by Jo Piazza
If Nuns Ruled the World
Ten Sisters on a Mission
Jo Piazza
To Simone, Megan, Tesa, Nora, Dianna, Madonna,
Donna, Joan, Maureen, and Jeannine.
If nuns ruled the world, I have no doubt it would be
a fairer place.
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
1. Weapons Are Made Like Gods
2. The Nun on the Bus
3. It Isn’t About Being Gay; It’s About Being in Love
4. Racing Against Time, Outliving the Competition
5. An Underground Railroad for Modern-Day Slaves
6. Keeping an Eye on Corporate America
7. The Act of Survival Is Worse Than the Torture Itself
8. I Want to Run a Laundromat Before I Die
9. Jesus Treated Men and Women Equally
10. We Are All Sisters
Epilogue
Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Author’s Note
Strictly speaking, “women religious” refers to all women in the Church who have taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. By the strictest of definitions, “nuns” are a subset of women religious who are cloistered, contemplative, and dedicated to a life of prayer. “Sisters” are another subset, who pursue active work out in the world. However, these words have become so colloquially interchanged within and outside of the Church that we use them as synonyms here.
“Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.”
—Dorothy Day
“Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.”
—Mother Teresa
Introduction
In December of 2013 the newly elected Pope Francis won out over NSA leaker Edward Snowden, gay-rights activist Edith Windsor, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and US president Barack Obama to be named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.”
“He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a church of healing,” Time wrote in its announcement about the decision. “The septuagenarian superstar is poised to transform a place that measures change by the century.”
Ever since Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit from Argentina, assumed the papacy in March of that same year, he was lauded as a potential reformer, praised for backing away from a focus on doctrine and moving toward a reinvigorated focus on service and compassion for the poor. And within a very short amount of time his actions began to help change the perception of the Church as out-of-touch.
“This focus on compassion, along with a general aura of merriment not always associated with princes of the church, has made Francis something of a rock star,” wrote Time editor Nancy Gibbs.
He washed the feet of female convicts and opted to drive around in a used 1984 Renault. He chose to live in a Vatican hotel, rather than the fancy Apostolic palace. He eschews the security squadrons of the popes before him and takes “selfies” with his adoring fans.
The new pope was hailed as a progressive icon, and yet on the subject of women in the Church, he remained loyal to a long-held and antiquated stance: women cannot become priests.
“The reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion,” he said in his first apostolic exhortation in November 2013. He insisted he wanted women and their “feminine genius” to contribute to the Church in other ways, just not as priests.
This book is about the feminine genius in the Catholic Church.
Catholic sisters and nuns rarely receive banner headlines or magazine covers. They eschew the spotlight by their very nature, and yet they’re out there in the world every day, living the Gospel and caring for the poor. They don’t hide behind fancy and expensive vestments, a pulpit, or a sermon. I have never met a nun who drives a Mercedes-Benz or a Cadillac. They walk a lot; they ride bikes.
Each woman profiled in this book deserves her own magazine cover. When we went to press, Sister Madonna Buder, at eighty-three years old, had competed in forty-six Ironman races. Sister Megan Rice, also eighty-three, was slated to spend the rest of her life in prison for staying strong in her beliefs that nuclear weapons need to be eliminated from the world. Sister Simone Campbell of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby, drove across the country during the 2012 presidential election to stand up to vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s social-service-slashing budget plan. Sister Joan Dawber was running a safe house for victims of human trafficking, and Sister Tesa Fitzgerald had just completed a $9 million luxury apartment building to provide affordable housing to female ex-felons and their children.
Writing in the New York Times in 2012, “Beliefs” columnist Mark Oppenheimer described the American attitude toward nuns as a “a safe nostalgia . . . [a] curiosity that we reserve for endangered species, like manatees, or Shakers.”
Just as we were going to press with this book, the Internet exploded in a viral media frenzy over twenty-five-year- old Sister Cristina Scuccia. The Sicilian Ursuline sister appeared on the blind auditions for the Italian version of the reality television show The Voice, bopping around onstage in a full black habit to Alicia Keys’s hit “No One,” with perfect pitch and moves that rivaled Justin Bieber’s. Within days the YouTube video of the audition received more than 19 million views. The world gushed over her. “For when you want a taste of sister act!” tweeted Whoopi Goldberg, the star of the movie Sister Act. The Vatican’s minister of culture Gianfranco Ravasi also tweeted his admiration and even added a hashtag. “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others (1 Peter 4:10) #suorcristina.”
No fewer than thirty-seven people sent me a link to Sister Cristina’s video.
“Can you believe this?” they wrote. “A nun!” It was the same incredulous tone people use when they send you a video of the unlikely friendship between a dog and a wallaby or an astronaut singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while actually in space. The video of Sister Cristina getting down to Alicia Keys on television was such an oddity in itself that it jarred and excited people.
