If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  They had five phone lines ringing at once and there wasn’t a quiet line all night. Interfaith Voices was born—a radio show with the mission of bringing together disparate religious voices. Today the show airs in seventy-four markets and counting. Its mission is public education in the full spectrum of major religious traditions and a mandate to confront anything that even vaguely smells like discrimination.

  When the Vatican began its Apostolic Visitation, or investigation of American nuns, in 2009, Sister Maureen was able to use her platform to defend the sisters on air and her position as a commentator to speak out.

  She wrote an op-ed for Ms. magazine:

  Most progressive nuns suspect a desire by the church hierarchy to rein in the independent lifestyles and ministries of active, often outspoken, feminist women, and to push them back into highly scheduled convent living and recognizable religious garb (habits). Other nuns see the investigations as an attempt to silence their cries against injustices in the church. Fueling such suspicions are the three targets of the doctrinal investigation: It will assess whether nuns’ leaders accept the all-male priesthood, adhere to church teaching that homosexual activity is “intrinsically disordered,” and believe that only the Catholic Church provides salvation, while other Christian churches have “defects.” Those teachings have been challenged for years by prominent theologians. Many nuns have been active for decades in the movement for women’s ordination to the priesthood. Some nuns have questioned teachings on contraception and abortion. Others have defended the rights of gays and lesbians, and still others work for interfaith understanding and collaboration.

  She also took to the Huffington Post:

  Some [nuns] participate in anti-war and anti-torture campaigns and demonstrations, or protest at the School of the Americas in Georgia. Not a few have gone to jail. Many work with the poor and advocate for the poor in legislatures. And many work with poor women specifically—in homeless shelters, rape crisis centers and centers that deal with domestic violence. Some commentators think that [Cardinal Franc] Rodé and his ilk wanted to put an end to all of this and return American nuns to the classroom and convent. As a nun who has long been involved in peace and justice work, interfaith collaboration and the rights of women, there is virtually no chance of that happening.

  In 2010, Sister Maureen published the book Breaking Through the Stained Glass Ceiling, a series of interviews she conducted on Interfaith Voices dealing with discrimination faced by women in all religions and the emerging leadership of women in some faith traditions.

  “I say in the book, you know, in a day and age when Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, when Hillary Clinton could be a credible candidate for president of the United States, being a woman bishop doesn’t look like such a big deal anymore,” Sister Maureen told NPR in 2011. Her interviews in the book, which also aired on the radio show, include talks with Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and the first woman primate of the Anglican Communion; Dr. Ingrid Mattson, the first woman president of the Islamic Society of North America; and Rev. Susan Andrews, the first woman National Moderator of the Presbyterian Church.

  Plenty of Sister Maureen’s fellow sisters have left the Church for religious organizations where the stained-glass ceiling has already been broken, or for completely new callings that don’t restrict them based on gender. Sister Maureen herself has no plans to leave.

  She believes that being a champion for women’s rights is easier to do from within the Catholic Church. “I see it as a part of my calling. And I think a lot of women of faith would say the same thing,” Sister Maureen told me. “My vow of obedience is a vow of obedience to the call of God and to the call of Jesus. And first among that is to do justice.”

  Sister Maureen is busy. She is hosting the radio show, she is writing books, she is penning op-eds and appearing as a commentator on other people’s shows. She loves dogs but she is too busy to own one; that is why she has her three cats. But when she jogs, which she tries to do every day to keep both her mind and body fit, she takes dog treats with her in her pockets so that she has an excuse to pet the neighborhood canines. One day, she introduced herself to one of the dogs’ owners.

  “Oh my,” the woman exclaimed. “You’re that woman on the radio!” Sister Maureen is a little bit famous in certain circles.

  With so much focus at the end of 2013 on whether the newly elected Pope Francis could change the Church for minorities, including women, Sister Maureen became a valued commentator for various media outlets. “I really like Pope Francis in so many ways. He seems personable, friendly, truly human, a man who experiences life with joy. I love his simpler lifestyle, his emphasis on the poor of the world and his preaching of social justice and peace as cornerstones of the Gospel message,” Sister Maureen wrote for the National Catholic Reporter in November of 2013. “But when it comes to women, I want to cry. He just doesn’t seem to get it. He tries to be nice, to be complimentary and understanding. But in almost every phrase, he seems to think of women as a different species of human.”

  Sister Maureen doesn’t think that Pope Francis will be the pope to finally ordain women. Only nine months into his tenure, she just didn’t think he has it in him. She could hear it in his language, in the words he uses to describe women.

  “He talks about women’s sensitivity and intuition. He says women are sentimental and empathetic. He says women are socialized into these roles. He talks about loving motherhood. These are all positive stereotypes, but they are stereotypes nonetheless. He doesn’t talk about women’s intellect or their organizing ability or their political savvy,” Sister Maureen said. “That’s why I wish I could give him ‘Women 101.’”

  Even if the pope agreed to sit down and meet with feminist Catholic women like Sister Maureen, he would have to contend with all the men beneath him if he wanted to make real changes in how the Church deals with women.

