If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  In October, Sister Simone saw off another group of nuns who opted to tour more than 1,000 miles in Ohio in time for the presidential debate between Paul Ryan and the sitting vice president, Joe Biden. There in the Buckeye State they received some of the most vitriolic protests of the trip. An angry local Tea Party affiliate prayed the Rosary and shook their fists, calling out the women as “fake nuns.” They wielded signs labeling the tour the highway to hell and bums on the bus.

  Sister Simone thought that was it, the end of the road, as they say. But in 2013, the Holy Spirit continued to make mischief with the nuns and they set out on their grandest trip yet, returning to the Hudson River Basin to kick off a Nuns on the Bus reboot near Ellis Island, this time focusing on immigration reform and traveling more than 6,800 miles through fifteen states in three weeks. They would travel down the East Coast, across the South, and then up through California, ending at Marina Park in San Francisco, overlooking Angel Island and Alcatraz. The journey was more difficult this time for many reasons, the least of which was the length of the trip. If the first Nuns on the Bus trip broke Sister Simone’s heart, this one cracked it wide open and made it bleed.

  “I wasn’t prepared for how painful it was going to be,” she said, her voice breaking. “The last time, we went out to prevent bad things from happening. With this trip, we had to lift up the stories of horrible things that had already happened. There was a whole different level of anguish to it.”

  There were more stories, more names, more broken hearts.

  It was also the first trip that brought the nuns to the southern part of the United States, an area that Sister Simone, a woman who had traveled around the world, including to war zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, had never spent much time in and a place where she was challenged to face her own prejudices.

  “The South makes me nervous. I grew up with it being so racist and segregated. When I first moved to DC, I realized that I had a prejudice against white men speaking with Southern accents. It was something I had to confront on the trip.”

  Writing for Politico at the end of 2013, Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader for the House of Representatives, called Sister Simone a “champion for the cause of peace and justice.” She continued: “There are qualities that define Sister Simone—and that make her an inspiration to millions of Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. These are the characteristics that remind each of us of our own responsibilities to speak up, to judge others fairly, to defend the rights of the poor and needy. These are the values that Sister Simone drives home, on a bus and in our communities—and that we should each strive to live by each day, in Congress and in our country.”

  Every day, Sister Simone prays to be enough for the people who depend on her. During her time on the bus, she wrote a poem based on the story of the loaves and fishes recounted in all four Gospels. In that ancient story, which is the only miracle besides the resurrection that is featured in all of the Gospels, Jesus feeds a multitude of the poor—5,000 people—by blessing five barley loaves and two small fish. The crowd eats from the broken pieces, and the hungry soon find themselves full. The moral of the story in its simplest version is that you can do an awful lot with just a little.

  Sister Simone’s poem begins like this: “I always joked that the miracle of the loaves and fish was sharing. The women always know this.”

  At the end of the verse is her favorite line: “Blessed and broken, you are enough. I savor the blessed, cower at the broken and pray to be enough.”

  “It tells the story of how we are all in such lonely places and how we all need to be fed,” Sister Simone said, mentioning again her need to be present with the people. “We need to feed each other, and you can’t do that feeding on e-mail. You can do some of it, but it is not enough nourishment.”

  The Nuns on the Bus covered more than 10,000 miles of the US in two years. I asked Sister Simone if they would just keep going, if there would always be new battles for the nun bus to fight.

  At first she joked. “We created some car magnets, so you can have nuns on the bus too. There are guidelines on our website. The rule is you have to have at least one nun.”

  But then she grew serious.

  “I don’t understand it myself,” she told me. “But there continues to be this hunger for whatever the bus is. I never thought there would be a second one, but the country needed it. I like to say that the bus is like Robin Hood; it will show up whenever you need it. People are hungry for it. Everyone wants to know that they are not in this alone.”

  Being in her presence is invigorating. She has an irresistible confidence that makes you want to be an active participant in whatever call to action she is advocating at that moment. She is also thoughtful and kind, even over the phone. As we finished up a phone interview one afternoon, I developed a terrible cough. Sister Simone was frustrated.

  “I wish I was there with you to give you a lozenge right now,” she said with genuine concern. Given her ability to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks, I thought she would somehow actually reach through the line to hand me a Halls.

  During our many conversations, Sister Simone shrugged off suggestions that she should run for political office with a roll of her eyes, and yet I could tell that she didn’t discount these suggestions entirely. Her supporters beg her to do it, even though she often refers to the inside of government as a “sausage-making pressure cooker.” They have minted bumper stickers that read run sister run: sister simone for office.

  “Apparently people don’t care which office I run for, as long as I run,” she told me. She smiled then and glanced away, thinking for a moment. “I think I may be a better nudge on government from the outside, but you never know.”

  One day between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in 2013, she asked me, “You know what I would really like to do?” She had a new haircut since we last talked. It was about four inches longer, in a chic bob that swept along the curve of her chin. One of the makeup artists at MSNBC told her that the audience often found women with longer hair more believable. As a lawyer, Sister Simone is always skeptical of statements like that, but she grew her hair out anyhow. She blushed when I told her how pretty it made her look.

