If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  She sighed and nodded just slightly.

  “The men are a little more cautious and fearful of the repercussions than the women. Women’s communities are less afraid to take the risk,” she said.

  But joining a new order did nothing to divert the Vatican’s interest. As Sister Jeannine made her transition to Loretto, the attacks from the patriarchy continued unabated.

  A 2010 statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops excoriated New Ways as an organization that “cannot legitimately speak for Catholics.” Cardinal Francis George, OMI, archbishop of Chicago and president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued the following statement about New Ways: “Their claim to be Catholic only confuses the faithful regarding the authentic teaching and ministry of the Church with respect to persons with a homosexual inclination. Accordingly, I wish to make it clear that, like other groups that claim to be Catholic but deny central aspects of Church teaching, New Ways Ministry has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and that they cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.”

  By 2009, the Loretto sisters had received nine letters from the Vatican informing them that if Sister Jeannine continued her ministry, she should leave their service voluntarily or be dismissed. Each time a letter was received, it was treated with respect and a response was sent, but the order had no plans to dismiss Sister Jeannine.

  There is a button stuck on one of the bulletin boards in Sister Jeannine’s house that reads: we shall not be silenced. i support jeannine gramick. She smiled as I looked at it.

  “I don’t like people to say I was silenced. The Vatican tried to silence me and it just didn’t work.”

  This is a woman who, since the age of seven years old, has never wavered in her decision to be committed to Jesus Christ and has continually loved her Church. Regardless of everything she has gone through, Sister Jeannine still has a deep and abiding love and respect for the Church hierarchy because she believes they are the victims of an outdated theology that they feel bound to defend. Their sanctions against her make her feel ashamed for her Church’s leaders.

  “When the Vatican tries to silence people, it projects an image of Catholics to the world that I find embarrassing. I want to be proud of my Church and the bishops’ actions just make me feel ashamed for them,” Sister Jeannine told me. But there is also a selfish side to it. No one likes to be reprimanded.

  “I don’t like to be censured by a higher authority. I was always considered the good girl in school and in religious life. I don’t like being in the position of the outcast, and that is how I felt then and how I still feel in many ways,” she told me.

  And yet in a small way, being an outcast of the Church hierarchy has helped Sister Jeannine relate even more to the people she serves.

  “If you’re a shepherd, you have to smell like the sheep, as Pope Francis says, and God knows I have now experienced just a tiny fraction of what gay and lesbian people have experienced their entire lives,” she said.

  As the battle for equality and gay marriage evolved at a rapid clip toward the end of President Barack Obama’s first term, so too did Sister Jeannine’s mission. It was no longer just about workshops and outreach; she believed that she was now needed on the front lines of the fight for gay marriage. She wanted to change the hearts and minds of Catholics across the country. She knew that this was a time and a place where she could truly make a difference.

  In 2012, with a referendum on marriage equality on the ballot in four states, Sister Jeannine traveled through Maryland, Maine, and Washington to speak to Catholics on the ground.

  “We urged them to vote their conscience, because the bishops have a campaign against same-sex marriage which we believe is ill-advised,” she said.

  New Ways Ministry’s official stance on the issue was as follows:

  New Ways Ministry views the legalization of same-sex marriage as a matter of equal justice, not as a matter of sexual ethics. We believe it is important for the greater common good to protect the rights of couples in ALL adult, committed relationships based on the values of caring, compassion, love, mutuality, respect, and justice. Such Catholic values are more important than gender.

  New Ways Ministry finds the notion that heterosexual marriage will be devalued and harmed if same-sex marriages are approved to be illogical and blind to empirical evidence. Problems with the traditional nuclear family as an institution began decades before the notion of same-sex marriage was raised as a political reality. Divorce rates among heterosexual couples skyrocketed many years before legislation to approve same-sex marriage was discussed. For centuries same-sex marriage has not been legal, and yet such a legal absence has had no positive effect on heterosexual marriages.

