The Good Sisters

My wife and I have known each other now for going on 50 years, ever since we met in 1^st grade -- September, 1959, at St. Aedan’s School in Jersey City.  We were in the same class, all eight years, taught by the same nuns; we (and all our classmates) went to church together – Mass at 9:00 AM without fail every Sunday, Mass every morning before school began on First Fridays, and every day of the months of October and May (Mary’s months) -- First Communion and Confirmation together; we were even partners on line at our 8^th grade graduation.

This has gone a long way, I think, in creating and sustaining the bond that holds us together.  I suppose if someone were to ask me what I believed to be the key to a successful marriage (35 years and counting), one component would certainly be the sheer depth of our common background – our collective memory and experiences; we grew up in the same neighborhood, knew all the same people, did many of the same things, and shared many of the same expectations and aspirations about life.  And one of the things that we -- and many other Catholics of our generation shared – is our experience of the nuns.

Nowadays, too many people get their images of nuns either from people like playwright Chris Durang, whose Sr. Mary Ignatius is a twisted and vindictive woman, warped by a "faith" that sees only sin and evil in human nature; or (worse yet, for a whole host of reasons, in my opinion), the "wacky" denizens of Dan Goggins' Nunsense musicals.   Because of the steep decline in vocations over the last 20 years or so, even kids in Catholic schools today will only rarely encounter a nun as a teacher. 

I spent the first six months of my life in a Catholic orphanage, cared for by the Sisters of Charity; and my whole educational life in the Catholic schools, each of the first eight years of which solely (with one exception in 5^th grade) under the tutelage of a Sister of St. Dominic.  I suppose that, having spent what psychologists now know to be the most formative phase of an infant's life under the daily care of nuns, I am perhaps subliminally predisposed to see the whole of religious women in a positive light. Notwithstanding, I have to say that the women who taught me, as well as the many nuns I have come into contact with over the course of my adult life -- with only a very few exceptions -- were (and are) sweet, dear women who I remember fondly as teachers and exemplars, and who loved me wholeheartedly and taught me well.  I even remember most of their names – Sr. Dolorosa, Sr. Patricia Mary, Sr. Ferdinand, Sr. Anthony Marie, Sr. Agnesine, Sr. Leonard Marie, Sr. Maureen James, Sr. Maria. 

My mother continued to be active in the parish church and school long after I’d graduated, gone off to college and grad school, and gotten married.  One upshot of this was that all sorts of random people from my childhood knew my business, and in great detail.  I had a conversation with my mother one day, not long after my wife became pregnant with our first child.  She mentioned that she had been speaking to our 8^th Grade nun, Sr. Maria (who had of course already known, through my mother, that two of her erstwhile pupils had married), and told her of our good news.  I asked her to tell Sister that we both sent our best; and that, I thought, would be that.  


About eight weeks later a large box showed up in the mail in care of us both.  My first assumption was that it came from my mother, but when I  looked at the return address the name on the package was Sr. Maria’s.  I tore open the box, and found inside, folded carefully in tissue paper, a lovely, hand-knitted baby blanket, with a note in Sister’s neat, spidery hand assuring us of her love and prayers for us and the baby to come.  We wrapped our infant daughter in that blanket when we brought her home from the hospital, and we’ve kept it ever since, stored away in a chest, should the baby it swaddled ever have need of it for a child of her own.   There are a lot of reasons why women are not choosing the convent as a vocation; many of those reasons apply as well to men considering the priesthood.  Modern life presents many more options, especially for young women, than were available to them when I was a child; and very few young men and women will have grown up with the kind of day-to-day interaction with religious of all kinds –priests, brothers or sisters – that my wife and I encountered in our youth, and that might serve as an exemplar or role model for them to follow.  I do not know what this bodes for religious life in the Catholic Church, or what changes in attitude or established practice will have to occur to see any kind of renaissance in vocations; but I do know that a world without these wonderful women, working to help children, and the poor, and the sick, living their lives prayerfully and joyfully, is diminished by their absence.