If Nuns Ruled the World (15 page)

Candy drives, which she thought were such a great idea when she worked as a principal of a school in her earlier life, were particularly taxing. “When I saw these kids walk in with a hundred and twenty chocolate bars to sell, I wanted to choke.” She remembers walking down the street with two-year-old Amelia, five-year-old Julia, and a wagon of chocolate. Julia would go on to become the top chocolate seller in her kindergarten class.

“It sure was a different model. We had five sisters raising the children and we did all the things a parent would do. I became a mom,” Sister Tesa said. “But my commitment was to their mothers. Every weekend we would ride up to Bedford [Hills Correctional Facility] and take the babies to see their mothers. It was a ritual for nine years.”

One little girl would sit in the back of the giant van explaining to her imaginary friend what it would be like in the prison. Sister Tesa drove and listened to the little girl chatter to the air about how excited she was for the visit. She would plunge into tremendous detail about how pretty her mother would look, what she would be wearing and what color lipstick she would have on. She talked all about what they would eat out of the vending machines and what kinds of crafts they would do.

That conversation made Sister Tesa wipe away tears as she drove. That right there. That was her goal, for the child to love and connect to a parent they could only see once a week. That is why it was imperative for her to step away once they got to the prison, to make sure the children had one-on-one time with their real moms. It was even more important for the younger ones, who tended to bond closely with the sisters.

On the drive back, they would debrief.

“We talked about what happened during the day, the highlights of the visit. The reflection was important,” Sister Tesa told me. Having a parent in prison was a taboo topic of conversation in any other circumstance, but in that van the kids were all in the same boat. They could talk about how awesome it was, how scary, and how sad. They could admit that the prison smelled gross sometimes but their moms smelled good. They weren't afraid to cry in front of one another.

Leaving the prison was always the hard part.

“Until the kids got used to the idea that the visits wouldn't be erratic, they screamed and they cried. For the new ones it was always a readjustment. The ones who best prepared them were the other kids.”

What Sister Tesa didn't expect was just how fun some of the trips could be.

The nun is partial to Christian music, but she learned all the top-forty songs from the 1980s and '90s by heart.

“I remember ‘Walk Like an Egyptian' very vividly,” she told me, belting out a couple of lines from the 1986 Bangles hit.

The entire process took a toll on Sister Tesa, too. It was never easy to give up the children when their mothers got out. Giving up Naté, that first baby, was particularly hard. Sister Tesa cried for an hour as she prepared to hand her back over to her mom. Julia, one of the other children, was just four years old then, but her words of wisdom were much older. She looked at Sister Tesa, distraught over Naté, and said to her very matter-of-factly, “This is the way it is supposed to be. But it's OK, you are allowed to cry.”

It wasn't just the idea of relinquishing a child that rocked Sister Tesa; it was the pain of handing them over to an uncertain future. These children hadn't committed any crime.

“It became very clear to me that the mothers didn't have the opportunities that the children deserved,” Sister Tesa said. She wanted something more for all of them. She knew that when these women were released, they would need the embrace of a supportive community, or post-prison pressures would break them—and likely their kids.

She was further inspired by Doreen, a woman she met in prison and whose son Hakeem she had taken in. Doreen had been a foster child herself when she became addicted to drugs as a teenager, and she was still very much a child by the time she was locked up. While in prison, she gave birth to Hakeem. Doreen completed drug treatment while serving her time, but she had no options once she was released. She had nowhere to live, no education, no skills, and no money.

When Sister Tesa first met her, Doreen was sobbing uncontrollably because she knew she would be homeless when she was released and that none of the state-run shelters would let her keep Hakeem with her. Sister Tesa tried to plead Doreen's case with the administration for the halfway houses. Their response was stern: “We have no room for mothers with their children.” This was a common occurrence in New York state. Sister Tesa knew then that she had to find a space, not just for Doreen, but for all of the mothers.

They expanded St. Rita's to be able to accommodate the moms. These days, the women live in St. Rita's, as well as three other communal homes in Long Island City.

As mushy as she can be with the kids, Sister Tesa enforces the rules. Women are required to enroll in Hour Children's employment and training program. They must comply with sober and communal living restrictions and responsibilities. They ultimately need to get a job, and they have to keep finding ways to give back to the community.