  Instead of scapegoating same-sex marriage as causing the decline of the family and heterosexual unions, religious leaders should examine the economic, social, and cultural changes that have recently occurred to find the real causes of problems to these institutions. Only by finding the real causes will these leaders be able to start addressing real solutions.

  We call on all Catholics to examine the social justice tradition of our Church—a tradition which values the freedom of conscience, the dignity of all human beings, and the protection of the common good—and to learn how these traditions have long been applied by Catholic leaders and thinkers to the protection of lesbian/gay people and their rights.

  Sister Jeannine was in her element on the road. She gave what she calls “pep talks,” miniature rallies wherein she told crowds of Catholics that it was completely OK in the eyes of God for them to vote in favor of gay marriage. The fight for equality, she argued, is not about sacramental marriage, but legal marriage.

  “We didn’t get the backlash from the Catholics on the ground. We had mostly support from them,” she said. She began a campaign to collect signatures of Catholics who would publicly say that they would vote for marriage equality.

  “There is nothing in the Gospel against gay marriage and homosexuality. We need to take into account the science, psychology, and justice, of course,” was the message Sister Jeannine stuck to when addressing the skeptics. Voters in Maryland assured Sister Jeannine that she had influenced them to vote their conscience. “It was a good sign that we are growing up as a Church. Half of Catholics are in favor of gay marriage,” she said. “In a way, it is nice to start growing obsolete. We’re finding so many Catholics on board with lesbian and gay issues that they don’t need us anymore,” she said half-jokingly. A 2011 survey by the Public Religion Institute showed that 52 percent of Catholics believe that same-sex couples should indeed be allowed to marry.

  Outcry from the patriarchy aside, the shifting sentiment in favor of equality for gays and lesbians among average Catholics gives Sister Jeannine a certain sense of vindication for the issue she has championed for most of her life. From that moment when she met Dominic in that row house in West Philadelphia, she knew that with time, prayer, and hard work, what was rotten in the Catholic Church could be made new. The fact that Catholics came out in favor of gay marriage forty years after she held her ministry for that group of gay men gave her hope that even more positive change could be possible in the Church.

  “In my day and age, growing up in the Catholic ghetto, we Catholics were not trained to be thinkers,” she told me. “We were trained to do what the religious authority suggested. I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t have religious authorities, but we need authorities who will give guidance and direction. If we want to grow in our own moral lives, then we need to make our own decisions, not merely follow the decision that someone else makes for us.”

  The congregations have come around, but the fight that remains is with the old men of the Church. “Now we need to work on the American bishops,” Sister Jeannine told me. In November of 2013, before a mostly full Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Springfield, Illino
is, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, wearing a royal-purple robe, staged an “exorcism,” asking God to deliver the world from the evil of same-sex marriage just as Illinois governor Pat Quinn was signing the state’s gay marriage bill into law.

  Sister Jeannine has met with Bishop Paprocki, and they have had a debate about same-sex marriage.

  “We were on completely opposite sides,” she told me. “But as a person, he is a good person, and we have had an e-mail correspondence. That is what Francis wants us to do. He wants us to get to know the bishops and talk to each other. He wants a dialogue.”

  Despite everything the Vatican has done to thwart her mission, Sister Jeannine is optimistic about Pope Francis.

  “I am so much more hopeful now than I was with Pope Benedict. If we had more Pope Francises at the lower level, then we could have the Church that we want,” she told me, her bright-blue eyes growing wide with anticipation and her apple-round cheeks flushing with excitement. She quotes Francis with regularity, waving her hands in the air like an orchestra conductor punctuating his words with a crescendo. Her line about smelling like the sheep came from a March 2013 Mass the new pope gave in St. Peter’s Basilica, where he urged the priests to live with the people most in need. “Be shepherds with the smell of sheep,” the new pope advised. “So that people can sense the priest is not just concerned with his own congregation, but is also a fisher of men.” On a July morning, the pope was returning from his first papal trip abroad from World Youth Day in Brazil. He was unusually candid in answering a slew of reporter questions, including one on the issue of gay priests in the Vatican.