  “I doubt that he will move to ordain women, mainly because there will be a major revolt in the Vatican Curia,” she said. “It is so male-entrenched there that the thought of having a bunch of powerful women around probably scares the living daylights out of them.

  “But change will come,” she says. “After all, Jesus was a feminist, and we claim to follow him.”

  10.

  We Are All Sisters

  A woman cannot have real autonomy unless she has reproductive autonomy. My hope is that one day both Church and society will embrace this justice issue.

  —Donna Quinn

  Donna Quinn doesn’t like putting “Sister” in front of her name.

  “We’re all sisters,” she says with a little bit of attitude. She prefers that people just call her Donna.

  The protestors outside of a women’s health clinic that performed abortions in Hinsdale, Illinois, didn’t know that. To get her attention, they shouted at her.

  “Sister, Sister!” they yelled as she peacefully walked women from their cars and into the clinic. “Clinic Escort” was written across the front of her stark white smock, but again, she prefers another term—“peacekeeper.”

  The crowd of irate protestors alternated between praying the Rosary and ranting at the top of their lungs at the patients, mostly young girls who were exhausted as they tried to cross through the irritated crowd just to reach the front door of the simple one-story brick clinic on a tree-lined residential block. “They never questioned getting up at four a.m. to lurk outside of a women’s health clinic, to attack a woman for being a moral agent in her own life. Who does that?” Donna asked me.

  “Murderer!” the mob collectively shouted as one woman tried to pass. To Donna, the women’s decision was a sacred one “made as a moral agent in a country that has said abortion is legal.”

  It is an incredible thing to walk with a woman, a stranger, as she heads into a clinic and prepares to undergo a surgery l
aden with moral, ethical, and psychological implications that will likely be with her for the rest of her life. In those moments Donna Quinn served as their protector and confidante. As she tried to walk with and shield those young women from further offense, she reminded herself that her work as a feminist activist was driven by a desire to leave this world a better place for subsequent generations.

  “I wanted to be so much more than an escort. I wanted to be their human shield. These women put themselves in a vulnerable position because they made the right choice for themselves at the right time in their lives. I just wanted to put my arms around them and protect them,” Donna told me. Many times that is exactly what she did, wrapping them in her thin arms and whispering words of comfort in their ears.

  Donna Quinn has studied and spoken out on issues of reproductive justice for more than three decades and believes that a woman’s right to make reproductive decisions for her own body should be safe, legal, accessible, and one day funded by Medicare.

  “Any woman should have the right to choose an abortion,” Donna said. “Just as men continue to make decisions for vasectomies and male-enhancing drugs, so too women should be able to make decisions for their bodies without jeering, name-calling, and violence as they enter health clinics for reasons unknown to those who perpetrate this violence on them because they are women. As a peacekeeper, my goal is to enable women to enter a health clinic for whatever reason in dignity and without fear of being physically assaulted.”

  After she became well known as a clinic escort, anti-choice blogs started calling Donna the “Abortion Nun.” The protestors had run the license plate of her car and figured out she was a Catholic sister.

  When the stories took on a life of their own, Donna was asked by the leadership of her community to explain her work. The Chicago Tribune reported that she had decided to stop her work volunteering because the irate focus on her was escalating and she was worried that the safety of the women at the clinic could be put in jeopardy. “I want to be clear that this is my decision,” she said. “Respect for a woman’s moral agency is of critical importance to me and I look forward to continuing this dialogue with our congregation on these matters.”

  When it comes to abortion, Donna is at odds with the Vatican. The Catholic Church has changed its position on abortion throughout the centuries, but it currently takes the stance that human life must be protected absolutely from the moment of conception.

  Still, every time we spoke, Donna Quinn told me, “I’m so Catholic.”

  Raised by a fearless mother and a generous father in the staunchly Irish Catholic parish of St. Gabriel in the Canaryville section of Chicago, Donna quickly learned that dedication to the Church was a way of life. Both parents were active in parish life. If her dad could have gotten up on the pulpit and delivered the sermon himself, he would have. Instead he would stand in the back of the church and motion to the priest when his sermon was going a little too long. He practically ran the parish, making sure that those with less got food, clothing, and shelter. Donna’s mother took her own risks to help those in need, surreptitiously turning on the fire hydrant pump on their block so all the kids could cool off on hot summer days. Donna says that everything she now knows and practices about social justice, she learned from her family.

  No one was surprised when all three Quinn siblings entered religious life. Early on, at the age of six, Donna’s uncle asked her if she wanted to be a nun when she grew up. Not familiar with the word, she shook her head and replied, “No, I want to be a sister.” When Donna was in the seventh grade, one of the order priests came to her school to try to sell the boys on the vocation. At the end of his talk, he asked the class who wanted to be ordained as a priest. Donna’s hand shot up. The boys laughed and the priest informed her: “Oh no, only boys can become priests.”

