If Nuns Ruled the World (12 page)

“They sat right here in this conference room and told us that they would love to stop selling cigarettes, but it is just too high a percentage of their business,” Sister Nora told me with a shake of her head and a wave of her arm around the convent's finely appointed conference room and imposing mahogany table. Surrounding the table are framed photographs of the order's leaders staring down at the room's occupants in what could alternately be described as judgment or curiosity. Mother Mary Francis has the wall to the right of the room's doorway all to herself. The founder of the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia was born Maria Anna Boll Bachmann in Bavaria. She had three children and was pregnant with a fourth when she was widowed in 1851. Together with her sister Barbara and a novice in the Franciscan Secular Third Order, Maria Anna asked Bishop John Neumann to establish a congregation of Franciscan sisters in their diocese, and she became Sister Mary Francis, the first Mother Superior of the order. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the sisters served God wherever they saw a need. They supported themselves by taking in piecemeal sewing jobs, making just enough money to live and nurse the sick and the poor in their congregation.

Moving clockwise around that very conference room today, the next wall bears the superiors who succeeded Mother Mary Francis at the latter end of the nineteenth century, stoic women in full habits, only two-thirds of their faces peeking through the heavy black cloth. Then it is as though an imaginary line were drawn in between the photographs taken from the 1960s to 1970s. As I stared at it with confusion, Sister Nora looked at me. “Vatican II,” she said. No longer did the sisters in the photographs wear the dark habits. They switched first to a modified habit and veil and then surrendered them altogether, donning smart suits with brightly colored blouses.

The majority of the Franciscan sisters' funds are invested in Fortune 500 companies that behave responsibly—they are transparent, upstanding members of their communities, fair in their compensation practices and mindful of human rights. But even those corporations could often do better. Sister Nora isn't afraid to stand her ground when she thinks that a company is not up to snuff.

Back in 2011, ICCR members, including Sister Nora, almost walked right out of a meeting with Hershey at their corporate headquarters in central Pennsylvania. “They were just stalling rather than dialoguing with us, and we were about to say, ‘Let's get out of here.' All we wanted was for them to produce one product without child labor. We were begging them to produce one product without child labor,” she told me.

Since that meeting, Sister Nora says, the chocolate company has come a long way. With her nudging, along with that of the ICCR and other activist shareholders, Hershey's pledged to source their cocoa from responsible co-op farms. In Christmas of 2012 the company released their first chocolate bar made entirely without child labor, and they have pledged to be completely free of child labor by 2020. Right before I visited her, Sister Nora was able to get on a group call with a farmer in Ghana, who told her that working conditions had vastly improved.

“We are just thrilled,” she told me. “Some people will say, ‘Oh, 2020 is a long way off.' I say you have to have goals!”

The goal is always to get a face-to-face meeting with executives. That's how you get the best answers. ICCR members collaborate on goals for different issues and always find that the best path is through dialogue with upper management and executives, when it's possible. They research company policies, write letters, meet face-to-face, do conference calls, and file resolutions when necessary. When it comes to her work, Sister Nora is a relentless communicator, which is why most corporations have found that it is simply easier to schedule a meeting with her rather than open themselves up to the very public criticism that comes when the nun files a resolution against the company that legally must be read at a shareholder meeting. Sister Nora isn't sure whether the executives respond to her differently because she is a nun or because she represents a group that controls some very sizable investments and the ICCR is very well respected.

“Corporations have learned to respect us, not just because we sit on the other side of the table, but because we represent the interests of the investor, the communities, and the corporation. If you don't do what is right and just, you're damaging your reputation and your shareholders',” she explained. “They know we're speaking from a place of truth.”

Sister Nora speaks often about bringing the Franciscan spirit into her work, a message that is categorically straightforward: greed produces suffering. Her order's namesake, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, nicknamed Francesco, or Francis, was raised in an upper-middle-class family with a luxury clothmaker for a father. After witnessing the poor beggars on the streets of Rome, Francis made the choice to forego the trappings of the upper class in order to live and work among the sick and the poor as a preacher. “Remember that when you leave this Earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received—only what you have given,” Francis wrote.

In addition to the teachings of Saint Francis, Sister Nora looks to the Bible to provide a value base for promoting the common good, human dignity, human rights, sustainability, and overall corporate responsibility. As a Sister of St. Francis of Philadelphia, she is deeply committed to what her congregation calls “the care for creation,” which includes protecting and defending the rights of those who are poor and vulnerable, and who stand to be most severely affected by environmental degradation and climate change.

