record holder for having lived the longest as a cloistered nun.

After 84 years as a cloistered nun, Sister Teresa says that the greatest gift she has received has been prayer: "Without it, one cannot sustain oneself. I never cease repeating: 'Thank you, forgive. Thank you, forgive.'"

The nun is one of 10 cloistered nuns profiled in the Spanish-language book "¿Qué hace una chica como tú en un sitio como éste?" (What's a Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?). In the book, author Jesús Garcia brings to light the secluded world of cloistered nuns by getting to know what life is like behind the grail, and what inspired them to join.

Sister Teresa's story began as young girl living in Alava, Spain. She was known then as Valeria, and she was happy with her life on the family farm. "We were in the field from morning 'til night, working, but we were happy," she said.

The eldest of seven children, her father saw how hard Valeria and her younger sister worked and he wanted a different life for them. "Thinking nuns didn’t work, [my father] would say to my sister and me: 'Wouldn’t you like to be nuns?'" she recalls.

"I didn’t like nuns," she continued, "given how comfortable I was at home, [but] to please my father, [I] prayed to the patroness of Vitoria and asked her to give me a vocation. And did she give me one!"

Upon entering the Cistercian convent in Guadalajara, Spain, Valeria took the name Teresa. "I was afraid to enter, but the Lord helped me," she said. The sister said that she prayed to both God and St. Teresa for the courage to be committed to her new vocation.

Though Sister Teresa says that there was a time when she wondered about her contribution to society from behind the convent walls, her worries were soon put to rest: "Once, I was tempted to imagine how my life would be outside [the convent] because I felt I wasn’t contributing anything by being here."

She adds that it is a concern of many cloistered nuns. After consulting a priest about her feelings, Sister Teresa says "He told me I had a very beautiful vocation; that it’s worthwhile."

Sister Teresa says that she is very happy and does not desire anything from the outside world. "It’s a grace from God," she says. "I know that many won’t understand my way of living, but I don’t understand any other."

criteria for using the Vatican library

Admission Criteria
PrintThe Library is open to:

1.researchers and scholars with appropriate qualifications and/or relevant scientific publications;
2.teachers and researchers at Universities and other institutes of Higher Education;
3.graduate students (laureati) who are pursuing research for a doctoral dissertation;
4.in exceptional cases, undergraduate students who can demonstrate that they need to consult material which is available only at the Vatican Library.
5.it is not open to High School students, nor, as a rule, to undergraduate University students.

Required Documents
All readers applying for their first reader’s pass must produce the following:

1.a valid identification document, which will be left at the Police Office at the Sant’Anna entrance to the Vatican City State;
2.a reference letter or a valid document proving appropriate academic qualifications;
3.for students, a Letter of Surety, printed on institutional letterhead and signed by their dissertation supervisor.

The Reader’s Ticket
The reader’s pass allows access to the Library.
The annual pass is valid from the day it is issued until the following annual closing of the Library. The short-term pass is valid for a fixed number of days, as determined by the Admissions Office.
In any case, access is granted only until May 31 for undergraduate students and until June 15 for graduate students.
The reader’s pass allows consultation of printed books only; specific authorization is needed for the consultation of manuscripts. The pass is strictly personal and non-transferable; it replaces the reader’s identification document while he or she is in the Library.
By accepting the reader’s pass and signing the form indicating their personal details in the Admissions Office, readers agree to observe the Library’s Rules and Regulations.
In case of loss or theft, readers are required to advise the Library’s Admissions Office as soon as possible, and to present a copy of the report filed with the competent authorities.

“Much of the Vatican’s library is accessible from the Internet for study etc. You might try to utilize that...very interesting reads once you wade thru the clutter.”

Really? This is from 2010. ~And it isn’t there yet.

“Toward on-line, worldwide access to Vatican Library materials.5389448 abstract
.
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Mintzer, F. C.; Boyle, L. E.; Cazes, A. N.; Christian, B. S.; Cox, S. C.; Giordano, F. P.; Gladney, H. M.; Lee, J. C.; Kelmanson, M. L.; Lirani, A. C.; Magerlein, K. A.; Pavani, A. M. B.; Schiattarella, F.;
IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P. O. Bar 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598, USA

This paper appears in: IBM Journal of Research and Development
Issue Date: March 1996
Volume: 40 Issue:2
On page(s): 139 - 162
ISSN: 0018-8646
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1147/rd.402.0139
Date of Current Version: 06 April 2010
Sponsored by: IBM

Abstract
The Vatican Library is an extraordinary repository of rare books and manuscripts. Among its 150,000 manuscripts are early copies of works by Aristotle, Dante, Euclid, Homer, and Virgil. Yet today access to the Library is limited. Because of the time and cost required to travel to Rome, only some 2000 scholars can afford to visit the Library each year.

Through the Vatican Library Project, we are exploring the practicality of providing digital library services that extend access to portions of the Library’s collections to scholars worldwide, as an early example of providing digital library services that extend and complement traditional library services.

A core goal of the project is to provide access via the Internet to some of the Library’s most valuable manuscripts, printed books, and other sources to a scholarly community around the world.

