by Jo Piazza
While the Church at large maintained an anti-homosexual stance, splinter groups throughout the institution were starting to consider “the gay issue.” Sister Jeannine was not venturing into this territory alone. In 1976, Bishop Francis J. Mugavero of Brooklyn wrote one of the first Roman Catholic statements to contain a compassionate and encouraging message to gay and lesbian people. Entitled “Sexuality: God’s Gift,” it offered that gay and lesbian people deserved to be treated equally in society generally and in the Christian community. Mugavero, tall, bald, and staunchly liberal, spoke directly to the homosexual community in his letter: “We pledge our willingness . . . to try to find new ways to communicate the truth of Christ because we believe it will make you free.”
That passage, and that phrase “new ways,” caught Sister Jeannine’s attention. There had to be a new way, she thought. Soon there would be. One of the letters Sister Jeannine received after that newspaper article ran in the Bulletin came from a local Philadelphia priest, Fr. Bob Nugent.
Father Bob said in his letter, “If there is anything I can do to help, just let me know.” Sister Jeannine wrote back: “We need priests to preside at the Eucharist.” So he joined her in her home ministries. Father Bob would later call this their Adam and Eve story, because Sister Jeannine was the one who gave him the apple. He thought it was a humorous way to say “The nun made me do it!”
By 1976, Father Bob had left Philadelphia for Washington, DC, where he was working at the Quixote Center, a Maryland-based Catholic social justice group. He called Sister Jeannine about an opening on the staff, saying the center wanted to start a program on justice for lesbian and gay Catholics. She joined, but after a year she and Father Bob realized there was enough work for an entire justice organization solely devoted to gay and lesbian issues and the practicality of living as a gay Catholic. And so in 1977, borrowing the phrase from Mugavero’s letter, they started New Ways Ministry and devoted themselves to making life easier for Catholic gays and lesbians.
Up until the day she met Dominic, Sister Jeannine had thought she would spend her life as a math teacher. She loved teaching math, loved the order and the elegance of proofs and equations.
“I still miss teaching math,” she said, “but many people could teach math, and at that time there was no religious person working on behalf of lesbian and gay Catholics. That was God’s call for me. It was what I needed to do.”
She recounted a story from that time about an older nun who had no idea what it meant to be homosexual or what “New Ways” was all about. The elderly sister was in the dark about what Sister Jeannine even did with “those people,” and why they needed their own special ministry in the first place.
Sister Jeannine patiently explained the basics of homosexuality. The older nun just shook her head.
“I understand now,” the older sister replied slowly. “But I think I like the ‘Old Ways’ better.” Sister Jeannine at least had to give her credit for asking.
That was the institutional stance in a nutshell.
Like its name and its co-founders, the vision and philosophy of New Ways was solidly Catholic. Sister Jeannine and Father Bob’s work was based firmly in the positive messages of justice, acceptance, dialogue, and reconciliation. Sister Jeannine wanted no less than equality for gays and lesbians in the Church and in the world. Her mission was to educate Catholics that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters were just like them.
The New Ways mission was all about education. They spent a significant share of their time and resources providing workshops for Church personnel across the country. Entitled “Building Bridges: Gay and Lesbian Christians and the Church,” these programs offered positive information on Church pronouncements, scripture interpretation, lesbian/gay spirituality, and pastoral outreach. Gays, lesbians, and their family members and pastoral ministers attended. The structure of the workshops allowed for storytelling and dialogue so that the walls of ignorance and fear could be broken down.
During one of her earliest retreats, Sister Jeannine ran into a close friend of hers from grade school and high school whom she hadn’t seen for a decade. The two of them used to dance like crazy with all the boys on the dance floor, but during their walks home, her old friend always told her that she felt like she related to all men like they were her brother. She never understood what that meant until she went off to medical school and fell in love with a woman.
“So I was wrong,” Sister Jeannine told me. “I did know gay people when I was growing up. I just didn’t know it.”
That was the crux of it for her: Show people that there is nothing different or strange about gay people. Show them that they are their friends and their neighbors. She believed that if New Ways could just break it down for people that this was an issue of exclusion, she would be able to win supporters to her side.
New Ways programs expanded nationwide. They created a retreat program for parents of lesbian and gay children, pilgrimages around the world for lesbian and gay families, and even the Lesbian Sisters Project, a support system for nuns in various stages of coming out to their communities and to their families.
It was a scrappy start. At first they worked out of Father Bob’s small apartment, and once that grew too claustrophobic they spilled over into Sister Jeannine’s apartment, which wasn’t much bigger. In 1980, Sister Jeannine’s parents lent them the money to buy a house in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, right on Eastern Avenue, the dividing line between Maryland and Washington, DC. The white stucco three-story with baby-blue trim let them finally give desks to all their interns and grow the organization. They set on publishing book after book: Homosexuality and the Catholic Church, The Vatican and Homosexuality, Homosexuality and the Magisterium—all with the intention of convincing Catholics that gay people belonged to the Church just as much as everyone else. Today Sister Jeannine lives in the attic of that house with her cat, Kitty—a shy, lovable kitten of a cat that weighs in at just seven pounds.
