If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  In Milwaukee, Sister Simone met Billy, his wife, and their two boys at the dining room of St. Benedict the Moor Church. Billy’s work hours had been slashed in the recession. Being the man of the family, he wanted to step up and take responsibility, but without help from food stamps and the local church, he and his wife had no way to put food on their table. Sister Simone held him in her prayers.

  In Toledo they met ten-year-old twins Matt and Mark, who had gotten into trouble at school for fighting. A nun named Sister Virginia and the staff at the Padua Center there, took them into their program when they were suspended to try to figure out what was going on with these little boys who were under so much stress. They wanted to find a solution to the problem before things got even worse. During a home visit, Sister Virginia discovered that these ten-year-olds were trying to care for their bedridden mother with multiple sclerosis and diabetes all on their own. They were her only caregivers. The nuns got the boys’ mother medical help and worked to give the twins a sense of stability and childhood. Sister Simone prayed with them.

  In Cincinnati, she met Jini Kai, who had arrived straight from her sister Margaret Kistler’s memorial service two hours earlier. When Margaret lost her job, she also lost her health insurance. Their father had been diagnosed with colon cancer in his forties; she knew it was likely hereditary but couldn’t afford tests and treatment out of pocket. Living without preventative treatment for the disease was the equivalent of a death sentence for Margaret.

  “Even as she felt herself growing sicker and sicker,” Jini told Sister Simone, referring to Margaret, “she kept her worries to herself. She knew she was in no position to pay for the care she knew she needed.

  “When she could no longer walk far enough to answer her front door, a friend scooped her up and they headed for the ER. There her stage-four colon cancer was diagnosed, having already spread to her lungs and liver. It was a diagnosis too late.”

  Sister Simone listened to Jini’s story. She hugged her. She now carries a picture of Margaret tucked away in the Bible she takes with her on the road.

  Just a few days into the tour, the bus erupted into cheers and tears of joy as the nuns were gathered around the bus’s television and learned that the Affordable Care Act was upheld by the Supreme Court.

  “My immediate reaction was elation mixed with relief and a sense that riding beside me were the hundreds of people I had met during our bus journey—people who, like me, would be directly impacted by this historic decision,” Sister Simone told me.

  Sister Simone has always been political.

  In the second grade, when a proposition threatened funding for Catholic schools in her Southern California hometown, she organized her fellow neighborhood children to demonstrate. Her father, an aeronautical engineer for the Douglas Aircraft Company with a fondness for gadgetry, bought one of the first televisions in the neighborhood, which allowed Simone and her sister to watch political conventions and the rise of Dr. Martin Luther King in the living room of their ranch-style house.

  “Dr. King was our hero. We just couldn’t understand why kids would have to have guards to go to school,” she told me. “That made civil rights feel real to me.”

  Like many Catholic kids in the 1950s and ’60s, Simone dreamed of being a missionary, traveling to exotic lands and serving the poor.

  “In my more noble thoughts, I imagined I would be a doctor. I liked the idea of caring for people,” she told me with a laugh. “I don’t think I thought it through very well, though.” She felt changed after she made her First Communion in second grade. It was a feeling of freedom that never really left her.

  Becoming a nun was simply the sensible solution for Simone, and she describes her journey to the sisterhood as organic rather than dramatic. It was while organizing a sit-in at the Board of Education at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles that she decided it would be her calling.

  “Faith was about justice for me. I was thinking that I do this kind of work because of my faith, but no one ever talked about that. I grew up in California, for heaven’s sake. Nobody ever talked about faith there. I wanted my life to be about both, justice and faith. From then on, I couldn’t imagine being anything but a Sister of Social Service,” she said. The Sisters of Social Service are one of the most progressive communities of vowed women out there. They are a cadre of badass women, starting with their founder, Sister Margaret Slachta, who would later go on to become the first female parliamentarian in Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century. The first three Social Service sisters in America lived a bohemian life in a small house on West Second Street in Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. They eschewed the traditional long black veils and convent living well before the changes of Vatican II, in favor of simple gray dresses and living among the poor. Like Sister Simone, they were seen daily on the streets visiting families and finding food and clothing for the very poor. Well known among the order is the story of Sister Sára Salkaházi, who ran a safe house for Jews during World War II. On December 27, 1944, members of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross movement arrested Sister Sára and the Jewish women sheltered there, whom she refused to abandon. She was taken to the banks of the Danube, where the group of them were all stripped and shot.

  After finishing her bachelor’s degree, Sister Simone began her first year of work as a social worker on the glittery streets of Beverly Hills, working with drug-addicted teenagers and domestic workers. She received her JD at the University of California at Davis before founding and serving as the lead attorney for the Community Law Center in Oakland, California, which charged on a sliding scale based on a client’s income. Afterward, she served as general director of the Sisters of Social Service and then as executive director of JERICHO, a California advocacy and education organization that served those living at the economic margins.

  In 2004, right in the middle of George W. Bush’s presidency, she accepted a position as executive director of NETWORK, the Catholic social justice lobbying group in Washington, DC. She tried for four years to get a meeting­ with that president’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, but without any success. Founded on December 17, 1971, NETWORK was the brainchild of forty-seven Catholic sisters across the country­ who came together to lobby for federal policies and legis­lation promoting­ economic justice. In April 1972, they opened a two-person­ office that became the epicenter for Washington-­area Catholic peace and justice activism. Their justice agenda ranged from global hunger to nuclear weapons­ and women’s rights, and their legislative seminars drew activists and politicians from around the globe, including such prominent members of Congress as Ted Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Walter Mondale, and Joe Biden.

