The Carmelite Nuns have called upstate New York their home for their entire lives — but now after 103 years in North Buffalo, the cloistered community has moved to Florida to find “silence and solitude.”
They say the area where their long-time home at the Monastery of the Little Flower of Jesus is situated has changed too much for their liking over the years.
The community said in a statement late last year, “When this monastery was built, this was a quiet area on the outskirts of the city. Now, however, we no longer have silence and solitude which are requisite for a cloistered community.”
The Carmelite Nuns said friends offered to help them find a “spacious property” located in Florida in the territory of the Diocese of Saint Augustine that they hope will be their next “ideal location for” a “life of contemplative prayer.” The cloistered community said they are “confident that this is a blessing coming to us from the hand of Divine Providence.”
Pamela Jacobs, an upstate New York resident who grew up just blocks away from the Monastery of the Little Flower of Jesus, told Scripps News Buffalo, “Anytime anything of stress or even happiness happened, we’d come to the Carmelites and get a prayer card, and we had faith it would change the course of things.”