Dominican Contemplative Nuns, have withdrawn from the world in such a way as to embrace everyone in the heart of Christ. We are called by God to witness His love, to adoration and prayer, with the Word of God as the center of our lives. We seek to sustain the Church, to INTERCEDE FOR MANKIND and THROUGH OUR LIFE OF PRAYER, work and study we bring to fruition God’s loving Word in the World.1
On St. Patrick’s Day 1924, in response to Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s request, Archbishop John J. Cantwell invited her and four other nuns from the Newark monastery to live in Los Angeles as the city’s first community of cloistered Catholic women. The Dominicans took up residence at 728 West 28th Street near Exposition Park, in the elegant former home of mining geologist Horace Winchell. The 12-room property was known for a decade as the Monastery of the Angels, and hosted within it a Chapel of Perpetual Adoration where the public could come and pray with the sisters.
In 1934, the sisters obtained a more suitable home when their order, with the aid of wealthy friends, purchased the former mansion of Nevada copper king Joseph Louis Giroux, on Carmen Avenue in Hollywood. The house had been designed by master architect Frederick Roehrig in 1912, with landscaped gardens by Arthur E. Simpson. The grounds included vast lawns, terraces, fountains, rare specimen plants and long driveways lined with palms.
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For 14 years, they lived and prayed in the mansion. In Spring 1948, the Catholic women of Los Angeles came together in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel to fundraise for the sisters’ new purpose built cloister, chapel and office complex.
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By 1950, there was a community of 30 cloistered nuns living, working and practicing Perpetual Adoration in their simple chapel, with at least four nuns praying at all times. The sisters ate a spare pescatarian diet with just one meal daily from the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14) to Easter Sunday, slept on straw mattresses, baked communion wafers for local churches, sewed vestry garments for the priests, tended their flower garden and ministered to the sick and needy who came to the chapel to speak through the metal grill that separates the cloistered sisters from the world outside.
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By 1986, an assembly line of 26 nuns was producing 12,000 loaves a year and bakery sales made up 25% of the monastery’s income.As for the old Giroux Mansion, it remained in service as a retreat house for Catholic women seeking a respite from the modern world until May 1973, when all of the decorative elements that could be salvaged–stained glass, hand-carved bookcases, pre-Raphaelite fireplace tiles, cement planters, Italian roof tiles and the copper king’s copper doorknobs and bathtubs–were auctioned off to benefit construction of a modern retreat house facing Gower Street. The mansion was then demolished.
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In 1950, prioress Mother Mary GABRIEL told a reporter “OUR PRAYERS are for all the world and IN PARTICULAR LOS ANGELES in this age of destruction and confusion.” In 1959, after thirty years of service in Hollywood, Mary Gabriel moved to Karachi, Pakistan to establish a cloistered monastery, also called Monastery of the Angels, to minister to the largely Muslim community. While today the Hollywood monastery is a shadow of itself, its Pakistani sister is thriving.2“Carlos Sanchez started working here almost 20 years ago when 50 nuns lived on the property.”3
Enclosure
In the monastery everything is directed to the search for the face of God, everything is reduced to the essential, because the only thing that matters is what LEADS TO HIM. Monastic recollection is ATTENTION TO THE PRESENCE OF GOD: if it is dissipated by many things, the journey slows down and the final destination disappears from view. (Verbi Sponsa)4
Through her religious consecration, the virgin becomes the wife of Christ. Inspired by reading Saint Bernard’s commentary on the Song of Songs, Columba Marmion seeks—in the lectures gathered in this work—to indicate the conditions required for a soul to become Sponsa Verbi [the wife of the Word]. These are instructions that, in addition to reviving in consecrated virgins the awareness of their eminent dignity, due to such a sublime vocation, also seek to reach other souls who, in order to be married to Christ, only await the opportunity for the ideal to which they secretly aspire to be fully revealed to them, and which will be unveiled to them in these pages. (Columba Marmion, Sponsa Verbi: The Virgin Consecrated to the Lord)
Energy is Real
“The energy these nuns send out with their prayers all day is so important to this community. You can FEEL that ENERGY.”
“Baker said that the Monastery of the Angels has always been a place to turn to in times of DESPAIR —when someone is sick or dying or when a MIRACLE was needed. ‘There is nothing like it in Los Angeles’.”5
“We found Kenneth Warfield nearby playing his music, he’s lived here for more than 20 years, and says even if people in the neighborhood don’t see the cloistered nuns THEY ALWAYS FEEL THEIR PRESENCE.”3
Location: 1977 Carmen Ave, Hollywood Hills, CA 90068 (not to be confused with St Mary of the Angels Church, 4510 Finley Ave, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 555 W Temple St, Church of the Angels, 1100 Avenue 64, or Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church, 535 N Main St).
Notes
- “History abounds at the Monastery of the Angels — part 2,” Larchmont Chronicle, January 25, 2024; see also “Heavenly pumpkin bread from the Monastery of the Angels,” Larchmont Chronicle, November 30, 2023.
- A Short History of The Monastery of The Angels in Hollywood (1934-?)
- “Monastery of the Angels KTLA 12 16 21 330PM,” YouTube, Dec 16, 2021
- Verbi Sponsa: Instruction on the Contemplative Life and on the Enclosure of Nuns, 1999
- Deborah Netburn, LA Times, Dec. 3, 2021