If they meet these requirements, they are welcome to stay for as long as they feel they need support. Some have stayed with Hour Children for a few months, others as long as fifteen years.

Only women are allowed to be on a lease in Sister Tesa's apartment buildings.

“It gives them control. It gives them the power to say no to the men in their lives,” Sister Tesa said.

Hour Children's holdings in the neighborhood provide a microcosm of the real world. There is the food pantry, the source of food for the women when they first live on their own, and a huge boon for the rest of the neighborhood, which ranges from poor to working class. Local politicians love Hour Children's food pantry. The Twelfth District's congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, hosted a press conference there when the Democrats were trying to pass the farm bill in 2013. There is a building for the Working Women Program, where the former inmates are taught life and career skills and prepped for internships and jobs all over Queens. Sister Tesa spent years convincing the Con Edison plant to take on her women as employees, and in 2013, they had eight Hour Children women in their intern training program. There is the day-care center where women can leave their kids while they go to their new jobs. “When you're taking in mothers and children, you have no choice but to provide child care,” Sister Tesa told me with her typically intense certainty.

Sister Tesa's biggest achievement was the demolition of the old Trinitarian convent across the street from St. Rita's. In 2013, she secured $9.4 million in funding to buy the property from the diocese, demolish it, and then reconstruct it from scratch. In its place she built an apartment building with eighteen renovated apartments for former inmates who need permanent housing.

The rent will never rise above one-third of a woman's income and averages around $500 for a two-bedroom apartment. There is plenty of room for their kids. Each apartment was beautifully furnished before the women moved in, the handiwork of longtime Hour Children volunteer and interior designer Connie Steinberg, who scoured Home Goods stores up and down the East Coast to make each apartment unique for the woman who would live there. Ms. Steinberg put tea towels in the bathrooms, patterned rugs on the floors, and brand-new mirrors in the hallways.

Each apartment came with a pair of fuzzy slippers for each family member; on the weekends, the women can hear the soft shuffle of their neighbors moving between floors.

Right before the apartments were ready for move-in, Sister Tesa took the women on a tour of their new homes. One former inmate, Venita Pinckney, a mother of two kids, just sat down on her new couch and cried.

“Is this really my new house?” she asked.

The nun nodded, then added, “You deserve it.”

Ms. Pinckney, forty-two years old, spent a year and a half in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for a drug crime before walking out in 2010. Her son, Savion, a five-year-old with a broad smile and a penchant for LEGOs, was born in the prison nursery. Today, Ms. Pinckney is a housing coordinator for Hour Children.

She shyly told Ms. Steinberg that she had always wanted to live in an apartment decorated in all black and white. The interior designer delivered.

“I never thought I would live somewhere so beautiful. My life was sure chaotic before I met Sister Tesa,” Ms. Pinckney said as she cooked grits and bacon one Saturday morning. “When you out there on the street,” she said, “you don't think someone like Sister Tesa could love a total stranger. I'm glad she loves me.” Getting her new apartment helped Ms. Pinckney regain custody of her sixteen-year-old daughter, Janaye. “I got her back because I'm clean,” she said, “and I have this apartment.”

Sister Tesa has never met a bargain she doesn't love, and every other building she works in is filled with secondhand furniture. But it was important to her that, in this case, the women received nice new things.

“It says, ‘We value you.' It helps them move forward and start a whole new life. They will take care of these things and they will feel special,” Sister Tesa said as she gave me a tour of the new apartments.

Next door to the new apartment building is Theresa's Hair Salon, a full-service salon with three styling chairs that provides hair-cutting and -coloring, as well as makeup lessons. Rosa Peralta, a voluptuous and handsome woman in her forties with a bouffant of inky hair with crimson highlights, runs the salon. When Sister Tesa first met her at the Taconic Correctional Facility, Rosa was doing time for a drug sale and didn't speak a word of English. She has been working for the nun for fifteen years.

I asked Rosa what her life would have been like if she hadn't met Sister Tesa.

“I don't think about it,” she told me without pause. “She gave me another chance. She gave me another family. She changed my entire life.”

These women have changed Sister Tesa as much as she has changed them by inspiring her to have a grander vision for her own life.

