To many, she’s a soft-spoken Spanish teacher, but in her religious congregation, Sr. Elise Mora, O.S.F, lives fearlessly, accepting her moral convictions with complete willingness.
Mora, adjunct professor of modern languages, who began her religious journey at 19, said the religious life wasn’t a clear, instantaneous decision for her. Rather, a friend from New Mexico, where she was born and raised, who was also considering religious life, prompted her to join a local convent.
Mora added that her unfortunate living situation at the time and a recent breakup, made “convent life” a convenient safe haven.
“I was an orphan child, and I was raised in many, many households,” she said. “It was like foster care—but not exactly—because these were all aunts and uncles. However, it was not a very happy childhood…so, when I joined my religious congregation, I think I was really looking for a home…”
Mora said that while human beings don’t always do things for the right reasons, sometimes the reason becomes “purified” and that’s why people continue to do it.
According to Mora, her choice to join her order, which sprung from a desire to belong, has become a serious commitment, affording her the “privilege of serving others.”
“In the inner city or in jails, immigrant services too, had I not been religious, I probably would not have had those opportunities and the privilege of serving those people,” she said. “I know there’s lives I touch, and I think I get more from it than they did.”
Mora, whose self-proclaimed goal is to be a friend to others, added that her missionary work started far before her 2006 entrance into the Bonaventure community.
In the early 1980s, she said her work was centered in South Bronx helping drug addicts and AIDs patients, before relocating to Manhattan in the late 1980s, where she worked in immigrant services for the Archdiocese of New York.
Mora’s impressive mish-mosh of inner-city, Christian work came to a head in the early 2000s, when she founded her own prison ministry program.
As a part of the program, she would personally educate inmates about “the faith.”
Mora, with a petite stature and without a bodyguard said she was never frightened by the inmates, jokingly describing them as, “pussycats.”
While Mora added that she is unable to regularly visit the prisons—due to her full-time teaching position at the university—she still writes to the inmates, many of whom are still incarcerated.
Also, inspired by both love and people, Mora said she’s equally as captivated by nature.
“I worry about the world you’re going to inherit and the world your kids are going to come into,” said Mora, who keeps a small book of daily nature-related, inspirational quotes on her desk. “We just don’t know with all the things we’re doing to it right now.
Mora added that she uses a small paper towel to dry her hands and meticulously shuts off any unnecessary lights around campus because she believes it’s humans’ responsibilities to care about the planet, as she wrote in one of her order’s news releases.
“I believe, with all my heart, that as women who profess to follow the charism of Francis, our original founder, we are called to use all the energy and love we can muster, to heal and preserve our planet Earth,” she wrote in the quarterly publication. “I feel that the greatest injustice of our time is the continued destruction of it.”
Mora, who said she’s thankful that a habit-free life has made reaching out to others easier, said her goal is to be a friend to the people she meets—starting with the students she instructs nearly every day.
“I love Bona’s,” Mora said with a smile. “I really like young people—even the crazy ones.”
mcgurllt14@bonaventure.edu
