by Jo Piazza
The number of Catholic nuns in America dropped from 179,954 in 1965 to 51,247 in 2013, according to Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Worldwide orders are not robust, but not in as dire straits as in the United States—globally the number of women religious dropped from 1,004,304 in 1970 to 721,935 in 2013.
Because of their dwindling numbers, Catholic nuns in America have been placed on a deathwatch. “American Catholics have no idea how very soon there will be no nuns,” Sister Patricia Wittberg, a church sociologist at Indiana University, told the Los Angeles Times in 1994.
Sister Eleace King, a research associate at Georgetown’s CARA, told me, “The majority of religious congregations of women in this country will not survive. Most are dying.”
Nuns confuse people because they don’t have many of the things Americans think of as the trappings of a good and “normal” life: marriage, kids, a sex life. The one thing everyone asks me when they find out I’ve been writing a book about nuns is: why would anyone choose that kind of life?
I asked the sisters that very question over and over again. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t, at some point, wondered it myself.
The first part of nuns’ answer to that question is spiritual. All of these women, at some point in their lives, but very often before puberty, felt a calling from God. Many describe the calling as an intense feeling that grew into a life-changing idea. This is practically unfathomable to someone lacking the God gene, but it is what I have heard consistently across almost each and every nun’s personal narrative. I believe them.
The second part of the answer is practical. These women wanted to live an authentic life of service, and they couldn’t do that as married women trying to raise a family. I also heard over and over again that nuns experience an uncommon sense of peace and happiness in their lives. We live in a society constantly searching for ways to live an authentic life. Nuns already do. They do exactly what they love, are unapologetic about it, and enjoy every single day to its fullest. There is a marked lack of regret, and an ability to live in the moment that is rare. They tell me that they don’t feel like anything is missing. After conducting countless interviews with nuns, I can say that these women have no doubt that Jesus Christ is the great love of their lives and service is their highest calling.
The most interesting explanation I heard for the decision to eschew romantic relationships in favor of a symbolic marriage to Jesus came from a woman named Sara Marks. She is around my age, pretty and blond, with perfectly tousled curls and a penchant for mascara and funky earrings. She has a harmless addiction to buying beautiful scarves and loves a glass of white wine. When we met she was discerning—religious speak for training—to become a Franciscan sister in Aston, a Philadelphia suburb.
I told Marks I thought of her as a unicorn, since she is one of the incredibly rare women today seeking to become a nun in her twenties. I found her through her blog titled “Mascara and Prayer,” and we soon started talking about how she reconciled giving up the fairy tale of a wedding, husband, and kids. Marks was so matter-of-fact that I was taken aback.
“I wanted the first five years. I wanted the engagement, the wedding, having the baby, and I never thought beyond that—about living the day-to-day with one person for the rest of my life. Once I thought beyond it, I was able to give it up. I realized I was more in love with the idea of those things than the reality of them.”
Marks said no to being a nun for about seven years, but she kept dipping her toes in and out of the vocation. She’d be on a date on a Friday and on a retreat with the sisters on Saturday.
“How do you tell somebody you’re dating that you’re considering becoming a nun?” I asked her.
“You don’t,” she said. “It’s like living a double life.”
One of the final signs she was ready to become a sister came when she read her journal. She realized that every time she wrote about being sad or lonely, it had to do with a man. When she wrote about feeling happy and fulfilled, it was when she was spending time in a community of sisters. She professed her first vows as a Sister of St. Francis on the Feast of St. Clare in August of 2013.
That sense of emotional fulfillment is mostly universal across the sisters I spoke with. This emotional stability and sense of peace makes nuns a real joy to be around. Like their laughter, it is contagious.
God has become a character in these chapters. It is an occupational hazard when writing about the lives of nuns. In these pages, God means a lot of different things: a friend, protector, confidante. Sometimes God is just the hand of the universe shuffling the deck of our lives.
While most of the stories I have worked on in my career as a journalist seem completely unrelated to one another, I believe there is a common thread. What I most enjoy doing is treating the extraordinary stories of ordinary people the way most of our media today treats the lives of celebrities. Have you ever noticed that everything a celebrity does is inherently fascinating to us? They walk down the street, they get a coffee, have a wardrobe malfunction, take their kids to the playground, fight with their spouse, or adopt a puppy, and it could be the most-read news of the day.
I need to admit right here and now that this is partially my fault. I have worked in the entertainment sections of newspapers, magazines, and television news networks for years. That makes me feel a bit guilty. Some might call that Catholic guilt. Perhaps that is why I want to tell the stories of these nuns as if they were rock stars or Hollywood royalty. My guilt aside, this is exactly the kind of platform they deserve, more so than any starlet I have covered.
I wanted to write a book that showed nuns as people as opposed to stereotypes.
The women in these pages have done extraordinary things.
Each of them has changed her corner of the world for the better. The fact that they have accomplished so much while yoked to an institution that actively and publicly sets out to quash their activities makes what they have done that much more remarkable.
I originally titled this book Bad Habit: The Secret Lives of Nuns. I, too, like a good pun. But the thing is, none of these women is a secret. They don’t do their good works behind closed doors. They aren’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. They are out in the open, making the world a better place.
