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The Holy Spirit chapel at St. Clare's Retreat House. After months without any income because of the pandemic, the retreat center is facing hard choices about its financial future. (Courtesy photo)
June 3, 2020
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
The coronavirus pandemic has dealt severe financial blows to Bay Area retreat centers, putting some of them in danger of closing.
After nearly five months without any income, St. Clare’s Retreat Center, a ministry of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows, is looking at the end of its 70 year mission to provide spiritual peace and healing.
“The retreat house has very small margins. What we bring in is what we pay out,” Franciscan Sister Christine Marie Chauvel of St. Clare’s Retreat House said.Even before COVID-19 shut down St. Clare’s revenue, the Soquel retreat center had been hit hard financially. In September, Santa Cruz County stopped grandfathering property easements, forcing the sisters to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unplanned expenses to destroy old wells and upgrade the retreat house's kitchen and dining room. Then the chapel floor and some of the campus roofs needed to be fixed.
Franciscan Sister Mary Vincent Nguyen, the retreat directress, said that was manageable until the shelter in place order meant no money was coming in at all to cover their ongoing expenses.
Sister Mary Vincent said she has halved the retreat house’s operating expenses to about $25,000 per month, but even on such a reduced budget they’ve run through their savings. They have been able to cover the salaries of their two full-time employees but had to furlough their 4 part-time employees.
Now the sisters are looking to raise $237,000 to cover their financial needs. Sister Mary Vincent said the sisters are “praying mightily that God has the bank account to get it all handled,” but she said they have to face the possibility they might not be able to reopen the retreat center’s doors.
Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows Maria Gabriel Standfield, Christine Marie Chauvel, Carol Ann Kos and Mary Vincent Nguyen at St. Clare's Retreat Center. The retreat center needs to raise $237,000 to cover its financial needs. (Courtesy photo)
“We would hate that because so many people count on us being here,” she said. Since every mission has to be financially self-supporting, “if we had to shut down and not do retreats, we’d have to find some other way to be here.”
Last year about 2000 people came through St. Clare’s doors, with an average of 60-80 people per retreat. County rules will likely prohibit hosting that many people at once when they receive permission to reopen.
Even after that, Sister Mary Vincent was not sure how many people would be able to attend, since many of their regular retreatants are elderly or on fixed incomes.For the community at St. Clare’s, the past few months have been hard. Sister Mary Vincent said she has had “to learn how to trust God more.” People are also missing the spiritual aspect of coming to retreats and finding peace. Sister Christine Marie said people have called asking “why is God doing this?
“I kept on saying God isn’t doing this, he’s allowing it,” she said. “As I prayed more about it and talked to the sisters, it seemed he was allowing it so people could know more what was essential — so we can see better what is essential for our lives and what isn’t.”
While St. Clare’s situation is more dire than others, Bay Area retreat centers have all been hit hard by the downturn in business. “Right now every retreat center has this problem: you don't know when income will come in and what you do in the meantime,” Dave Fencl, operations and finance manager at Vallombrosa Center, said.
A paycheck protection program loan will fund staff salaries there through July 3, but the retreat center’s future is uncertain after that. The company that provides much of the staffing for Vallombrosa has reassigned some workers, so retreat center employees have had to take on additional responsibilities. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cancellations has depleted the center’s accounts.
The financial difficulties at Vallombrosa are especially hard for Fencl because the retreat center was on track to have its most profitable year ever, rewarding a half-decade of work to make it an attractive destination for retreats. Now he has to focus on which bills get paid first and which ones get delayed.
“I'm just amazed at what we have to think about, things we had never considered before. There’s just so much uncertainty,” he said.
Fencl said his staff have been working out how to safely run retreats under California’s reopening guidelines, looking at breaking up group to keep low numbers and changing how food service, meetings and housing are handled.
“We could work with those restrictions to distance everyone, protect everyone and maintain social distance,” he said.Since the beginning of May the center has also been holding online mini-retreats, with a free reflection offered the Tuesday before the retreat happens on Friday. Dave Leech, Vallombrosa’s coordinator of public and digital programming and marketing, said the retreats have seen a good response, averaging about 25-35 attendees.
The online retreats have been “a real opportunity to expand our ministry,” he said, and will be an ongoing part of Vallombrosa’s ministry, even after in-person retreats return. Not only can online retreats reach people beyond the archdiocese, but they can also be attended by people who are homebound or otherwise unable to attend in person.
Vallombrosa has scheduled online retreats into August, including a daylong retreat run by Father Ron Rohlheiser.
While there are concerns about how the center will keep on going forward, Leech said he is encouraged “that people are deriving benefit from what we’re offering. We want to make sure people are not alone and can use whatever is available to them to grow and connect."