Clare Crockett

Sister Clare Maria of the Trinity and the Heart of Mary, S.H.M. (born Clare Theresa Crockett; 14 November 1982 – 16 April 2016) was a Catholic nun and former actress from Northern Ireland.

Early life

Clare Crockett was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. As a young child she loved to act and be with her friends. In secondary school she was most passionate about literature and theater. She was a very lively student and played the class clown at times. She joined an acting agency at 14 and got her first job at 15. She worked as a theater actor, writer and director, and as a TV presenter for Channel 4, and was offered a position at Nickelodeon which she turned down. She was a self-confessed wild child during her teenage years and loved to go partying. She wanted to be an actress from a very young age, and landed a small part in the 2002 film Sunday, about the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972.

Call to vocation

After a religious experience in Spain on Good Friday 2000, she felt called to religious life. She felt confirmation of her call in the months afterwards, including from a priest at World Youth Day 2000 who told her surprising details of her childhood. During her final school year she felt torn between her worldly life and her call to vocation, and her worldly life seemed to be winning out. However, further religious experiences and the continued feeling of having a call helped convince her. In summer 2001 she went back to the convent of the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother (S.H.M.) in Spain, where she took the name Sister Clare Maria of the Trinity and the Heart of Mary.

Life as a religious sister

She worked in Spain, the United States and Ecuador, doing pastoral care duties, hospital chaplaincy, teaching and missionary outreach. She was known for her interpersonal skills and was much loved by her pupils. As part of her work, she voiced the character of Lucy in the children's series "Hi Lucy" which aired on EWTN for many years. It was still showing as "Lucy and Friends" on their Europe and Asia-Pacific TV channels as of May 2023.

Death and legacy

On 16 April 2016, while she was playing the guitar and singing with her companions, the house where she was staying collapsed due to the 2016 Ecuador earthquake. Hours later she was found lifeless under the rubble. She died due to multiple injuries in Playa Prieta, a community of Riochico, Portoviejo, Ecuador.

Her remains were flown from Ecuador two weeks after her death back to her home town of Derry and were laid to rest in the new area of the City Cemetery on Lone Moor Road.

Since her death, the story of her life has been covered in several sources and she has been described as an "inspirational example of womanhood". The movie All or Nothing summarizes her life. In 2020, a house-sized mural commemorating Sister Clare was unveiled near her home in Derry, and a sister in her religious order published a biography of her.

Cause for beatification

A number of healings and fertility miracles have reputedly been attributed to her by people who prayed for her intercession, and a 2020 article in The Irish Catholic referred to calls for her to be declared a saint. In January 2021 her order said that, while they had begun "to take steps in view of opening the cause" of her beatification, such a step would depend on the local ecclesial authorities in Ecuador, as set out in the Catholic Church's 2007 Sanctorum Mater document. In the same statement, the order described as "fake news" a claim that it would open a cause for beatification in 2021, noting that the beatification process does not begin until at least 5 years after a person's death. The order issued a further clarifying statement in September 2021, noting that while it "truly seems that Our Lord is permitting her to intercede and help people", simply visiting her grave a fixed number of times or asking her for help "is not magical". They said that a request for Sr. Clare's intercession depends on the request, one's faith, and on God's will.

In May 2023, Sr. Kristen Gardner stated that she had been appointed postulator of the cause of beatification of Sr. Clare. She said that the opening of the cause was underway and had been moved to the diocese of Alcalá de Henares in Spain after permission was received from the bishop of Portoviejo, from Rome, and from her local bishop. She said this had been done to make the process easier, since their community is headquartered in Spain, and also because Sr. Clare had lived most of her religious life there.

References

External links

• Homepage of Sister Clare maintained by her order
• Biography of Sister Clare by Sister Kristen Gardner, SHM (2020)
• All or Nothing movie on youtube