A multinational, multidisciplinary team is addressing the technical challenges raised by that goal, including • Development of a multiserver system suitable for providing information to scholars worldwide. • Capture of images of the materials with faithful color and sufficient detail to support scholarly study. Protection of the on-line materials, especially images, from misappropriation. • Development of tools to enable scholars to locate desired materials. • Development of tools to enable scholars to scrutinize images of manuscripts.

• In this paper, we provide an overview of the project, a description of the system being developed to satisfy its needs, and a discussion of how the technical challenges are being addressed.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5389448

I hope you read Latin, Greek, Italian because a lot of the Library site is en Italia, French and Archaic English.

Why on EARTH would the Vatican scour the internet for research when it has all the documents, letters, apostalic visits and current information too, from Bishops ad infinitum which deal with all things religious?

The project WILL make things available to SCHOLARS, WILL, not done yet! There are SELECTED manucripts and documents available.

This is your statement CAWW: “Much of the Vatican’s library is accessible from the Internet for study etc. You might try to utilize that...very interesting reads once you wade thru the clutter.”

Here is the Project’s status:

“Project to digitize manuscripts
Below is the article published on March 24, 2010 in “L’Osservatore Romano”, in which the Prefect, Mons. Cesare Pasini, announced plans to digitize the manuscripts of the Vatican Library.
Since then, and after about two years of preparatory work, various ways to raise the necessary funds have been proposed. This gives us reason to hope we are not far from a solution which will make the project operational. However, this is only the beginning of a long journey which will require further funding.

The work which has been accomplished so far, with the help of Seret, Autonomy, Metis and E4, has allowed the completion of work on 126 manuscripts, for a total of 28,000 reproductions.
As soon as possible, we intend to make the captured images available, in low resolution, for direct consultation via the web.

An initiative of the Vatican Library
Digital manuscripts

di Cesare Pasini

The digitization of 80,000 manuscripts of the Vatican Library, it should be realized, is not a light-hearted project. Even with only a rough calculation one can foresee the need to reproduce 40 million pages with a mountain of computer data, to the order of 45 petabytes (that is, 45 million billion bytes). This obviously means pages variously written and illustrated or annotated, to be photographed with the highest definition, to include the greatest amount of data and avoid having to repeat the immense undertaking in the future.

And these are delicate manuscripts, to be treated with care, without causing them damage of any kind. A great undertaking for the benefit of culture and in particular for the preservation and conservation of the patrimony entrusted to the Apostolic Library, in the tradition of a cultural service that the Holy See continues to express and develop through the centuries, adapting its commitment and energy to the possibilities offered by new technologies.

The technological project of digitization with its various aspects is now ready. In the past two years, a technical feasibility study has been prepared with the contribution of the best experts, internal, external and also international. This resulted in a project of a great and innovative value from various points of view: the realization of the photography, the electronic formats for conservation, the guaranteed stability of photographs over time, the maintenance and management of the archives, and so forth.

This project may be achieved over a span of 10 years divided into three phases, with possible intervals between them. In a preliminary phase the involvement of 60 people is planned, including photographers and conservator-verifiers, in the second and third phases at least 120. Before being able to initiate an undertaking of this kind, which is causing some anxiety to those in charge of the library (and not only to them!), naturally it will be necessary to find the funds. Moves have already been made in this direction with some positive results.

The second announcement is that some weeks ago the “test bed” was set up; in other words the “bench test” that will make it possible to try out and examine the whole structure of the important project that has been studied and formulated so as to guarantee that it will function properly when undertaken in its full breadth.

The work of reproduction uses two different machines, depending on the different types of material to be reproduced: one is a Metis Systems scanner, kindly lent to us free of charge by the manufacturers, and a 50 megapixel Hasselblad digital camera. Digitized images will be converted to the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS), a non-proprietary format, is extremely simple, was developed a few decades ago by NASA. It has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.

In addition to the servers that collect the images in FITS format accumulated by the two machines mentioned, another two servers have been installed to process the data to make it possible to search for images both by the shelf mark and the manuscript’s descriptive elements, and also and above all by a graphic pattern, that is, by looking for similar images (graphic or figurative) in the entire digital memory.

The latter instrument, truly innovative and certainly interesting for all who intend to undertake research on the Vatican’s manuscripts – only think of when it will be possible to do such research on the entire patrimony of manuscripts in the Library! – was developed from the technology of the Autonomy Systems company, a leading English firm in the field of computer science, to which, moreover, we owe the entire funding of the “test bed”.

For this “bench test”, set up in these weeks, 23 manuscripts are being used for a total of 7,500 digitized and indexed pages, with a mountain of computer data of about 5 terabytes (about 5,000 billion bytes).

The image of the mustard seed springs to mind: the “text bed” is not much more in comparison with the immensity of the overall project. But we know well that this seed contains an immense energy that will enable it to grow, to become far larger than the other plants and to give hospitality to the birds of the air. In accepting the promise guaranteed in the parable, let us also give hope of it to those who await the results of this project’s realization.

As I said, If you are doing doing your research from the Vatican Archives online because as you say: “Much of the Vatican’s library is accessible from the Internet for study etc. You might try to utilize that...very interesting reads once you wade thru the clutter.”

I’m the Pope.

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