By Jay Sorgi • Posted October 8, 2025

God doesn’t always  reveal His will through one major life-changing moment. Sometimes, it comes in droplets of truth — slowly filling a person’s soul with clarity.

For Amanda Bielat, it was what she calls “a gradual unfolding” over her life. That journey has led into her first weeks with the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Malvern.

Her path began through Queen of Peace Church and School, Cardinal Dougherty and Lansdale Catholic high schools, and deepened through college and a career in Catholic education and service ultimately leading her to Immaculata University before entering the IHMs.

“I really fell in love with God and my faith in college, maybe even before that,” Bielat said. “I remember really through service, that connection was made for me. As a high schooler, I think that those seeds were planted. We went to Wheeling, West Virginia when I was in high school for three years. There were moments that I was saying, ‘Yeah, this is really what we’re supposed to be doing.’”

“Just being present to people, it’s not about the things we do or when we’re doing service. It’s being willing to listen to people’s stories and walk with them, even if it’s momentarily through their joys and sorrows and the struggles and everything in between. For me, service has been an affirmation of other people, of people’s dignity and being created in the image and likeness of God.”

After graduating from Marywood University in Scranton,  Bielat joined a Capuchin volunteer mission in New York, taught in Archdiocese of Philadelphia schools, served as a campus minister and teacher at Nazareth Academy, and studied at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, the same school that taught Villanova graduate Pope Leo XIV.

Most recently, she spent the last three years as assistant director of campus ministry for Immaculata University.

“When I came back to Pennsylvania and started working at Immaculata, I really thought I couldn’t keep pushing it away,” she said. “I sort of had to confront this idea that, oh, God is going to win.”

Those who have witnessed Bielat’s journey say it’s been clear how God has been present within her, including her parish priest, Father Jim DeGrassa, who helped the discernment process.

“I asked her last year if she would like to give a retreat, and that I’d like young people to be involved. She seemed like a very faithful, prayerful person. She did a beautiful retreat. I was really taken back. She really has a good faith and a real good insight with her faith,” said Father Jim DeGrassa, the pastor of Queen of Peace.

“A few months later, she came to me and wanted to talk. She said she was thinking about pursuing this vocation to be an Immaculate Heart of Mary sister. We have six sisters in our parish that work in the convent, visit the people that are sick in the parish and run the school. I kept her in my prayer and checked back in with her a couple of times. She applied and got accepted.”

Bielat is entering her postulant year, a year of discovering what the order calls “the purpose of community as a witnessing to Christ by offering herself, her gifts and her potential to Him” while discerning her vocation.  It marked the beginning of an eight-year passage before fully entering into the congregation.

She knew God desired a calling that would bear fruit from her charism of love and service developed in mission work from New York to West Virginia.

“Just being present to people, it’s not about the things we do or when we’re doing service. It’s not about doing as much as being willing to listen to people’s stories and walk with them, even if it’s momentarily through their joys and sorrows and the struggles and everything in between,” Bielat said. “For me, service has been an affirmation of other people, of people’s dignity and being created in the image and likeness of God.”

Bielat and Mary Steinbicker, a student at Immaculata, discerned their callings to the same religious order  while working together in campus ministry last year.

Father Jim believes Bielat’s vocation will allow her to live out her gifts of compassion and  accompaniment.

“She has a very compassionate heart. She’s definitely a giver,” he says. “Generosity, compassion, empathy.”

Bielat sees this next step as an extension of her true identity, one rooted in the same thing that defines the IHM’s own charism.

“Love and fidelity, that enduring faith, even when the world wants us to give up when things are difficult,” said Bielat. “But we don’t, because we’re there to serve God, right?”