CNA Staff, Jan 9, 2025 / 06:00 am
Before Sister Tonia of the Heart of Jesus Borsellino became a religious sister of the Mercedarians of the Blessed Sacrament, she was an intern for Catholic News Agency (CNA).
Sister Tonia shared her discernment story with CNA last week at SEEK25 in Salt Lake City — one of many SEEK conferences she has attended, both as a student and as a religious sister.
In 2017, when Sister Tonia was in the midst of her discernment process, she attended a SEEK conference — not as a participant but as a reporter for CNA. It was at that conference that she had an experience that confirmed her call to her vocation.
In December 2016, she had visited the Mercedarian Sisters for a “Come and See,” shortly before she left for SEEK 2017 in San Antonio. At the event, Sister Tonia sought spiritual direction and decided to apply to the community — but she still wasn’t sure she was called to be a sister.
“I was unsure — was this the right answer?” she recalled thinking.
This internal dilemma played out in her mind while she interviewed a Catholic speaker for CNA.
“I was interviewing this Catholic speaker, and at the end, he just looked at me and said, ‘I just need to tell you something’ and that the Holy Spirit was telling him to tell me how much God loves me,” she said.
“I just got emotional and I knew that the Lord was saying, ‘I’m confirming and leading you to be my bride,’” Sister Tonia said.
Years later, Sister Tonia has returned to SEEK as a religious sister. When asked how it feels to return as a fully professed sister, she said: “It’s amazing.”
“There’s a lot of awe of how the Lord works and how his hand is on everything,” Sister Tonia said.
“To be here at SEEK and to see I was there as one of these students and that the Lord has done so much since then — there’s just a lot of pondering in my heart, like Mary, of how the Lord works, how his love is so much more than I could have thought.”
Sister Tonia shared her gratitude that SEEK provides this opportunity “to encounter Jesus and to learn more about our faith and to have these opportunities to meet different religious communities.”
Along with keynote talks, breakout sessions, and prayer opportunities, SEEK gathers apostolates, religious orders, and other Catholic organizations together in “Mission Way,” a large area of booths that SEEK attendees can visit.
It was actually at SEEK where a couple of Sister Tonia’s college friends — who later went on to become sisters in the same order — first encountered the Mercedarian sisters.
Sister Tonia — who was studying at University of Florida in Gainesville at the time — was deeply involved in campus ministry with several friends. While at SEEK, members of the campus ministry invited the Mercedarians to join a retreat they were hosting on campus.
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Several of Sister Tonia’s friends from campus ministry then went on to join the Mercedarians after college, which was how Sister Tonia first got to know her community.
“My friends were entering with the community, and I saw them and how they became more fully themselves,” Sister Tonia recalled. “I got to know the community a little bit through them.”
The Mercedarian sisters in Sister Tonia’s junior year of college started a community in Gainesville, Florida, to minister to the University of Florida.
“I got to see their day-to-day life and really get to know them,” Sister Tonia recalled.
When she graduated from the University of Florida in 2017, Sister Tonia joined the Mercedarian Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and professed her final vows on April 3, 2024.
Sister Tonia said she had considered other communities for their apostolates, looking for something related to communications. But her vocation director advised her to “look at the spirituality of the community.”
“The spirituality, the charism never changes,” Sister Tonia said. “Our charism is about the Eucharist and redemption through the Eucharist — spreading the love of the Eucharist through education and evangelization of children and youth.”
“And that was my heart,” she continued. “Desiring to bring people to know Jesus in the Eucharist felt like home, and the sisters felt like family. So the Lord was slowly prompting my heart to see that this was where he was leading me.”
The community is contemplative and active, meaning they pray for more than four hours every day in addition to serving their apostolates. On top of this, the sisters have a silent hour of Eucharistic adoration.
“Our day starts with the Eucharist, then we go out then to our apostolates,” Sister Tonia explained. She serves in campus ministry three days a week and runs the communications for the community at the regional house in Baton Rouge, where she has been for the past four years.
The Mercedarian sisters have more than 400 religious sisters in 12 different countries — and the community is growing in the U.S. They recently opened a new house of formation in Baton Rouge in addition to the community of professed sisters there.
“It’s incredible to see how the Lord works,” Sister Tonia said. “Now I get to use all these gifts and talents that I’ve studied or just learned along the way, and I get to bring that to continue to build the Eucharistic kingdom for our community.”
A connection to EWTN
While she was personally discerning religious life, Sister Tonia was a guest on EWTN’s “Life on the Rock” where she shared about the campus ministry work she was involved in at University of Florida. She was telling a story about how the campus ministry would reach out to students to invite them to light a candle and pray before Jesus in Eucharistic adoration.
“As I’m explaining this on the show, I’m getting really passionate, and the host of the show says, ‘Well, forget about communications; just go be a sister,’” Sister Tonia recalled.
She said the comment by co-host Doug Barry “caught me very off guard.”
“My face turned super red because I was thinking about religious life. All these thoughts were in my prayer, and I was not expecting him to say that,” Sister Tonia recalled. “It was a little way of the Lord speaking through it.”
When asked what her advice would be to others who are discerning, Sister Tonia said to “ask the Lord to lead.”
“Our vocations are not something for us to figure out. They’re not a puzzle,” she said. “It’s through our relationship with the Lord that he leads us to our vocation.”
She noted that “our primary vocation is holiness.”
“So what does your prayer life look like? How are you in communion with the Lord?” she asked.
She advised those who are discerning to focus on “building that relationship with him, spending time in adoration, just receiving his love, and then following where he leads.”
“It’s all in him,” Sister Tonia added.
Sister Tonia’s archival story on SEEK 2017 in San Antonio can be found here.