“Matthew 5 is a biggie,” she told me. That verse is the start of the well-known Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus gathers his disciples around him to teach them the value of social justice:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who have been persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Corporations, Sister Nora tells me, have so much control over the lives of ordinary people, the meek, the hungry, and the poor, that they should have a responsibility to take care of them.

Sister Nora prays daily. Her local convent gathers for Morning Prayer at 6:30 a.m., but she rises even earlier for her own personal prayer at home. The sisters try to pray together each night, but that can get difficult with everyone's hectic schedules. She attends church every day except Monday, when there is no liturgy in her local parish. Instead she goes to physical therapy.

Our time together at the convent came to an end just before dusk. Sister Nora needed to leave me in order to check her phone messages. She had been playing a bothersome game of phone tag with Wells Fargo Bank on the day that I met her at the convent. When it comes to shareholder activism, you have to cross every
t
and dot every
i
. Corporations will look for any loophole to try to ignore your resolution. Sister Nora wasn't having it. She stressed that the sisters were very qualified to ask their questions, as they were continuous holders of the bank's stock.

“You're pretty fierce,” I told her.

She smiled almost shyly back at me.

“You have to be,” she said, and winked. “I have a passion for justice.”

7.

The Act of Survival Is Worse Than the Torture Itself

Torture does not end with the release from some clandestine prison.

—Sister Dianna Mae Ortiz

S
i
ster Dianna Mae Ortiz had only been working as a missionary in San Miguel, Guatemala, for a few months when the death threats began. She had no clue what provoked them. Sister Dianna was just a nun in her twenties, there to teach elementary school English and hardly a threat to anyone.

“You are going to die in this country. Return to your country,” one menacing letter read.

A second notice was composed of words cut from a newsletter and glued to a piece of stationery, looking almost farcical, like something out of a movie, except for the chilling command:

Eliminate Dianna. Raped, disappeared, decapitates leave the country.

She was terrified but didn't want to make the threats public for fear of word reaching her parents back in New Mexico, whom she knew would demand that she come home and give up on this adventure.

“It isn't easy for me to admit, but fear clawed its way into my life and began to affect my physical health and my ministry. I began fearing the people who were part of my community,” Sister Dianna told me some twenty years later.

She had a reason to be afraid. She should have been more afraid.

It isn't easy to tell Sister Dianna's story. In so many ways she is a woman still painfully broken from her experience in Guatemala all those years ago. Just speaking about it brings her intense psychological pain, while her every movement reminds her of the physical pain inflicted on her young body. She is a survivor who has channeled a terrible experience into a way to help others. For that and for many other reasons I am in awe of her. What follows was difficult for her to tell me, hard for me to hear from Sister Dianna's mouth, challenging to write, and may be problematic for the sensitive reader.

When she first traveled to the Central American country in 1987, Sister Dianna Mae Ortiz, a young Ursuline nun from New Mexico with clear, bright, coffee-colored eyes; a toothy smile embedded into delicate features; and dark curly hair, planned to live in Guatemala for the rest of her life.

“I thought I would breathe my last breath there,” she told me the first time we spoke in 2012. Fiercely dedicated to the children there, she loved the people like family and taught them Spanish in the hopes that they could one day pull themselves out of the worst kind of poverty. She never wanted to do anything else except live among these people and serve God. When Dianna was just six years old, her parents asked each of her siblings what they wanted to be when they grew up. Dianna didn't blink or pause like the other kids. “A nun,” she said with a casino dealer's certainty. She just kept saying it too, to anyone who would listen, which forced her into a kind of social isolation. The girls in her school teased her. In junior high and high school they crossed themselves and laughed when she walked by, but she ignored them, feeling strong and confident in what she wanted to do with her future.

During her junior year, as other kids were filling out college applications, Dianna began to put her plan into action. She visited an Ursuline sister who was the principal of a local school to inquire about how she could become a nun. That sister invited her to the Ursuline motherhouse in Maple Mount, Kentucky. She spent her senior year at the girls' school there and went on to a nearby Catholic college to receive a degree in education, making her temporary vows with the Ursulines before she graduated. Sister Dianna finally felt at home.