“They look at their lives very honestly. They have a resiliency to admit their past and then create a vision for their future, and that is a lesson for us all,” she told me. “They don't dwell in the negative. They have a vision for where they want to go, and the small steps they need to take to get there. I think about that all the time.”

Sister Tesa operates with an enviable forward momentum. This brassy little nun will hustle for her women until the day she dies. We were saying good-bye one fall afternoon outside of St. Rita's when she looked across the street and lifted a finger to point at something over there. In between the hair salon and one of the thrift stores sat a two-story brick building with commercial space on the first floor and apartments on the second.

“We need to buy that,” she said with conviction, before she looked past me and had one of her side conversations with God. “Lord, we can put women in apartments on the second floor and they can work in the Laundromat. That is what I want. I want to run a Laundromat filled with former felons. Lord, if you are listening, I want to run a Laundromat before I die.”

9.

Jesus Treated Men and Women Equally

Women's status in the Church is the
single most important and radical issue of our time.

—Sister Maureen Fiedler

S
h
e was famished. Men, and even a few women, walked by Sister Maureen Fiedler in their well-pressed suits and polished loafers on their way to work, some taunting her by eating just a few inches in front of her face. The food—fruit, bagels, breakfast sandwiches—looked so tempting, but she refused to consume anything but water. Wearing a white robe with a regal purple sash, the colors of the early suffragists, Sister Maureen sat in protest with seven other women inside the Capitol rotunda in Springfield, Illinois, abstaining from food for the thirty-seven days in 1982 that the state legislature debated the Equal Rights Amendment.

“You're hungry for the first few days, but then your body adjusts,” she explained to me, more than thirty years after her five-week hunger strike in the last northern state to hold out on ratifying the amendment that would provide women with rights equal to men. “I began to understand what it means that prayer and fasting go together, because being hungry draws you to prayer in a different way. At some point you just stop concentrating on your own needs and start concentrating on something larger. So the idea of prayer comes more naturally to you,” she told me as I bit into a medium-rare burger over lunch at a greasy spoon called Plato's Diner, across the street from her office in College Park, Maryland. I nodded, feeling a small pang of guilt for never having a moment that inspired me to put my own needs aside for that kind of cause.

Sister Maureen's hope as she fasted in the rotunda for weeks on end was that the ERA would change things for all women, and that its passage could help influence the Catholic Church's antiquated rules against women being leaders.

She and her fellow protestors were mindful of their health, drinking plenty of water and meeting with a doctor to monitor their vitals.

“We were very careful not to kill ourselves,” Sister Maureen told me in her pragmatic way.

It was still dangerous stuff. One woman was briefly hospitalized, and even Sister Maureen was taken to the emergency room at one point to have an EKG. But on June 23 it became clear that they would not receive the 60 percent of the vote necessary for ratification. Sister Maureen sipped on grape juice for the first time in over a month. Spectators applauded their efforts, but the ERA was tabled across the country.

Maureen Fiedler was born in Lockport, New York, on October 31, 1942—Halloween.

“I won't even get into the number of jokes that has inspired over the years,” she told me. “To this day, I am spooking people.” Her parents were Catholic, but not the strict kind.

At around age eight or nine, Maureen was watching her mom iron clothes and wondered, “Is this my future?” She couldn't imagine anything more boring than a lifetime of household chores.

Role-playing Mass in her living room, Maureen was the priest and her younger brother, Mike, was the altar boy. It was a few years still until she realized being a priest wasn't a thing that was possible for her in real life.

Maureen's father was an early feminist who wouldn't have dared allow anyone to call him that. In the 1950s he encouraged his daughter to take the kinds of classes typically set aside for the boy children—physics, chemistry, biology, and trigonometry. When Maureen told her dad that she might want to be a nurse, he countered, “Why wouldn't you be a doctor?”

In high school she started thinking about becoming a nun, but Maureen wasn't particularly attracted to the nuns teaching at her school, the Sisters of St. Mary de Namur. In her sophomore year, her high school, St. Joseph's Academy, merged with De Sales High School, a boys' school. By her senior year, Maureen's grades were so good that she was the valedictorian. The principal, a priest, told her she couldn't give the valedictory address because she was a girl. She went home and talked to her mother about it. “Don't get into a fight with a priest,” her mother warned.