I first visited the New Ways Ministry house a few days after Christmas. Most of the suburban streets were in a state of half-decoration, deflated lawn ornaments littering yards and strings of lights hanging halfheartedly from windows. Sister Jeannine and I made plans for the evening and she e-mailed me to invite me to stay over. “An early dinner sounds fine and then you can have a ‘sleep-over’ at the nuns’ house,” she wrote. Just a day before my visit, she got word that Father Bob’s health had taken a turn for the worse, and she was rushing to be by the bedside of the priest, who had since relocated to Milwaukee, that night. Still, she carved out a few hours to spend with me, picking me up at the train station in her old black Nissan with the bumper sticker declaring to the state of Maryland: civil marriage is a civil right.
Once we arrived at the New Ways headquarters, Sister Jeannine fussed over me, serving palm-sized scones with butter and Smucker’s strawberry jam. An ancient teakettle whistled as she puttered around the warm kitchen, deciding that tea would be easier to serve. Over her fluffy white curls, smoke stains marked the white clapboard cabinet door as proof that this was a kitchen that had been much used and much loved. Sister Jeannine is slight and almost elfin in a blue cardigan two sizes too big with a playful reindeer pattern; roomy black pants; and Teva sandals, the kind you wear white-water rafting, with thick black socks. Kitty spied on me skeptically from the doorway. A much chubbier cat marched brazenly up to me to say hello by shoving his head into my calf.
“That one isn’t mine,” Sister Jeannine said with a shake of her head as the cat gazed up at her. “He is a neighborhood cat who just comes in here looking for food. We can’t get rid of him, and don’t want to. We just love him too.”
The interloper padded behind us as Sister Jeannine walked me through the old house’s foyer, where the history of the organization plays out in photographs lining the walls to create a makeshift New Ways Hall of Fame. One photo showed a pretty woman in her thirties in a simple dress and a shag
gy bob haircut, sitting in front of a Thorn Birds–handsome priest. “That’s Bob and I,” she said, beaming at the black-and-white photograph. There were group snapshots of New Ways pilgrims, with Sister Jeannine front and center, holding up a rainbow flag in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, the pyramids in Egypt, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and the Alhambra in Spain. There was the slightly yellowing ad they placed in the Denver Post newspaper in 1993 during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Colorado, asking for respect for lesbian and gay persons. There was a letter from Sen. Ted Kennedy thanking Father Bob and Sister Jeannine for providing him a copy of their position paper on human dignity and gay rights. “New Ways ministry should be commended for providing creative leadership in this area,” the senator from Massachusetts wrote. “I look forward to working with you on these serious and complex issues in the future.” In the living room, hanging over comfortable old furniture, was a picture of Sister Jeannine’s parents, a pair none too happy to see their only daughter run off to join the convent.
As an only child growing up on Scattergood Street in Northeast Philadelphia, Jeannine first heard God’s call to become a nun when she was only seven years old and attending Catholic grade school at St. John Cantius. She was a popular child, well-liked by her peers, but instead of using that popularity for dastardly things as young girls sometimes do, Jeannine imagined she could use other people’s affection for her to bring them closer to God.
“I felt that if I identified with a vocation that was God-connected and I was liked by people, then somehow I would be drawing people to God. I hoped that I would be a conduit for God’s love. That’s what I was thinking about when I was seven.” She laughed. One of the things that sets her apart, even among other nuns, is how completely present she is with you at any given moment. She is completely attentive in a way that shows in her eyes and how she touches you when she talks. I had seen it before in celebrities, namely Tom Cruise, who takes the time to make direct eye contact and touch every reporter on the arm as he walks along a red carpet at a movie premiere. It may be one of the reasons the other kids liked Jeannine so much. It is one of the reasons I liked her so much as we sat in her kitchen that cold winter morning. She continued: “I told my mother I was going to be a sister, and she said, ‘All Catholic little girls say they want to be sisters when they grow up. You’ll grow out of it.’”
The word “devout” lacks a certain seriousness and ferocity in Sister Jeannine’s view, so she hates using it. But everyone else described her as a devout child, both serious and ferocious about her faith.
“I went to Mass every day. I said my morning and my night prayers. I was very much in love with God,” she said. “In those days, if you really loved God and you were a female, then you became a nun.”
She was a hometown girl, a real Philly girl, who only left the city a handful of times on school field trips. St. Hubert’s Diocesan High School graduated more than 700 kids the year that she graduated and had 65 nuns on the faculty, all from different orders. Each year Jeannine would become enamored with a different sister and decide that without a doubt she wanted to be in their order. Freshman year, she loved her Latin teacher, so she wanted to be a Mercy nun like her. Sophomore year, she was partial to her religion teacher, a Sister of St. Joseph. Finally, in her junior year, she met a School Sister of Notre Dame—her history teacher and moderator of the debate club. That was the order that stuck.
In that day, girls entered the convent straight out of high school.
“It was time for my serious life’s work to begin. I entered religious life right after high school and I have never, ever regretted it. It is where I should be and where I am meant to be. I have been very happy,” she told me. Her mother wasn’t so happy. She cried the day Jeannine entered the convent, lamenting that she would never get to be a grandmother.