  “I can’t even imagine what you are going to say,” I replied with a grin.

  “I have heard a rumor that Frank will be visiting Philadelphia in 2015,” she said. I already knew that she referred to the new Pope Francis colloquially as Frank, as if they had graduated from a first-name relationship to the kind of friendship that warrants nicknames. She never said it in a disrespectful way. I think that she did it as a way of making him seem more human, more like one of her peeps. “I would love to get him on the bus. Do you think we could do it?”

  I thought about it for a minute. If anyone could get Pope Frank on a bus with a group of women, it would probably be Sister Simone.

  3.

  It Isn’t About Being Gay; It’s About Being in Love

  Lesbian and gay people have been marginalized because of their orientation. They are denied basic human dignity. It is a clear affront to the social justice teachings of the Church.

  —Sister Jeannine Gramick

  How could Sister Jeannine Gramick have known that meeting a handsome gay stranger named Dominic at a house party on Spruce Street in West Philadelphia would completely change the course of her life?

  It was 1969, and Jeannine was a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was only a few years into her tenure as a Catholic nun, living at the convent of Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus at Thirty-Eighth and Chestnut Streets, on the night she encountered the attractive young man at a joint liturgy shared by a Catholic priest and an Episcopal priest at a home near the school. Interfaith ceremonies back then were organized religion’s way of loosening up, trying to get in line with the rest of the long-haired, bell-bottomed decade, and Sister Jeannine was intrigued by the div
erse crowds that assembled and the exciting ideas that bubbled up in a melting pot of Christian faiths. At a small reception afterward, guests were encouraged to mingle and chat over passed cheeses and meats. That’s where Dominic strode up to her. He was a baptized gay man who had left the Catholic Church because a priest told him that he was going to hell. He wasn’t alone. Most of his circle of gay friends hadn’t set foot in a church for years for the same reason.

  Dominic’s story made the young nun squirm. She knew there was a profound stigma against homosexuality, especially in conservative Philadelphia, but she despised the idea that the Church would exclude anyone for something so inconsequential. Dominic asked Sister Jeannine if she would be willing to host a home liturgy for him and his buddies, telling her he missed his faith and the Church. Anxious to help, to do something to heal his wounds, she agreed.

  “I got a priest friend of mine to come to Dominic’s apartment and we had about a dozen men there. Many of them hadn’t been to church in years. They were so stunned that there would be a sister and a priest there who would welcome them. They were so shy at first,” Sister Jeannine remembered. “There was this feeling of great exhilaration, great joy. We made them feel very loved. We made them feel like they weren’t flawed.” They continued the practice once a week . . . mostly at Dominic’s house and sometimes at other people’s houses. It became known as the home liturgy group for the gay community.

  Sister Jeannine didn’t start out so open-minded. Following the Catholic mindset at the time, she thought gay people had something wrong with them, that they were sick. She struggled against her own prejudices and apprehensions to keep the events going. “I didn’t know what to expect. I thought I had never met any gay people before in my life and I was just a little nervous,” she recalled. “But after I got to know them, I didn’t think these people were sick at all.”

  What struck Sister Jeannine the most was their gratitude for her service. “They just had this sense of amazement that there would be church people interested in them.”

  She repeated to them over and over, “This is your church too.” After a while they started to believe her.

  The events were such a success that Dominic and his friends wanted more, and he kept nudging her to do something bigger.

  “What is the Catholic Church doing for my gay brothers and sisters?” he would demand after their meetings.

  “Nothing,” she admitted guiltily.

  In the early 1970s, gay rights were still a marginal civil rights issue. The Stonewall riots, the demonstrations in New York’s Greenwich Village, only just happened in 1969. In 1971, Colorado and Oregon repealed sodomy laws. Idaho had repealed its sodomy law but reinstated it because it couldn’t take the backlash from Mormons and Catholics. The American Psychiatric Association didn’t remove homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders until 1973. As for the Catholic Church, its stance on gays was hard and fast. The official Vatican position was the same then as it is today in 2014: being gay is morally neutral; flawed, but morally neutral. The belief was that in the best of possible scenarios, God wouldn’t have created homosexuals at all. However, God did make homosexuals­, and His creation shouldn’t be censured. Any type of homosexual activity, however, is viewed as a sin. That’s the reason Dominic and his friends were thrown out of confessional booths when they revealed the things they had done in the privacy of their bedrooms. The story of gay rights in the Catholic Church represents a kind of xenophobia at the core of the institution, a fear and castigation of the unknown.

  Sister Jeannine did her research, hungrily reading anything she could get her hands on that touched on the intersection of homosexuality and Catholicism. One of the theories she dove into came from the moral theologian Fr. Charles Curran, a Roman Catholic priest with two doctorates in theology from Rome. In the early ’70s Curran contended that homosexual acts, in the context of a committed relationship, may not be the ideal, but they were both good and healthy for homosexual individuals.