  “We shouldn’t marginalize people for this. They must be integrated into society,” Pope Francis said. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

  It was a change in tone to be sure, but the pope gave no indication that he was ready to modify the doctrine that views homosexuality as intrinsically disordered. Still, it was a giant step past his predecessors. Sister Jeannine believes that with prodding and education Francis may just see things the New Ways way.

  “You know what I think Francis’s problem is, Jo?” Sister Jeannine asked me, licking jam off her fingers as she cleared our plates away and packed some scones in a Tupperware container for me to take on the train back to New York.

  “What, Jeannine?” I replied, prepared for a doctrinal assessment.

  “I just don’t think he has met enough assertive women in his life.”

  4.

  Racing Against Time, Outliving the Competition

  Heading to the finish line of the Ironman is like me

  getting to the pearly gates. I think that is why I smile

  every time at the finish.

  —Sister Madonna Buder

  She’d made a wager with God. If she couldn’t complete the 2012 Canadian Ironman triathlon, Sister Madonna Buder wouldn’t attempt this insane race ever again. The nun was exhausted and beaten down as she dove into the silvery blue water of Lake Okanagan. She just didn’t want to put herself through the pain and the agony, the torn ligaments and the broken ribs, any longer. Still, for this one race, possibly her last race, she willed her muscles to make another stroke, which they did as her limbs trembled like twigs laden down with ice.

  The race was actually going surprisingly well at every turn. Sister Madonna was able to ward off her usual stomach issues much longer than usual. She made it eight miles to the finish line before finally, as she likes to describe it in the sweetest voice you can imagine talking about such things, “giving up my cookies.”

  She doesn’t wear a watch when she races (can’t see it in the dark anyway, she says), but by the time she was in the home stretch, finishing the marathon portion of the race along Lakeshore Drive, Sister Madonna knew that God had won the bet. Adrenaline coursed through her veins and with crowds roaring her name she crossed the finish line in sixteen hours and thirty-six minutes—twenty-four minutes shy of the seventeen-hour cutoff to officially complete the Ironman.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we now have a world record!” the announcer Steve King boomed over a loudspeaker at the finish line with his signature game-show-host enthusiasm on August 26, 2012. At age eighty-two, Sister Madonna Buder was the oldest athlete, male or female, to ever successfully complete an Ironman triathlon. God had bested her. Sister Madonna would go on to race another day.

  Sister Madonna’s nicknames include “The Mother Superior of Triathlon” and “The Iron Nun,” both in honor of the more than 366 triathlons she’s done, forty-six of which were Ironman distances, since taking up running at age forty-seven. She has this real no-nonsense attitude about the whole thing and is always asking what the big fuss is about. “Why do people care about this little old lady running these races?” she says. As she sees it, God gave her this body that happens to be good at running incredibly long distances. Why shouldn’t she use it?

  Looking at Sister Madonna, you can’t help but think that body was made for racing and little else. Her petite 5’7”, 115-pound frame carries nothing more than what it needs to propel her over miles of road. She is all sinewy muscle over tanned arms and legs. Her cerulean-blue eyes sparkle teasingly beneath an adorable pageboy of brown hair with just a sprinkling of gray.

  As for the pain? It’s just an annoying by-product. In the course of the more than three decades that Sister Madonna has competed in races, her delicate body has been battered, bruised, and broken.

  “I’m like a Dresden doll. I think I have broken almost every part of me that can be broken,” Sister Madonna told me, comparing herself to a china toy. In all, she has flown over the handlebars of a bicycle more times than any living human has the right to. She’s broken her ribs countless times, her right hip in two places, her right arm six times, her left arm twice, and let’s not mention her shoulder, clavicle, and nearly all her fingers and toes.

