From foster care to Lourdes: Young convert leaves job to see pope, embrace monastic life

Among the throngs of pilgrims in Lourdes this weekend will be a 27-year-old woman who’ll be there with a group of Cistercian nuns, hoping the visit will confirm her call to contemplative life.

LOURDES, France — The exceptional fervor that marked the pope’s visit to Paris — the first stage of his Sept. 25–28 apostolic journey to France — should show no sign of waning in Lourdes, where tens of thousands of faithful are expected to gather around the famous grotto of Massabielle when Leo XIV comes to pray there on the evening of Sept. 26, ahead of an outdoor Mass on the sanctuary’s meadow and the traditional torchlight procession the following day.

Among them will be a 27-year-old woman who will attend alongside a group of Cistercian nuns, hoping the visit will confirm the call to contemplative life she has felt since returning to the faith during the COVID-19 crisis.

It is no coincidence that Yohanna, a sign-language interpreter for deaf people, has chosen Lourdes to mark this new beginning after years of volunteering with people with disabilities. It is a few dozen miles from here, at the Abbey of Sainte-Marie de Boulaur, one of the strongholds of monastic renewal in France, that her vocation took shape. And it is to join this community as an aspirant that she quit her job in Paris, just in time not to miss the Holy Father’s visit.

Her story reflects a broader generational movement in France, where adult baptisms reached a new record this year, driven largely by young adults.

‘I wanted to give God everything’

But Yohanna’s story is a singular testament to divine grace. Placed in foster care at the age of 4, she grew up far from any religious practice in a life marked early on by bereavement and solitude.

Like so many of her generation, she first went looking for answers in the spiritual movements close to the New Age that flourish among young French people — an exploration that left its mark, literally, in the tattoos she still carries. She evokes these wanderings today with a smile rather than regret, for it was through them, she believes, that she eventually found her way back to God.

That way opened in the spring of 2020, in a university residence emptied by the first COVID-19 lockdown.

“All the students had left, and it felt a bit like the end of the world,” she recalled. “I had nothing; I had no one. And suddenly there was this thought of God that took hold of me. I became really eager to know more about him.”

She began learning how to pray through online resources and quickly made prayer part of her daily life. Once the lockdown was lifted, she developed a taste for stepping into every church she encountered to pray alone, while avoiding Masses, since she didn’t know any of the customs. The turning point came in 2023, when she moved to Paris and walked into a church on a weekday, just as a Mass was beginning.

“I didn’t even know there was a consecration, although it is the heart of the Catholic Mass. But I spent that whole celebration crying at the back of the church,” she remembered. “And at the end I said to the Lord: OK, I’ve understood. Now I want to give you everything, really everything, my whole life. Do what you want with me. And from that moment on, everything changed.”

After settling in a parish in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, she undertook a period of catechetical formation and received the sacrament of confirmation.

During the National Pilgrimage each August, she serves as an interpreter for deaf-blind pilgrims — an experience that transformed her understanding of the sanctuary. “The real miracle of Lourdes,” she said, “is perhaps simply that we all end up together.”

Her conversion was followed by the call to consecrated life almost immediately, but she was determined not to rush her decision, having been warned that new converts “might be very enthusiastic and immediately think of consecrated life, only to give it up quickly.”

An unexpected call

Guided by her parish priest and the vocations service of the Archdiocese of Paris, she began discerning with apostolic sisters, cloistered life being the last thing on her mind. “Given my personal background, I had enormous clichés about monastic life,” she said. “I imagined all sorts of old-fashioned things.”

It was in the middle of a difficult university year, at the end of December 2024, that she first went to the Cistercian abbey of Boulaur, simply because she “had always heard that monasteries were a good place to rest and get some air.” She has returned every holiday since. When the sisters offered her a stay inside the enclosure, she accepted with the thought that it would only confirm her prejudices.

“I thought that going inside the cloister for the first time would help me understand that this was not my path at all, and that would settle it,” she said. “But when I experienced the cloister for the first time, it was incredible. I felt completely in my place.”

“The Lord knows us better than we know ourselves,” she continued. “Sometimes he leads us to things that at first seem absurd, and afterward you realize that it fits perfectly.”

At the 2025 Jubilee of Youth in Rome, she encountered the universal Church for the first time among thousands of young people “so different from each other, and all there for the Lord.” That experience now shapes her expectations for Leo’s visit to a France witnessing record numbers of adult baptisms.

Reflecting on the pope’s forthcoming visit to Lourdes, which Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of Tarbes and Lourdes has described as that of “a simple pilgrim,” she said: “Pope Leo knows what is happening in our country, and I’m sure his words will help us on our way.” The official program already includes a special prayer for France, asking the Virgin Mary for the renewal of Christian families and the flourishing of vocations, “especially priestly and religious.”

Yohanna’s own vocation initially alarmed her foster parents. But faced with her perseverance and joy, they agreed to drive her to Boulaur themselves, giving them an opportunity to meet the sisters and discover the life she is preparing to embrace. From there, they will travel together to Lourdes for the pope’s visit.

“It will be a chance for them to meet the sisters and to see what a monastery really is, not just what people imagine,” she said. “That’s already a big step.”

Her aspirancy, the first step on the long road to the novitiate, is to last until June. She said her heart is “completely open” to what it will reveal. “If God calls me there, I’ll be so happy that I’ll offer him a big yes, with all my heart.”