Dolores Hart - Vocational Calling

Vocational Calling

While Hart was doing Francis of Assisi in Rome, she met Blessed Pope John XXIII, who was instrumental in her vocation. She told him "I am Dolores Hart, the actress playing Clare." The Pontiff replied, "Tu sei Chiara!" ("No, you are Clare!" in Italian).

As a novice, she told Abbey founder, Lady Abbess Benedict Duss, "I will never have to worry again about being an actress because it was all over and behind me." But Lady Abbess replied, "I'm sorry, but you're completely wrong. Now you have to take up a role and really work at it." Hart submitted a rejoinder, "I was so mad when she said that because I really emptied my pockets, so to speak, and literally had given away everything that had meant anything to me." The Abbess said, "I'm sorry you did that because there's a lot of things you gave away that you're going to need here." She initially took the religious name Sister Judith", but she changed it to Sister Dolores at her final vows. "Hal Wallis wanted to call me Susan when I started my movie career, but I was under age and my mother would not hear of it. She wanted me to be Dolores." She took her final vows in 1970. She chants in Latin eight times a day.

In 2006, she visited Hollywood again after 43 years in the convent to raise awareness for peripheral idiopathic neuropathy disorder, a neurological disorder that afflicts her and many Americans. In April 2006, she testified at a Washington congressional hearing on the need for research on the painful and crippling disease amid her ordeal.

Hart, who was compared to Grace Kelly, was instrumental in developing her Abbey of Regina Laudis's project of expansion of its community connection through the arts, using her fame. Paul Newman helped her with funding for a lighting grid, when she envisioned a year-round arts school and a better-equipped stage. Another friend, the Academy Award winning actress Patricia Neal helped support the abbey's theater. Hart's vision was to meet the abbey's needs—development and expansion of its open-air theater and arts program for the Bethlehem community. Every summer, the abbey's 38 nuns on 400 acres (1.6 km2) of rural land, help the community stage a musical, with the 2008 presentation of West Side Story, after previous shows Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man and My Fair Lady.

The Reverend Mother Dolores Hart is Prioress of the Abbey (since 2001), but she remains a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, having in recent years become the only nun to be an Oscar-voting member.

On October 4, 2008 "The Holy Trinity Apostolate", founded by Rev. John Hardon, S.J., sponsored a "Breakfast with Mother Dolores Hart". Held at Rochester, Michigan's Royal Park Hotel, Hart told her story: "He Led Me Out into an Open Space; He Saved Me Because He Loved Me: The Journey of Mother Dolores Hart to Regina Laudis". Since 1963, when she joined the Bethlehem CT Monastery, she disciplined herself under the Rule of Saint Benedict. At the breakfast, several people spoke, including actress Patricia Neal and Maria Cooper Janis, the daughter of Hollywood leading man Gary Cooper.

A documentary film about Hart's life, God Is the Bigger Elvis is a nominee for the 2012 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) and is scheduled to be shown on HBO in April 2012.

Hart attended the 2012 Academy Awards for her Oscar nominated documentary "God Is the Bigger Elvis". Her last red carpet Oscar event was in 1959, as a Hollywood starlet.