Once she settled into convent life, the teasing continued, but in a good-natured way that no longer bothered her. Her nicknames in the convent were “The Prima Donna” and “Lady Di.” She was modest and neat, with clothes always perfectly ironed. There she developed strong friendships that would last her entire life. Once she became a sister, all Sister Dianna wanted to do was serve as a missionary in Central America. With parents of Spanish and Mexican heritage, she felt called to learn more about her family's history and travel to a place where she could immerse herself in Hispanic culture.

In 1987 her wish was granted when she was sent to work as a missionary in a small indigenous village in Guatemala. It took forty-four hours by bus from Mexico City to reach Guatemala City. From there she left for San Miguel Acatán, a cripplingly poor rural Mayan village, where 80 percent of the population under the age of five suffered from malnutrition, to teach grade-school children how to read and write. She learned a few phrases in the local dialect, K'anjobal, and set out to convince the wary villagers that she was there to stay. They were distrustful. For five hundred years these people had watched as foreigners came to their country, took what they wanted, and walked away. “Everyone who has come here has left us,” they told her. “You're not going to abandon us too?”

“No, I will never leave you,” she told them.

Sister Dianna expected to teach kindergarten, ages five to seven, but there were so few teachers that she ended up with a class of students from ages three to fourteen. Many of them had never held a pencil, seen a book, or used a crayon before. Because her initial intention was to teach them in Spanish, she had gone to language training for several months to become fluent. It was quickly apparent that speaking to the Mayan children in Spanish was useless.

“What I later learned was that education is a threat to governments,” Sister Dianna told me. “When someone teaches people to read and write and be proud of who they are, it teaches them to demand more from a society than brutal oppression. They become dangerous.” So she worked with the local women to create a system of translation—from the kids to a translator to her—and then reversed it.

Guatemala in the 1980s was a dangerous place. In 1982, the violent overthrow of the government led the military to take their aggression out on poor indigenous people in the countryside, the very people Sister Dianna was ministering to. The Army unleashed a scorched-earth campaign designed to destroy anyone viewed as an insurgent against the government and obliterated 440 rural villages. Human rights organizations estimated that as many as 100,000 Guatemalans were abducted or killed by their own government in the 1980s. Torture, disappearances, and massacres were routine. Anyone considered a threat was eliminated. Many of the victims were women. Most of the people who disappeared were found dead. Priests and religious workers were regularly hunted down and killed by an army that viewed them as allies of the guerillas, as well as Communist sympathizers.

When Sister Dianna first arrived, the people in San Miguel told her a story: The military had come in one day and told the women they would be killed if they didn't cook them tortillas. When they had cooked the tortillas, the guerillas came to the village to cut their heads off for cooking for the military. The village, they said, had no allies on either side.

Despite all that, many of Sister Dianna's memories of her early days in the village were happy ones. She remembers fondly her walks with the children and how they collected stones to build miniature prayer altars for her. On the days they did not walk, the children would knock on the nun's door and then bolt away quickly when she answered, leaving their small offering of stones outside the doorframe.

“It was symbolic,” she recalled. “[The children] were my rocks.”

By the time the threats arrived, she was committed to these people, but Sister Dianna knew that as a foreigner she had an easy way out. Americans could always just go home, where the threats would never follow them, and it would be written off as a journey gone wrong. She would have other adventures. But what gnawed at her was whether she could leave all those children with whomever was placing her life in danger.

Ultimately, Sister Dianna didn't think it was her decision to make—it was God's. She made retreats and prayed for hours on end. One day, reading the Bible in the garden of the retreat house with her friend Sister Darleen, she dared the book to fall open to any passage. When it landed, spine flat on the ground and pages open to the sky, staring at her was the story of Jeremiah, the prophet who remained with his people despite his persecution by his friends and family. The officials and the nobles of Babylon
“took Jeremiah out of the court of the guardhouse and entrusted him to Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, to take him home. So he stayed among the people.”

She had her answer. God was telling her not to flee.

“I remember my eyes resting on that page and there was a moment of indescribable peace, like an embrace from God. I knew that the road I would be walking down, I would not be walking alone. There was my answer. I knew I would stay with the people of Guatemala,” she told me.