1.
Weapons Are Made Like Gods
Putting trust in weapons is idolatry. Weapons are always false gods because they make money. It’s profiteering.
—Sister Megan Rice
She couldn’t keep walking. Sister Megan Rice had been training for this moment for months, but she was tired and kept slipping to her knees into the prickled shrubs and the high grass as she willed herself up the hill to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The eighty-two-year-old nun was the mastermind of this plan—a plan that, once completed, would become known as the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex. But she was also the weak link. A person half her age would have been exhausted as they scaled the steep and densely wooded hill on the path into the heart of Y-12.
It was the very early morning of July 28, 2012, when Megan, a vowed Sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two accomplices—Gregory I. Boertje-Obed, age fifty-seven, and Michael R. Walli, age sixty-three, both US veterans—broke into the nuclear weapons facility. Using bolt cutters, the three of them first infiltrated an exterior boundary fence, six feet high with bright-yellow No Trespassing placards threatening a $100,000 fine and up to one year in prison. Sister Megan went first. The men mended the fence behind her with twine, and together they began the forty-degree ascent.
The plan was to hike along the ridge of the hill, breach another set of fences, and then walk toward the facility, which houses the nation’s cache of highly enriched uranium—enough to fuel more than 10,000 nuclear bombs.
“Me
gan has trouble going up hills, so we walked at an angle,” Mr. Boertje-Obed told me. “We just kept going to the right. Megan was so tired when we got to the top that I said, ‘Let’s just go to the first building that we happen to see.’” Next they negotiated through an infrared intrusion detection system called the PIDAS, a perimeter intrusion detection and assessment system.
“The motion detectors are set off often by wildlife,” Ralph Hutchinson, a friend of the three, a co-conspirator, and the coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance told me. “That’s why they were ignored. One of the cameras that would have picked them up was malfunctioning, and the other camera did pick them up but the guard wasn’t looking at it.”
The one thing they all agreed on was that they felt they were being led by the Almighty.
Maybe they were. Some kind of providence was with them that night. The first building they happened upon was the big one, the site’s mother lode for nuclear storage—a billion-dollar Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility. That was where they would carry out their mission.
Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was where the nuclear age began. Ground was broken on February 18, 1943, in the midst of World War II, for an electromagnetic separation plant—or, in layman’s terms, a place that could make enough enriched uranium for a new kind of bomb. The atom bomb. At peak production in 1945, more than 22,000 workers were producing enriched uranium for Little Boy, the bomb the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima that killed approximately 60,000 civilians and ultimately ended World War II in the Pacific. During the Cold War, more than 8,000 people worked at Y-12 to make nuclear weapon “secondaries”—the components of a nuclear weapon’s secondary explosive that are compressed by nuclear fission from the primary explosive and generate the crux of explosive energy.
Once inside the facility, Sister Megan and her co-conspirators swung banners over the walls: woe to an empire of blood, one declared. They looped panicked yellow crime-scene tape reading nuclear crime scene around the site. They chipped bits of concrete from the wall with small hammers.
“Just a little. It wasn’t violent,” Sister Megan told me as she remembered mustering her strength to bang on the wall. “Violence was not an option.” She was adamant that the protest not be violent. “Even if we were attacked by dogs after we broke in, I would have just raised my hands,” she said. “I would have let the dogs take me down.”
Leading up to the break-in the trio had held conversations about whether they would be shot by guards. That was a risk they were willing to take.
They had brought with them six baby bottles filled with human blood (siphoned from three living humans supportive of their cause) and poured them onto the building before conducting a liturgical ceremony with white roses, lit candles, and the breaking of bread. They had chosen Sunday for their break-in as much for its spiritual significance as for the fact that they believed there would be fewer guards on patrol. When a guard finally reached the three trespassers at 4:30 a.m., they did not flinch and instead tendered some of their bread to him as an offering.
That guard, Kirk Garland, a sturdy man with a broad face weathered by the lines of Southern living, was authorized to use deadly force, but at first it all appeared so innocent. All Garland saw was an old woman and a couple of unshaven men. Maybe they were just a painting crew. Then he saw the messages spray-painted on the wall behind them. He read the words and when it clicked that these were intruders he called for backup. Five minutes later a second security guard appeared, this one brandishing an M16 weapon. Sister Megan sang “This Little Light of Mine” as she was placed in handcuffs. The last time that she looked at her watch, it was a quarter to five in the morning.
“They were passive,” Mr. Garland would later say during his testimony against them after he lost his $85,000-a-year job, just four years from retirement. Sister Megan would later express remorse at her involvement in Mr. Garland’s dismissal, saying she hoped he would find another job in security, preferably somewhere less destructive. “Like a bank,” she said.
For the Y-12 break-in, Sister Megan, Mr. Boertje-Obed, and Mr. Walli were charged with destruction and depredation of government property, both felonies. The intrusion caused $8,531.67 in physical damages, according to Y-12 officials. It took 100 gallons of paint to cover up the spray-painted graffiti and human blood and to repair the fences. The security breach also damaged Y-12’s credibility as a safe haven for special nuclear materials. If a little old nun and a couple of out-of-shape middle-aged men could get that close to the heart of the complex, what was stopping the terrorists?
