Sister Allie Lewya

Founder 

My journey to becoming a Sister started when I was in middle school. I grew up in the United Methodist Church, but my mother’s family was Roman Catholic. My maternal grandmother, a devout Catholic, offered to enter me into CCD/catechism. I thought about it for a while until I realized the only reason I wanted to be a Catholic was so that I could be a nun. Given that there were additional challenges to me becoming a nun besides my status as a protestant heretic, I decided to skip CCD.

Flash-forward a few years, in the Summer of 2002, while attending the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., I took a course called “Religions Wage Peace.” The course centered on the peace and justice movements within the world’s major religions. For our final paper in the class we had to research and write about a group or movement that wasn’t covered in the semester. I spoke with a friend of mine, a priest, about the project and he suggested The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. As a nineteen-year-old, new to queer communities, I had never heard of The Sisters. I immediately fell in love. My entire life has been influenced by a simple mission: to expiate stigmatic guilt and promulgate universal joy. I strive to ensure that everything I do returns to that simple (and extraordinarily difficult) mantra.

While in grad school in San Francisco, I started the process of joining the Order, but it wasn’t the right time in my life. I had more growing to do before I could handle the responsibility of the veil. I moved back to D.C. after grad school. When Sister Sedusa told me that there were talks about forming a house here in the District, I couldn’t have been more excited. I was finally in a place in my life where I could commit myself to the order. And I couldn’t be more proud and humbled to be a founding member of The D.C. Sisters, the Abbey of Magnificent Intentions.