On the morning of November 2, 1989, Sister Dianna was on another religious retreat in the neighboring village of Antigua. A scruffy man wearing a
Rambo
T-shirt appeared in the garden behind the retreat house with a gun in one pocket and a hand grenade in the other. He swiftly reached out and grabbed the young nun, yanking her violently through a hole in the wall. “Please, God, let this be a dream,” she remembers thinking as he blindfolded her. “
Hola mi amor!
We have some things to discuss,” the man said.

Her captor threatened to release a hand grenade if she did not board a public bus with him. So she did. The bus stopped in the small town of Mixco, where the man and two compatriots escorted her to a waiting car. There were three captors—a man named Jose and two others, whom she nicknamed “The Policeman” and “The Guate-man” to keep them straight in her head. “Guate-man” is short for a man from Guatemala City. Sister Dianna was terrified to realize that she recognized him from a recent trip she had made to the city to run errands. He had walked up next to her on a busy street and grabbed her by the arm. “We know who you are. We know where you live,” he had hissed in her ear. Jose was a dark-skinned Mayan man with matted hair and a bad eye. He was the first to introduce himself once they arrived at a compound that she would later describe as a secret prison.

“They tell me you are a nun. Is that true?” Jose asked her once he had her locked in a cell in a dilapidated building in the middle of nowhere. “I go to church every Sunday and read the Holy Bible every day. Since you are a nun, surely you must know if God forgives people for the sins they have committed. I don't like my work. But I have a wife. I have children. . . . Sometimes we live at the expense of others.”

Jose believed that the presence of a sister elevated the dingy jail cell into a confessional booth. A spigot was opened and stories of his sins poured out of him like raw sewage from a gutter. He described raiding a town in the north of the country. There he armed each of the boys in that village with a can of gasoline and told them to douse their own homes and light them on fire. Petrified, a small boy clasped his mother's skirt, paralyzed. An older man begged Jose to be allowed to take the little boy's place. So, Jose told Sister Dianna, he slammed the two of them in the head with the butt of his rifle. The small boy's head split in two halves like a ripe watermelon. The rest of the children did as they were told and turned their town to ash.

“We took the women to the chapel. I hate to tell you what we did to them,” he told the nun, his breath hot against her skin. “Old women, young girls, very young, pregnant women.”

He seemed proud before catching a flash of remorse. “I did not want to do it. I have nothing against you,
Madre
. Can you forgive me?” he asked. “If you, a nun, can forgive me, maybe God, too, can forgive me.”

Sister Dianna didn't know where she was. She didn't know if this man would let her live or be the one to kill her. What was the right answer? Was there even a right answer? She told him he would have to ask for forgiveness from God and from those whose lives he had silenced. He didn't like that. “I am sorry,
Madre
. I could have saved you,” he said. “If you had forgiven me, I could have saved you.”

First came her interrogation. They played a “game.” If she answered a question the way they liked, she would be allowed to smoke a cigarette. If they didn't like what she said, they would burn her with it.

Next, Sister Dianna was suspended over a pit full of bodies—men, women, children, some decapitated, all caked in blood. Some were still alive. Moaning. Rats ran across the bodies and swarmed Sister Dianna as she was suspended over the top of the pit, held aloft by her bruised wrists.

There was just one source of strength for her in that hellhole: her cellmate, a woman who had been severely tortured. From a cot across the room, the woman turned her head and tried to smile at Sister Dianna. Her breasts had been cut open. Maggots swarmed inside them. Sensing that the woman needed to feel her touch, Sister Dianna moved toward her and grabbed her hand.

But perhaps Sister Dianna needed the woman more than the woman needed her. “Dianna, be strong. They will try to break you,” the woman whispered through cracked and bloodied lips. The nun would repeat those words over and over again in her head. Three words—Dianna, Be Strong—kept her from completely abandoning faith that people could be good. “In that prison cell, where I witnessed the near-death of my faith, I made a promise to her and to the others who were there that I would tell the world what I had witnessed,” Sister Dianna told me.

She lay with the woman for several hours before all three of her captors burst into the cell. She describes what happened next as her soul's darkest moment, the moment she felt crushed by Satan. “Everything that made my life worth living withered. Hope vanished. I became a lost spirit in a world that didn't make sense,” she said.

One of the men walked toward Sister Dianna and handed her a machete, then stood behind her and trapped her hands beneath his. He placed his callused hands over hers and forced her to stab at the woman over and over again. She couldn't stop him. His full weight bore down on her tiny hands. She could only look away and sob.