“This is wrong. I have earned this,” Maureen thought.

“I had to stand up to it,” she told me. And so the headstrong girl marched into the principal's office and told him what he was doing was unjust and that it would look absolutely terrible on the front page of the local newspaper. She planned to publicize the incident and tell the paper if he did not change his mind.

“I knew the power of publicity even then,” she said, smiling at me, her red dangly earrings waving back and forth in a silent cheer for her younger self.

She gave the valedictory speech.

“For me, that was a seminal moment in my life, when I actually experienced that kind of discrimination,” she told me.

The sisters at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, were a different story from the nuns in high school. They were inspiring intellectuals, and before long, Maureen felt a serious call to the sisterhood.

“I don't know how to describe it,” she said. “It came to me in prayer and I couldn't shake it, no matter how hard I tried.”

She was just nineteen years old when she moved into the convent, and her parents were livid. They didn't come to see her for a year after she'd left home.

“My mother didn't want me to do it at all. She wanted me to settle down and get married and have children, and I didn't see that in my future.”

She entered the novitiate just as Vatican II was commencing in 1962. Sister Maureen and her fellow novices hungrily consumed all of the documents the Vatican released. Access to news outside the novitiate was limited, but Sister Maureen couldn't help but learn about a Baptist preacher down South named Martin Luther King Jr., who was also fighting for social justice. The connection between what the Church was asking and what the civil rights movement was doing became very clear in her mind.

“I wanted to go to Selma. Of course, I was barely wet behind the veil, so I got a no when I asked,” Sister Maureen told me. The rules were still so strict that the young nun wasn't even permitted to attend a sympathy march for Selma in downtown Erie, just a mile from the convent.

Soon after, she moved to Pittsburgh and began to make friends with members of the local NAACP. When Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, Pittsburgh was a powder keg. The Hill District, then the city's largest ghetto, erupted in flames. At the time Sister Maureen was teaching social studies and religion at a predominantly white inner-city school, where racism thrived. She decided she could do some good by taking her privileged white students to tutor the black kids over in the Hill District. She still had the problem of having to sign out and be accounted for by her convent whenever she wasn't teaching.

“I quickly learned that signing out could be as vague as vague can be, so I just signed out for ‘town.' Most people thought I was shopping. I wasn't shopping.”

Sister Maureen recalls fondly the day one of her white students came to her with his arm slung around a young black student and asked permission to walk to town to buy the poorly shod younger boy shoes with his own money. It made her feel a very real sense of accomplishment in her work.

Her thirst for social justice grew stronger, and in the fall of 1970, Sister Maureen headed to Georgetown University to pursue her master's in political science. She was raised to be unfailingly patriotic, but at Georgetown she found herself on the side of the anti–Vietnam War activists. She went on to get her PhD with a dissertation asking why women were not elected political leaders in the same numbers as men, despite the second wave of American feminism.

While in Washington, she searched for a spiritual director. A friend at a new group called NETWORK suggested a Jesuit priest named William Callahan. He had launched a group called Priests for Equality, calling for the equality of women with men in all walks of life, including the priesthood. In 1976, Callahan co-founded (with Dolly Pomerleau) the Quixote Center, a social justice institution where, as he put it, “people could dream impossible dreams of justice and make them come true.” Sister Maureen would spend the next thirty years there.

Women's ordination in the Catholic Church is one of the often-overlooked feminist issues from the 1970s, perhaps because organizers never succeeded in accomplishing their goal. That most certainly wasn't due to lack of trying.

Accompanied by Callahan, who was scheduled to speak at the conference, and Pomerleau, Sister Maureen attended the first national Women's Ordination Conference in Detroit on Thanksgiving weekend of 1975. The conference was the brainchild of a Catholic feminist named Mary B. Lynch, who felt compelled, in the winter of 1974, to ask all of the people on her Christmas list whether they thought it was high time that Catholic women were allowed to become priests. Thirty-one women and one man responded with a resounding yes. Soon after, she set out to organize a conference that would work to build a case for women in the priesthood. She expected a small group of like-minded women to meet her in Detroit. Instead, more than two thousand Catholic women flooded into the city for the meeting.