Three months later, Sister Cristina was crowned the winner of the Italian Voice, an honor that was accompanied by the promise of a recording contract with Universal Records. Learning of her win onstage, she gave the audience a thumps-up. Then she recited the Lord’s Prayer.
“The last word of thanks, the most important, goes of course to Him in heaven,” she said. “And my dream is to recite a Padre Nostro together . . . I want Jesus to enter into this.”
Her run on the show didn’t pass without controversy. The more conservative Catholics castigated Cristina for wearing her habit onstage, while others brushed her off as a silly gimmick in a world of reality television shows desperate for ratings.
But Sister Cristina took to that stage and shattered stereotypes of Catholic nuns held by millions of people around the world. She did it in her way, and the nuns in these pages do it in theirs.
None of the women profiled in this book are content to remain in the annals of nostalgia. They are wise, they are wonderful, and they change the world every single day, not through grand edicts or declarations but through their actions, and living the way they believe Jesus would want them to live. The religion scholar, author, and former nun Karen Armstrong has described the roles of women in all of Christianity as limited to virgin, martyr, witch, wife, and mother.
They don’t often get to play the hero. I want to change that.
The first Catholic nun I encountered in the flesh was Sister Elaine Kuizinas, a Sister of St. Casimir and the principal of the Villa Joseph Marie High School for Girls in Holland, Pennsylvania. I was fourteen years old and simultaneously tugging on my frizzy, sun-bleached brown hair and the ends of a plaid kilt. I had been suspended from public school after a fight with a group of girls much scrappier and more experienced in fighting than I was. My parents hoped that Catholic girls’ school might pray some sense into me. Sister Elaine stared a hole directly into my soul and admitted me on a trial basis. She made sure I knew I was a problem for her.
It was the 1990s, but still, black-and-white habits dotted the lush grounds of the school like lawn furniture. Most of the women were elderly and too frail to be standing in front of classrooms. Despite being surrounded by nuns, my view of them remained narrow and superficial.
I want to be clear from the start: I am not a religious person. I don’t attend church on a regular basis, I use birth control, my best friend is a gay diplomat, and I have a problem being part of a Church that would tell the daughter I hope to have one day that there is something she cannot be: a priest. I am the product of an Italian American, lapsed-Catholic father who once tried to baptize me in an apple-bobbing tank at the Iowa State Fair, and a fair-weather Lutheran mother who once used a Bible as a doorstop.
Some scientists believe in the idea of a “God gene,” a theory first posited by the geneticist Dean Hamer that explains there is a physiological basis for how spiritually connected a person feels to a higher power. Perhaps my lack of a God gene is what drew me to nuns in the first place. Perhaps I wanted to understand what exactly I was lacking. I was working on my master’s thesis at New York University on how nuns use social media when I traveled down a rabbit hole and into the lives of women who shattered every stereotype I had about Catholic nuns during my high school years. The women I met were funny, inspiring, and fierce, and that was just in 140 characters or less. They were sassy. They reminded me of the sisters of Nonnberg Abbey in the film The Sound of Music, a movie I watched over and over with near religious fervor as a little girl. In one of my favorite scenes, Sister Margaretta and Sister Berthe approach the Reverend Mother to confess that they have sinned. They have torn distributor caps from the Nazis’ cars in order to save the von Trapp family.
I may not believe in God, but I do believe in nuns.
I learned that nuns know when to laugh. The rest of us laugh because we feel obligated. Nuns reserve their laughter for things they genuinely find funny. They love puns. Tell a good “nunsense” joke and they’re rolling. When they laugh, I promise you that you will laugh too.
I learned that nuns are truly excellent huggers—quick to embrace friends and even strangers, giving the good kind of hug, the kind that comes in strong, where their hands clasp around your middle so they embrace the back of your heart.
American nuns are under fire from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, an institution whose stance on women can be described as bipolar at best. The Vatican has long grappled with how to keep nuns as loyal servants without affording them any of their own power.
The irony is that the very first Catholic nuns joined religious communities to gain more freedoms. In ancient times, women sought vocations with the young cult of Jesus Christ in search of a release from the patriarchal political system that subordinated them. By remaining celibate and serving God, the earliest nuns were considered apart from gender. They were referred to as “the virgins,” considered neither male nor female, and as such, were able to escape being consigned to a life of procreation. But throughout history, the descendants of those virgins who sought freedom from men through religious life have become entrenched in a patriarchal system where their freedoms have been consistently infringed upon.
Suffice it to say, attacks on nuns are not exactly a modern phenomenon.