  When she competes, she looks just like everyone else in the race, wearing brightly colored running tights. The only giveaway that she may be something a little apart from the crowd is the silver cross hanging from her neck.

  Her yearly competition schedule can include more than twenty races. She has dialed it back since turning eighty, but not by much. She often travels alone, leaning on the Lord to be her travel agent.

  “I trust that once I get my foot out the door, God will provide the rest, even where I rest my head,” Sister Madonna told me. “Relying on Him has always helped with finding a place to stay—whether it is a tent, on someone’s sofa, or bedding down in my own car.” Once, she was forced to spend the night in the Greensboro, North Carolina, airport after a connecting flight was abruptly canceled. Sister Madonna hardly thought it would be worth it to leave the airport and pay for a place to stay for just a few hours. One of the entry gates was under construction, so she poked around until she found somewhere suitable and then just slept on a wooden pallet that was covered in plastic bubble wrap. She narrowly avoided being hauled off to jail and spent the night hearing a pop-pop-pop every time she rolled left or right. Another time, during the 1998 ITU World Championship Triathlon in Lausanne, she was taken to a Swiss hospital for hyperthermia and an asthma attack immediately after she finished. When she was discharged from the hospital, she had on nothing more than her race attire and no money, but found her way to a bus that could return her to the race site.

  She is her own Sherpa, hauling her bike everywhere she goes, breaking it down and putting it back together like a grease monkey before and after each race. The amount of travel to make it to twenty-five-odd races around the globe in a year is exhausting enough for anyone, let alone a woman in her eighties. In the spring of 2012, she hopscotched across seven different states in an eight-week period.

  The Iron Nun was born Dorothy Marie Buder in St. Louis, Missouri, on a day in 1930 she says was “hotter than hell.” Her mother insisted everyone call her by both her first and middle names. She
wouldn’t become Madonna until the day she took her final vows.

  Sister Madonna inherited her athleticism from her father and her faith from her mother. Gustavus A. Buder Jr. was a championship oarsman in St. Louis and an analytical Unitarian who wasn’t expecting to fall madly in love with a French Catholic budding actress, but that was exactly what he got in Kathryn, who charmed him with her portrayal of a female Shylock in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Interfaith marriages were a rarity at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Gustavus, a civil rights lawyer, full of integrity and persistence, found a priest who was willing to intercede. Kathryn baptized her first child and only daughter in the hospital herself and then taught her the catechism at home.

  As a baby, Madonna was active from the get-go. In one home movie, she looks like she may be doing push-ups in her crib. One of Sister Madonna’s favorite photos from childhood features her running wildly, curls flailing in the air, little white dress catching air behind her, as she scurries away from a nurse into her father’s arms. In her later years, her long runs would remind her of that child. She was a beautiful tomboy who always preferred doing anything outdoors to staying inside. She became adept at sailing, horseback riding, hiking, and mountain climbing.

  When she was ten, her father finally relented and allowed Madonna and her brother to be properly baptized at the Saint Louis University College Church.

  The pair went out to play afterward. Madonna felt light and giddy as she rode the playground swings, tilting her face skyward to drink in the heavenly rays of the sun. When another little girl asked her how it felt to be baptized, she replied, “I am a child of God now.” She was high on spirituality. Her brother, in turn, said he felt nothing.

  That was the first time Sister Madonna felt particularly called by God. She told me that she knew from age fourteen that she wanted to be a nun, but her mother thought it was important for her to try out all of the normal things girls her age did, including dating. Her parents had yet to explain anything about the facts of life. After one coed party in the sixth grade, Madonna came home and told her parents about a game they had played involving a spinning milk bottle and a kiss. Her parents were nonplussed. On another evening she told them about a game the kids were playing in Forest Park called Snipe, which was the opposite of hide-and-seek. Instead of losing, the first person to be found received a kiss.