What's The Story With the Nuns?

Mary Pat Kelly visits the nuns of her old novitiate to talk about the work they are doing and the Vatican investigation into their lives.

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Sister Nancy Reynolds (SP) during a liturgy installing her as a member of the order's General Council in 2006.

Photo by Courtesy of The Sisters of Providence, St. Mary-of-the-Woods

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The visitation spans three phases. Phases one and two involve written questionnaires sent out to the congregations. Many orders replied by simply submitting their Constitution. “The answers are contained in our Constitution,” Sister Nancy Reynolds said, “which was approved by Rome years ago.” Mother Mary Clare Millea, superior general of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who was appointed by Rome to head the visitation, then selected nuns from certain orders to carry out phase three: on-site visits to question members of the congregations. During these visits, which began in April 2010 and are still taking place, visitators interview the leadership and members, take notes, and make a report that is put on a thumb drive and sent directly to the Office of Apostolic Visitation and then to the Vatican.  Visitators shred their notes. The congregations are allowed neither to see the report nor to respond.

Then what? “We don’t know,” says Sister Nancy Reynolds. In the National Catholic Reporter, Mother Millea explained that, “Each institute will subsequently receive feedback from the Vatican for the purpose of promoting its charismatic identity and apostolic vitality in ongoing dialogue with the local and universal church.”

In another National Catholic Reporter article, Editor Tom Fox wrote, “By most accounts, these were conducted in a spirit of mutual respect and charity.” He went on to say “our women religious have tried not to complain, but rather speak with their actions.” The Sisters have reacted with grace and prudence, and the hope is that their actions will speak loudly enough. Perhaps we are the ones who should speak up about what seems to be such an unjust process, one that has been estimated to cost over 1 million dollars. After all, we are the ones who have benefited from the service of generations of dedicated women, many of whom are Irish American.

I hadn’t known that Sister Nancy’s roots are in Ballymena in County Antrim, or that hers is the only Catholic branch of the family.  She told me that when her Northern Ireland relatives came to the Woods to celebrate her Golden Jubilee, one said that, though he wasn’t sure about Catholics, he thought nuns were terrific!

The last morning of my visit I got up very early and went on my favorite walk through the cemetery. I felt surrounded by our ancestors as the rising sun lit the names engraved on the white headstones – Sister Mary Frances, Anna Egan; Sister Pauline, Elizabeth Egan; Sister Rose Paul, Honora O’Donahue; Sister Maurelia, Emma O’Brien. I walked past the graves of my own teachers – Sister Marie Denise, Hannah Sullivan; Sister Marcella, Grace O’Malley; Sister Mary Olive, Mary Olive O’Connell – row after row of markers set in this open space amid the trees and green hills of the Woods.

For although the Sisters of Providence originated in France and were brought to America in 1840 by a Breton woman, Anne Therese Guerin – now Saint Mother Theodore, after her 2006 canonization – Irish women had joined the congregation from its earliest days. One of them, Mother Mary Cleophas, Margaret Teresa Foley, born in 1845 to Irish immigrants James Foley and Mary O’Connor, and General Superior from 1890 to 1926, was the force behind the order’s expansion as the congregation staffed up to 100 schools throughout the U.S. and became the first women’s religious order to open a mission in China. She turned the campus of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College into a gracious enclave in the Indiana wilderness, complete with a church modeled on Paris’ Sainte-Trinité and a chapel with stained glass windows inspired by King Louis IX’s Sainte-Chapelle. She was one of that whole galaxy of Irish women who spread out through America, opening schools, hospitals, and orphanages where none had existed. Mother McCauley’s Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary – BVMs – founded by Mary Frances Clarke, are two of the other orders that served the immigrants of Chicago – my city. But I’m sure right now you’re supplying the names of many other orders whose mission touched the place you live.

However, this morning, the dates as well as the names fascinated me. Mary Mullan had died in 1855; Bridget O’Neill, in 1861; Elizabeth Kehoe, in 1879; on and on, through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Do the math, I told myself; these women are survivors of the Great Starvation. They or their parents had somehow escaped the catastrophe that killed one million and sent two million more running for their lives. All of these O’Grady, Ryan, Fitzgerald, O’Connor, and O’Hanlon women could tell a story of courage and resilience. All devoted their lives to serving their poor and disadvantaged countrymen, women, and children.

I felt their spirits in this place, encouraging and protecting the Sisters who carry on the mission they began. As they face these many challenges, we too can offer our support.

(Just as this article was going to press, word came that Cardinal Rodé had been replaced by Archbishop João Bráz de Aviz, who, in interviews, seems more open to real dialogue with women religious. Write to Archbishop João Bráz de Aviz c/o Apostolic Visitation, P.O. Box 4328, Hamden, CT 06514-9998, or e-mail www.apostolicvisitation.org to say how grateful we are to the Sisters who helped so many of us.)
 

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