In the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent, a sweeping reaction to Protestant heresies during the start of the Reformation, handed down strict orders to protect the piety of religious women. Pope Pius V, the same pope who would excommunicate Queen Elizabeth I for daring to be born the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII, penned the bull Circa Pastoralis on May 29, 1566, part of which was enacted specifically to protect a nun’s virginity. The new legislation imprisoned the nuns by annexing them to cloisters where their purity would remain under lock and key. It decreed that nuns could not leave their convents or receive visitors unless approved by the bishop. To this end, there could be only one entrance to a convent so as to monitor arrivals and exits. Mothers Superior, the leaders of an order, conducted spot searches and destroyed any “contraband,” including “books, clothes, writings, dishonest paintings, dogs, birds, or other animals.” To allow for these searches, all personal locks were removed from the sisters’ doors.
Today’s nuns have not been held prisoner, but it is generally agreed in religious communities that the persecution from the patriarchy in the twenty-first century marks the greatest offense on nuns of the modern age. The most recent attacks began on December 22, 2008, when the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, led by Cardinal Franc Rodé, a Slav priest from Buenos Aires, initiated an inquiry into the “quality of life” of nuns in America. This inquiry took on the formal title of “Apostolic Visitation,” a euphemism for investigation. Previous “visitations” conducted by the Church were designed to probe Church officials who had gone astray. During the priest sexual abuse scandal, the Vatican ordered visitations of American seminaries. It also conducted a visitation of the Legionaries of Christ, a men’s order whose founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, abused young seminarians and fathered a child.
Nuns nicknamed the visitation process the “Great Nunquisition.” As I mentioned, they love puns. They viewed it as a by-product of the same increasingly conservative Vatican patriarchy that elected Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger to be pope in 2005 and was concerned about the progressive things nuns had been doing since shedding their habits in the 1960s—particularly some of their refusals to hold the Church party line on issues like abortion and gay rights.
The great irony is that it was the Vatican that told nuns they should shed their habits and live more independent lives in the first place. In 1962, Pope John XXIII launched a populist revolution in the Catholic Church with the Second Vatican Council. For the first time in more than a thousand years, Catholics could hear Mass in their native languages instead of Latin. Laypeople could take on leadership roles. The Church began to open up a dialogue with other religions, and nuns could take off their habits.
They were also given a newfound freedom.
Many sisters got their own apartments, drivers’ licenses, and bank accounts. The Church expressly told them to “start looking at the signs of the times, look at where the people are suffering, look at where the people are in need,” and it told the women to go to those places and find their callings there. This took the nuns out of schools and hospitals and placed them among the margins of society. Some women took up minority issues, including the rights of gays and lesbians. Some took on health-care issues; others fought for equal rights and women’s rights. Some even began fighting for a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Nuns knew charity wasn’t enough. They wanted to be present in the lives of the poor. Inspired by the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s to seek social justice through systemic change, many of them engaged in civil disobedience. Some even went to prison for their protests.
For the forty years between Vatican II and the millennium, nuns were largely left to their own devices. The recent Apostolic Visitation changed all that.
On paper, the probes were downplayed. The Church argued that they were looking out for the sisters’ quality of life and just making sure they were adhering to Church doctrine. But the real purpose of the extensi
ve investigation remained cloaked in secrecy. Many nuns did not know why they were being investigated at all.
Sister Maureen Fiedler, the host of the popular public radio talk show Interfaith Voices, was candid about the surprise that nuns felt when they discovered they were the ones under investigation. “These investigations came out of the clear blue sky, without any allegations of wrongdoing that usually prompt official probes,” Fiedler said. “And they brought howls of protest from nuns themselves and many in the laity. Typical was the comment of a friend of mine: ‘Now . . . let me get this straight. Some priests committed sex abuse. Bishops covered it up. And so they’re investigating nuns?’”
Theories volleyed back and forth about the why of it. Did the Vatican want to put nuns back in habits and turn back the clock to pre–Vatican II? Did they want to go even further and put nuns back in cloisters à la the Council of Trent? One theory was that the Church was after the nuns’ property. Still another maintained that the nuns had become a public relations crisis for the Church. Were the nuns so hip they made the rest of the Church look even more antiquated?
In the spring of 2010, the Visitation began on-site visits led by Mother Mary Clare Millea, a matronly American nun with a doctorate in canon law from Rome’s Pontifical Lateran University. After visiting four hundred religious institutes across the country, Millea found herself unable to reproach the nuns. In her 2012 report to the Vatican she admitted that she had been humbled by their work.
“As I learned of and observed firsthand the perseverance of the religious in the United States in their vocations, in their ministries and in their faith—and witnessed the fruits of their service—I have been both inspired and humbled. Although there are concerns in religious life that warrant support and attention, the enduring reality is one of fidelity, joy, and hope,” Millea said.
Nuns face another crisis outside of the Vatican—an aging population and a slowdown in recruitment. There has been more than a 70 percent decline in their numbers since 1965.
