Nuns have been at center of several disputes

By M.L. LYKE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The most difficult public policy debates have concerned the nuns. The island has three Catholic religious orders: the Franciscans, the Sisters of Mercy and the Benedictines.

In the early '80s, when the Sisters of Mercy began building a 4,000-square-foot building without a permit, concerned islanders successfully sued to stop them. Then the semicloistered Benedictine nuns -- whose since-departed priest was the subject of investigative stories about "cultlike" behavior -- landed in court in a dispute over donated land.

The dispute began when Henry Ellis, a devout Catholic, decided to withdraw the second half of a 300-acre donation to the Benedictines. The nuns sued for breach of promise and won on appeal in 1989.

It was a wrenching time for islanders.

"We had knots in our stomachs," says the Benedictine's Mother Felicitas, a former professor of musicology and grandmother of three who tends the herbal gardens at the bucolic retreat wearing a hooded blue sweat shirt over her long black-and-white habit.

Mother Felicitas, 67, joined the order at age 48. "You become more of a child again when you enter a religious community. You have to learn everything all over again," she says as she tours the handsome new Our Lady of the Rock chapel where the eight Benedictine nuns sing Gregorian chant and pray in Latin eight times a day.

The chapel, with Japanese garden outside and bamboo grill and ornate Oriental furnishings within, looks out over the nuns' organic gardens and green pastures where llamas, alpacas, sheep and cattle graze. There are hens for eggs, turkeys for eating, pigs to clean off the bones and ducks to eat the slugs. ("They dip them in water before they eat them," notes Mother Felicitas.)

She uses the herbs from her garden to make vinegars, spices, teas and the kicky Mother Prisca's Hot Mustard that is sold at The Little Portion Store. The secret ingredients, she confesses, are horseradish and nasturtium seeds.

Island kids describe the nuns as "cool." The nuns sell raw milk. That's cool. They also sell llama poop. Coolest of all -- a classful of students points out -- they name all their animals.