Sr. Carlotta Fontes, OSB

Sister Carlotta was born in Taunton, Massachusetts. Her father was in the Air Force and the family lived in several places including Japan. They moved to Boise, Idaho, in 1974 upon his retirement. As an adult, Sister Carlotta worked in a manufacturing company. Then, in 2000, she went to Europe, inspired by the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. While praying in a chapel, she saw a group of nuns enter the sanctuary. “I watched them pray and felt an overwhelming sense of wanting to belong to something like that,” she says. 

Later, a friend brought her to the Monastery of St. Gertrude for a weekend. She continued discerning a vocation with personal reflection, talks with friends and family, and several more visits to the Monastery. Two and a half years later, she became a postulant and made her First Profession on March 21, 2006. She began learning about gardening and herbs from Sister Theresa Dvorak.

She received her Master Herbalist certificate from the Global College of Natural Medicine in Santa Cruz, CA, in May 2007. In this intensive, one-year program, she studied herbs and their effects on the human body. She learned how to identify and grow herbs, prepare them for use in making teas, tinctures, and tonics. While Sister Carlotta cannot diagnose or prescribe, she can make suggestions about which herbs to use for the relief of specific ailments.