  There are sections of scripture that Sister Jeannine still looks to today that illustrate God’s inclusiveness. She points to Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians, 3:28.

  “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.”

  “He didn’t say gay or straight in there, but that is the implication,” Sister Jeannine said. “These things shouldn’t divide us. God doesn’t see the world through a lens of gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. To me that is a wonderful bit of the scripture.”

  She cites the story of David and his friendship with Jonathan, the two rivals for the throne of Israel who forged a deep friendship and loving bond:

  Now it came about when he had finished speaking to Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as himself. Saul took him that day and did not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, with his armor, including his sword and his bow and his belt. So David went out wherever Saul sent him, and prospered; and Saul set him over the men of war.

  Sister Jeannine doesn’t come right out and say that the relationship between David and Jonathan was necessarily a physical or sexual one, “But it was certainly a same-sex love,” Sister Jeannine told me. “It is about people of the same gender loving each other. It is good to point to these scriptures because people always emphasize sex, sex, sex. And it isn’t about sex. It is about love. It is who you fall in love with that makes you lesbian and gay. Love is the important thing here, not sex.”

  As her home liturgies became more popular, Dominic arranged for Sister Jeannine to give an interview to the Philadelphia Bulletin. He just cold-called the editor of the paper and said, “I have an interview lined up for you.” What good newspaperman could resist a story about a good-looking young-local-girl-turned-nun hanging around with a bunch of gay guys? As a journalist, that is the kind of cold call I have always loved.

  Next to a portrait of the charmingly posed nun, beautiful in her sleeveless white blouse, a simple black skirt, and a movie star’s smile, was the headline: “A Nun in Any Clothes Is Still a Nun.” My favorite paragraph from the four-hundred-­word piece is the lede: “She plays guitar. She’s also pretty, and is 29 years old today. She believes people should do their own thing. She does. And she thinks everyone should be tolerant of human difference.”

  Sister Jeannine told the reporter, “I’m interested in anyone, but my most recent apostolate is meeting and working with gay people. . . . At first it was just a matter of being friendly, like I am to anyone, but now I guess my goal is to try to make people feel less uptight like they do when they hear the word homosexual. It’s very unchristian.” She is flip and cool in all of her answers. The reporter asks her about her liberal attitude toward wearing the nun’s habit. She replies. “I wear clothes appropriate to the occasion. If I’m going to the beach, I wear a bathing suit. If I’m going on a picnic, I’m apt to wear a short ‘scooter’ skirt.”

  Sister Jeannine was on pins and needles when the article first came out. “I expected a negative reaction,” she said to me after she had pulled the clipping out of her archives. But she was pleasantly surprised. “I received a couple dozen letters, two-thirds of them from Catholics who supported what I was doing.”

  Sister Jeannine would continue her home ministry for the remainder of the year before leaving Philadelphia for Baltimore in 1972 to teach math at Notre Dame of Maryland.

  Dominic would go on to make a name for himself at the forefront of Philadelphia’s gay activist community while running a successful salon called the Abbey in South Philly. The name reflected how deeply connected Sister Jeannine helped him feel to his Catholic faith. On the day he
went to get his license to cut hair in the state of Pennsylvania, she was his hair model. He loved making people look fabulous, himself included, particularly as his platinum-blond drag persona, Madominic, who was partial to sequined leotards and lavender feather boas. When Sister Jeannine left Philly, Dominic extended their ministry to AIDS patients, visiting them as a spiritual guide several times a week. He served communion during his visits, counseled the patients, and helped them organize funeral services. Dominic succumbed to the disease himself on January 24, 1993.

  Word traveled fast among the religious communities back then—not as fast as on Twitter and Facebook today, but swiftly all the same—and just about every nun on the Eastern seaboard knew what Sister Jeannine was up to with her gay ministry. Her community of Sisters of Notre Dame was impressed with it and assigned her to work full-time in gay and lesbian ministry in Maryland, an incredibly liberal decision for the School Sisters of Notre Dame to make, one completely without precedent and filled with risk for the entire community. “When we first began, my role was tenuous,” Sister Jeannine told me. “There was skepticism in the Catholic community. No one in the Catholic community had been assigned to gay ministry before. It wasn’t even a thing. People were anxious about any sexual issues, much less homosexual ones. Those superiors were women of vision. They stood by me.”

  Sister Jeannine could grapple all day long with conservative Catholics over homophobia and heterosexism. But that wasn’t the story she wanted to tell. Her fight was about exclusion. It was about civil rights. She knew that she needed to flip the script and pivot from a focus on sexual ethics to a narrative about social justice.

  “Lesbian and gay people have been marginalized because of their orientation. They are denied basic human dignity,” Sister Jeannine told me with an angry tinge to her voice. “It is a clear affront to the social justice teachings of the Church.”

  She added with a chuckle, “If we were going to fire every person whose life is not in line with the sexual ethics of the Church, we wouldn’t have many people in the Catholic institution.”