Women priests seemed like a real possibility after Vatican II. In those heady early days of change and social activism, it truly seemed like anything could happen in the Church. Talking about it today, Sister Maureen can still quote with authority from the section of the Vatican's edict on the Church and the modern world. “Any type of social or cultural discrimination based on sex is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God's intent . . . it is deeply to be deplored that these basic personal rights are not yet being respected everywhere, as is the case with women who are denied the chance freely to choose a husband or a state of life.”

At the Michigan conference, speakers espoused the position that it was a moral imperative that women should be equals of men in the priesthood. Sister of Notre Dame Marie Augusta Neal stood up to proclaim, “God has no pronouns.” Sister of Mercy Elizabeth Carroll riffed on the many meanings of the phrase “the proper place of women in the Church,” and scripture scholars Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Fr. Carroll Stuhlmueller set out to prove that the Bible never explicitly says that women cannot be priests. The pièce de résistance came at the end of the conference, when an organizer asked for every woman who felt called to the priesthood to stand to be blessed. Hundreds of women stood tall. Sister Maureen didn't.

“I don't advocate for women priests because I want to be a priest,” she told me. “I don't have any desire to become a priest. But I want to be a catalyst to make it possible.”

Women becoming church leaders wasn't unattainable in other faith traditions at the time. Other religions had already embraced equality wholeheartedly. In 1972, the Jewish Reform movement ordained Sally J. Priesand as America's first female rabbi. In 1974, the “Philadelphia Eleven” caused a firestorm within the Episcopal Church when eleven female deacons presented themselves to three male bishops to be ordained as priests. In the Roman Catholic Church, women couldn't even be ordained as deacons, much less priests or bishops. Sister Maureen didn't accept that. To her, Jesus was, and is, an “equal-opportunity employer.” He loved everyone the same.

“It was probably male scribes that wrote most of the Gospels, since women back then couldn't read, but I do not think the women in those stories got a fair shake,” Sister­ Maureen says, citing the story of the Last Supper as proof. The Gospels are often interpreted as saying Jesus ordained all of the men who attended the Last Supper. “But we don't have a guest list for the upper room.” She went on: “Who
cooked
that dinner? I don't imagine it was the Apostles. There were undoubtedly women there, and I suspect that they were—like the men—in earshot when he said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.'”

Then there is preaching the resurrection. The first person whom Jesus encountered after he rose from the dead was Mary Magdalene, and it was she whom he commissioned to preach the resurrection. “Only then did she run off and get the boys,” Sister Maureen said.

“The problem is that those Gospels are written in a way that doesn't give women enough credit. I actually think that in the early Church—and by that, I mean the first century or two—women were close to being the equals of men. I think it is one of the suppressed realities in Church history.”

Some of those stories still exist, mostly about wealthy women. There was Olympias, a patroness of three of the bishops of Constantinople in the early fifth century. When she was widowed at age thirty, Bishop Nectarius ordained her as a deacon, in no small part because he wanted her large fortune for the Church. There are first-century frescoes that some scholars believe depict women giving out communion or being ordained.

Sister Maureen was exhilarated by the Detroit conference, afterward becoming a full-fledged member of the Women's Ordination Conference. She began a polling project to determine how other Catholics felt about the woman-priest issue. She coauthored, with Dolly Pomerleau, the publication of the results: a report entitled “Are Catholics Ready?”

“As feminists, we are aware of the Church officials' claims that the Catholic people are not ready for full equality. We realize, however, that these claims are based on a combination of old and scanty data, mixed with speculation. But we also recognize that the claims raise important questions that must be answered with hard, new, sociological data if public discussion of the issues is to be informed,” she wrote in the introduction to the study. The poll concluded that Vatican II Catholics—the more progressive members of the Church, the ones who wanted their Mass in English—were receptive to the idea of women priests.

Rome wasn't having it. In January 1977, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith delivered a decisive no on the question of women priests. Their calculus was that because Jesus Christ was a man, women couldn't be ordained in his image. “The Catholic Church has never felt that priestly or episcopal ordination can be validly conferred on women . . . by calling only men to the priestly order and ministry in its true sense, the Church intends to remain faithful to the type of ordained ministry willed by the Lord Jesus Christ and carefully maintained by the Apostles,” they wrote.