  The sisters Donna had in high school were strong women, articulate and educated. Many of her classmates wanted to be teachers, nurses, secretaries, or homemakers, but she knew she wanted to be a nun. After earning degrees in administration and history, she taught grade school, high school, and college for seventeen years. Then, starting in the early 1970s, Donna became interested in the women’s movement that was percolating on the heels of the previous decade’s civil rights movement. She set off to take a closer look at where the Catholic Church stood on women’s rights and was disappointed with what she learned. “After I took a look, I just realized that women essentially have no rights in the Catholic Church,” she said. “And then I realized women have no voice, either.”

  One of the best things about being a nun in the 1970s, before the advent of e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook, was the ability to network. If you told a nun in San Francisco something, you could bet it would get to the Chicago sisters by the end of the week—through a flurry of letter writing, phone calls, and in-person visits. And so, in her thirties, Donna began focusing on bringing together nuns and other Catholic women to champion women’s rights within the Church. She helped to found Chicago Catholic Women, the Women’s Ordination Conference, and a coalition of twenty-six Catholic-rooted organizations known as Women-Church Convergence. She became one of the first members of the National Coalition of American Nuns (NCAN), a progressive group of sisters dedicated to studying and speaking out on justice issues in the Church and in society.

  In the ’70s she helped pull together a group called Women of the Church Coalition, consisting of about fifteen organizations springing up across the country that focused on women’s issues in the Church.

  The all-male National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) would meet every spring at the Palmer House in Chicago. The Coalition, thinking that they might leaflet and speak with bishops about women’s issues, rented themselves a room and invited the bishops to join them for a lively discussion on women and the Church.

  Donna thought it would be that easy. She thought they could just ask and they would receive. She now knows that she was incredibly naïve. “Oh, we were so filled with hope,” she told me. Out of three hundred bishops, only two met with the women—Bishop Charles Buswell and Bishop Raymond Lucker.

  “We thought all we had to do was be there and they would talk to us.” Back then, the bishops did have a women’s committee—a group where the men ostensibly gathered to discuss women. The chairman of that committee was a bishop named Michael Francis McAuliffe from Jefferson City, Missouri. He was on his way to the airport when Donna and two other women, Rosalie Muschal Reinhardt and Dolores Brooks, stopped him to ask if he and his fellow bishops might be interested in feminist theology classes and workshops on women’s issues in the Church.

  He released a buoyant belly laugh.

  “I was amazed,” Donna said. “He told me these men would never take a class from us. He wasn’t mean-spirited. He just couldn’t believe it. What I said was just so ludicrous to him.”

  The next year, the NCCB rented every room at the Palmer House, so the women took their leafleting to the streets outside and handed them out to people passing by.

  “We were slowly learning that what we thought might take a few years to change might take a lifetime,” Donna told me.

  Abortion wasn’t always Donna’s first priority. Women’s ordination was her first battle, followed by gaining rights for lesbian and gay Catholic members of the Church. She spent years focusing on advocacy for those issues through her work with NCAN.

  In early 1984, Donna received a call from her friend Dolly Pomerleau of the Quixote Center in Washington, DC.

  “Are you going to sign the ad calling for the bishops to dialogue on the issue of abortion?” Dolly asked at the end of their call. When I mentioned this call to Dolly twenty years later, she laughed and told me she didn’t even remember the conversation. “But I probably said it,” she said. The “call for dialogue” was a letter from the group Catholics for Free Choice (CFFC) that would be published in the New York Times, asking for a discussion of the Catholic po
sition on abortion. The way CFFC saw it, there could be more than one stance on the morality of abortion, and those other stances were worth exploring. The letter was originally borne of a 1982 briefing that CFFC wrote for Congress detailing the difficulty of having a nuanced position on abortion for Catholic politicians. Then-Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro penned the introduction for the briefing. When Ferraro was named Walter Mondale’s running mate, Archbishop John O’Connor of New York and Archbishop Bernard Francis Law of Boston both issued statements denouncing her position on abortion.

  The CFFC wanted to stand behind Ferraro. They turned the briefing into a letter arguing for a dialogue on the Catholic stance on abortion and looked for signatures from progressive Catholic leaders.

  “All right, all right. I’ll sign it,” Donna replied. But she wanted to make it very clear: “This was not my first issue. This was not the issue I wanted to go down on.”

  A total of ninety-seven signatures were gathered, including Donna’s, along with twenty-five other nuns and two priests. The CFFC paid $30,000 for the full-page ad in the New York Times that ran on the day many Catholic Americans celebrated “Respect for Life Sunday.”

  Weeks after the election, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement saying that the opinions of the signers did not reflect those of the Church at large because they were in clear contradiction to the stance that a deliberately chosen abortion is objectively immoral. Cardinal Jean Jérôme Hamer, a Belgian Dominican, requested that the signers publicly retract their statements or be dismissed from their religious communities.

  The following month, Cardinal Hamer came to Chicago to greet the religious men and women in the archdiocese. A large group gathered at the Holy Name Cathedral and after his speech everyone present was invited to the auditorium to personally meet the cardinal. Outside the cathedral, protestors gathered wearing black armbands to signify that the Church was dead to women. Many held signs reading, we want a church for our daughters.