Famous volleyball player leaves sport to become religious

Rome, Italy, Feb 8, 2005 / 22:00 pm

Italian media has been fixated with the story of Michela Amadori, a renowned volleyball player who has decided to leave the sport and enter the cloister.

Sister Michela, as she is now called by her community of Discalced Carmelites in Rome, was thought to have a promising career in volleyball.

She says she is “totally happy” with her decision to enter the convent and thus leave behind her youth volleyball team, which made it to the junior World Volleyball Championships in 1997.

In 1998, when she moved to Rome to join a professional volleyball club, she decided to study theology, a subject that had always fascinated her.

Since that time, she says, she noticed her passion for volleyball began to compete with her profound religious longing.  Therefore she decided to finish her theological studies while at the same time embarking on a serious discernment of her vocation.

Her discernment ended when at age 26 she decided to enter the cloister.  “It is difficult to explain, it’s like falling in love: it’s impossible to explain with words,” Sister Michela told the Italian daily, “La Reppublica.”

She told the newspaper that like St. Therese of Lisieux, “I would like to help with the missions throughout the world.” She admitted that as a little girl she never thought about becoming a nun.