Annunciation Vita Dei House began in Rhode Island, USA, in 2011 when two older women, Maria Deliz and Antoinette Padua, came to assist the Confraternity of Penitents and to discern their next step in life. Initially, they lived in a private home with a married couple who were managing the Confraternity of Penitents. Within the first year, a prolife pregnancy agency needed live-in adult women to manage a shelter home for pregnant, single moms. Maria and Antoinette moved to this home to fill this role while continuing to assist the Confraternity. A third woman, Mattea Brandon, joined them. 

 

By 2013, Maria had returned to her home and was caring for an ill sister. Antoinette had returned to South Africa where she became a consecrated virgin in her diocese. Mattea had entered religious life. The married couple moved to Fort Wayne, along with the Confraternity of Penitents' office and Holy Angels Gift Shop.

 
In Indiana, five women stayed with this married couple, discerning various paths in life, praying and working together and sharing meals and fellowship. 

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When the couple purchased a nearby home, that home became the first Annunciation House with a house mother (now in religious life) and three other women while the couple continued to live in the original house as headquarters for the Confraternity. 

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The current Annunciation House was gifted to the Confraternity of Penitents in 2019 by the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend. Originally a convent for nuns who taught at an adjacent school (now closed), the building was later used as a home for men in recovery and then as a Franciscan friary. How wonderful that this building again houses women who are faithful to God!