Sitting at her kitchen table, I asked Sister Jeannine if she ever regretted not having a husband or kids. She didn’t flinch.
“Not at all! That wasn’t my calling. Not every woman wants children.”
“It’s true,” I responded carefully, and with all of my own societal biases as a thirty-three-year-old woman who feels compelled into both marriage and motherhood. “But it takes a lot of courage not to live up to society’s idea of what a woman should have in her life.”
She nodded. “If only we could all be that brave,” she said to me. “If only we could all choose not to live up to everyone else’s expectations and do what feels right to us.”
She still feels like she talks to God every single day, but she is quick to explain that she doesn’t hear voices. She knows that would sound a little kooky.
“It is more that I get a sense of what God is saying to me.” As she explained it to me, she looked past me and through a dusty window, at nothing but leaves and the shingles of the house next door.
“That is what keeps me going,” she told me. “I try to pray in the morning, just sitting in the quiet of my room. I read the scripture of the day. I have a prayer list of people I pray for. When my mind is oblivious, when I am swimming, doing yoga, or driving, I catch myself talking to God. I usually say, ‘Hey, I have this thing I am worried about getting done and I think I need some help here.’”
On most days, Sister Jeannine wakes in the morning delighted to go to work. Somehow she has managed to remain delighted in the face of serious oppression from within the Church. Working with the gay community has made her a target of the male bishops who would like to see her ministry eradicated completely. One particularly vociferous complaint came from Cardinal James Aloysius Hickey of Washington, DC.
Hickey was promoted to Archbishop of Washington, DC, by Pope John Paul II on June 17, 1980. On many issues he was liberal. He lobbied members of the US Congress to stop sending aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, and pushed his fellow bishops to take strong stands against increased military spending and in favor of nuclear disarmament. He was one of the first American bishops to address the issue of sexual abuse by clergy.
But on gay rights, Hickey remained conservative. In 1980 he began lodging formal complaints about New Ways Ministry with the Vatican. The Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life within the Holy See ordered both the Salvatorians, Fr. Bob Nugent’s order of priests, and the School Sisters of Notre Dame to conduct three “internal studies” of the priest and the nun’s activities.
Sister Jeannine’s community had her back. Each time they got a letter, her fellow sisters responded to the Vatican that she was simply doing the work of the Church and recommended that she not be sanctioned. It was a more polite way of saying “Mind your own business.”
Cardinal Hickey wouldn’t be silenced so easily. He kept trying to convince the Vatican that what Sister Jeannine was doing was at odds with Church teachings and that it was dangerous. At one point he wrote to the Holy See:
“At the risk of trying your patience I write to you once again and ask that you bring pressure on Sister Jeannine’s superiors to remove her from this ministry.”
Cardinal Hickey’s continued letters had their intended effect. In early 1988, the Vatican convened a three-member US-based committee headed by Bishop Adam Joseph Maida, the archbishop of Detroit, to render an official judgment on Sister Jeannine and Father Bob’s gay ministry.
In May of 1988, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), then headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, ordered the nun and the priest to sign a “Profession of Faith,” declaring that they agreed with the Church’s official stance on homosexuality. In 1999, the CDF released a report saying that the nun and the priest were prohibited from all forms of homosexual ministry.
Her community stood strong in support of her and her work, but they could not go against the Vatican’s final decree. They asked that Sister Jeannine step away from the ministry. Father Bob was asked to do the same. He composed and signed his own
“Profession of Faith” and separated himself from New Ways Ministry.
“We always knew if push came to shove what he would do and what I would do. But it was so hard for Bob,” Sister Jeannine told me. “His priesthood was very important to him. There was no community of priests that would accept him.”
She was torn. She didn’t want to embarrass her community, and yet she felt bullied by these continued attacks on work that she knew made a major difference in people’s lives every single day. She began a period of deep reflection, prayer, and retreat. “I still felt called to the ministry. I felt that what was being asked of me was unjust . . . that lesbian and gay people are so marginalized in the Church that they need an advocate. They need someone connected to the Church institution to speak on their behalf, and I felt that God was telling me, ‘There is still work that you need to do here.’”
Her leaders in Notre Dame reluctantly told her that if she continued to work with the gay and lesbian community, they would need to dismiss her from their order. They were anguished. Sister Jeannine didn’t want to cause them needless pain or to draw more of the Vatican’s ire toward them, so she made the lateral move to the Sisters of Loretto, often referred to by conservative factions of the Catholic Church as an order of “feminist” nuns. In the nineteenth century, Loretto’s founders, Mary Rhodes, Ann Havern, and Christina Stuart, started out teaching children on the Kentucky frontier. Maybe it was the frontier life that gave them a thicker skin than other orders. They were progressive visionaries on the frontier, and they remain on the front lines today.
I told Sister Jeannine that some people would be surprised to learn that the man, Fr. Bob Nugent, backed down in this situation and the woman was the one who held strong to her beliefs and wouldn’t be bullied, wouldn’t be submissive.
