Aspiring nun pays off student debt using GoFundMe page
A New Jersey woman used crowdfunding to pay off her $12,000 student debt so she could fulfill her dream of becoming a nun with the Sisters of Life in New York.
Alida Taylor, 28, of Clifton, N.J., had been told that she wouldn’t be able to enter the convent until she was debt-free, so she launched a GoFundMe page on June 29. By Saturday, she had raised more than $22,000.
“My dear friends and family, in ELEVEN DAYS, you all helped me reach my goal!! Praise be to Jesus Christ!!!” she wrote in an update to supporters on Friday. “I am deeply moved by your generosity. You, the Body of Christ, the Church — contrary to what the media says — HAS ALLOWED me to enter religious life.”
Taylor plans to join the Sisters of Life as a postulant, or candidate for admission, on Sept. 10. She will continue to fundraise and said that any money exceeding her goal will go into a vocation fund at Casa Guadalupe, a house of prayer for young Catholic women in Clifton, N.J.
In a post on her GoFundMe page, Taylor explained that the first religious sister she met was her third-grade teacher.
“I understood that though she taught like the other teachers, her life was set apart, and was first spent in being with the Lord. And I desired this,” she wrote.
In 2010, after college graduation, Taylor moved to New York and started to make costumes for Broadway productions. She met the Sisters of Life during a religious retreat and decided to move to Casa Guadalupe to reflect on her life’s calling in a spiritual community.
“At Casa, I had the space to grow more deeply in prayer with Jesus, to discern through different communities and to experience His love and mercy for me,” she wrote. “And the Lord has made His call clear, inviting me to follow His love by upholding the sanctity and dignity of every human life, through the Sisters of Life.”
CBS New York aired a segment on Taylor’s fundraiser Tuesday night, and she met her goal shortly afterward. In the report, the young woman said that she had originally planned to pay off her debt over the next 10 years but that crowdfunding was her only way to meet the convent’s September deadline.
Sister Mariae Agnus Dei, of the Sisters of Life, told CBS New York that paying off the debt would allow Taylor to “freely enter into her vocation” because a second job would not be possible for a nun.
“Religious life is a full-time job, so to speak, so she wouldn’t be able to work and enter into religious life,” she told the station.
Taylor declined to be interviewed when contacted by Yahoo News.