“All three of them were elated that they were able to do so much,” said Ellen Barfield, a fellow peace activist and the one phone call Sister Megan made from jail after the arrest. With a flick of her hand, Barfield added, with none of the gravitas the statement should have required, “Plus, they were mildly pleased that they were still alive.”
Frank Munger, the Knoxville News Sentinel senior reporter who covers the paper’s Department of Energy issues, has been on the Y-12 beat for three decades. He told me that in the aftermath of the July arrest, plenty of residents of Knoxville thought that the guards should not have hesitated.
“You heard people say they should have shot them,” Mr. Munger said nonchalantly during my visit to the offices of the Sentinel. Sister Megan really likes Frank Munger. He became her de facto biographer after she was arrested, and she talks about him like a proud mother, bragging about how thorough he was in his reporting of Y-12, even when it painted her in a less than pleasant light.
“He is a very special person,” she confided. “Special” is a vote of confidence from Sister Megan. Even though she is incapable of insulting anyone, when she doesn’t respect a person, she chooses not to answer questions about them at all. She just clams up and minutes later will change the subject.
Y-12 is the largest employer in this small section of Tennessee, with more than 9,000 workers in the area. Residents hate it when other people, especially Northerners, come to town and cause a scene. “In East Tennessee, the worst sin is to draw attention to yourself,” Ralph Hutchinson told me. “The second worst is to break rules. These people don’t break rules here.”
Oak Ridge is an insular place, situated between the jagged bends of the Clinch River and five Appalachian ridges and valleys. Just twenty-five miles west of Knoxville, folks in Oak Ridge don’t take to outsiders. It’s a town that once detained Santa Claus because they didn’t like the cut of his beard. There is a famous picture of Jolly Old Saint Nick from 1948, one hand in the air, a toy in the other, being detained and searched by two armed guards as he attempted to get into the first annual Oak Ridge National Laboratory Christmas party.
I traveled down to Eastern Tennessee at Sister Megan’s invitation, just days before Thanksgiving in 2012, hoping to meet with her and her legal team as they prepared for a pretrial hearing for the Y-12 break-in.
“We can drive back together and you can stay with me,” Sister Megan told me in her soft and measured voice that rarely rises above a whisper, over the phone from Rosemont, Philadelphia, where she lived with her order.
When an eighty-two-year-old nun facing federal prison for the rest of her life asks you to go on a road trip with her, you don’t hesitate. I had been covering the presidential election for nine months straight, and I thought a good old Southern trial might be the perfect antidote to my political languor.
“There’s this nun down in Knoxville facing life in prison,” I said to my boss, Victor Balta, the managing editor of the website for Current TV. He was skeptical.
“She is a peace activist, broke into a nuclear weapons facility,” I explained breathlessly. Then, for good measure: “Nuclear disarmament is a big issue with our viewers. Plus . . . she’s eighty-two.” Victor gave me the two days off as long as I paid for my own plane ticket.
I booked a one-way ticket to Knoxville and flew two legs coach early on a Mo
nday morning, the second of which was filled with sweaty and statuesque members of the University of Tennessee men’s basketball team. Sister Megan, who doesn’t drive, arranged for a member of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) to greet me at the airport. Carol, a United Methodist in her sixties, was wearing a flower-patterned embroidered vest when she met me en route to baggage claim carrying a sign written in black marker that read Namaste. Carol filled me in on the history of Y-12, to which she referred as both the nation’s “nuclear insecurity complex” and the “bomb plant,” always with a girlish giggle, as we drove along the highway past the kinds of motels that advertise $199 for a one-week stay.
Our destination was the basement of St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Knoxville, where Sister Megan was meeting with her legal team in advance of the hearing. It was the first time we met in person, but Sister Megan greeted me with a hug like we were old friends.
The temperature was a moderate fifty-five degrees in Knoxville that day, but Sister Megan looked ready for a family ski trip in a soft gray wool sweater, lavender hoodie, fleece vest, and navy sweatpants. “I’m always too cold,” she said with a small shiver. I could feel her shoulder blades through four layers of clothing. She grabbed my rough hand in her small soft one and we walked down the dimly lit hall together. It is hard to describe what Sister Megan’s presence is like. She projects an aura of calm that washes over everyone near her. Three coffees and an early morning flight had made me jumpy, but she made me feel at ease. There is a force and a vitality that transcends her tiny body.
Sitting in the basement’s spacious conference room were OREPA’s Ralph Hutchinson, a crunchy Richard Dreyfuss doppelgänger, and Kary Love, an advising counsel partial to black turtlenecks and cowboy boots, who had driven down from Michigan for the hearing. Compared to Hutchinson in his slightly ripped jeans, beard, and hiking sneakers, Mr. Love, who had been trying nuclear disarmament cases for the better part of three decades, looked the part of the dashing antagonist in a daytime soap opera.