  In the spring of 2012, the organization had just celebrated its fortieth anniversary. That is when, as Sister Simone described it, the Holy Spirit began to make some mischief with them. Four days later they were named in an official Vatican document as a “suspect organization” that was a bad influence on American nuns.

  “We’re only a nine-person staff and we made the Vatican nervous. Holy moly!” she said with a laugh when we talked about it later that year. The Holy See’s hand slap was due to Sister Simone’s and NETWORK’s support of President Barack Obama’s health care legislation. The Catholic sisters had split from the thinking of the American Catholic bishops who opposed the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that it would allow federal funding for abortions. The nuns believed a different analysis that said the bill would not provide federal funding for abortions.

  The nuns refused to let this difference of opinion jettison a plan that could have such a huge impact on the poor. They knew President Obama’s health-care overhaul would provide coverage to hundreds of thousands of Americans who’d previously been unable to afford it. Sister Simone wrote the famous “nuns’ letter,” signed by leaders of Catholic Sisters who supported the Affordable Care Act.

  We have witnessed firsthand the impact of ou
r national health care crisis, particularly its impact on women, children and people who are poor. We see the toll on families who have delayed seeking care due to a lack of health insurance coverage or lack of funds with which to pay high deductibles and co-pays. We have counseled and prayed with men, women and children who have been denied health care coverage by insurance companies. We have witnessed early and avoidable deaths because of delayed medical treatment. . . . While it is an imperfect measure, it is a crucial next step in realizing health care for all. It will invest in preventative care. It will bar insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. It will make crucial investments in community health centers that largely serve poor women and children. And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments—$250 million—in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance and we as Catholics are all for it.

  “The girls played the boys, and for once the girls won, and the boys were pissed,” Sister Simone told me, clapping her hands together with great joy in her voice. “It’s all politics.”

  The Vatican’s censure made her even feistier. Unfortunately, the sisters didn’t have enough cash on hand to make a big, expensive splash.

  When Sister Simone has a problem to solve, she takes to prayer. She prays and meditates for an hour each morning, facilitated by an egg timer and a prayer cushion. When she is home, she gets to do it in a designated corner of her apartment. On the wall above the little nook are things that make her happy, mostly gifts: an eye of God from the Dominican sisters in Iraq, a photograph of her fellow sisters, and an icon of Saint Peter, her patron saint. She prayed that spring with all of NETWORK and gathered a group of big thinkers in Washington to a summit where they discussed how they could get their name out there within the constraints of their limited budget.

  “It’s a sign of the Holy Spirit that no one remembers who said it first, especially in a city where everyone loves to claim credit, but someone said ‘road trip,’ and by the end of the meeting it was clear that we would go on the road in a wrapped bus. I had no idea what a wrapped bus was, but I knew it would lift up our mission of two years pushing against the Paul Ryan budget,” Sister Simone said. A map of the places they would visit had already formed in her mind.

  I joined the nun bus in June, in the town adjacent to the one I grew up in, five minutes from my Catholic high school, Villa Joseph Marie. It was roomier than I expected and had wireless Internet, a flat-screen television, three bunks on each side, and comfortable seats. But it was still a bus—no more than 100 square feet of space for up to twelve people at a time.

  A digital thermometer at the suburban shopping center in Newtown, Pennsylvania, hit 103 degrees on a Friday afternoon as the nuns’ sky-blue vehicle pulled into the parking lot. The word nuns was writ large in red, immediately informing the casual passerby that this was holier than your average bus. Sweat pooled on the upper lips and brows of the nearly one hundred supporters gathered on the black asphalt. When the nuns emerged, they were cool as cucumbers. The bus had excellent air conditioning.

  They were cool, generally, the group of Catholic sisters that Sister Simone had assembled.

  There was Mary Ellen Lacy, a Daughter of Charity who previously provided legal services to residents along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. She now works as an immigration attorney, but at various points in her life she has been a lobbyist and a nurse.

  Diane Donaghue was a spry eighty-one-year-old. When I asked her if she thought she would still be making bus trips at age eighty-two, she didn’t hesitate. “Why wouldn’t I?” she said, like it was an incredibly silly question to even ask.

  The reporter in Iowa was right about the way the crowd in that parking lot went wild. There was a kind of rock-star quality to it all, one that appealed to middle-aged women in Dockers and sensible shoes.

  The Nuns on the Bus, they feed the poor, feed the poor, feed the poor; the Nuns on the Bus, they feed the poor through the United States. The group sang along to a bastardized version of “The Wheels on the Bus,” adding two extra syllables to “through” so that it sounded like “thooo-ooo-roo.”

  The Nuns on the Bus say reject Ryan’s budget, reject Ryan’s budget, reject Ryan’s budget; the Nuns on the Bus say reject Ryan’s budget through the United States.

  The Nuns on the Bus say we are mad, we are mad, we are mad; the Nuns on the Bus say we are mad . . .

  It went on.

  Days later, in Virginia, Sister Simone and her fellow nuns attempted to get up close and personal with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at his local headquarters in an office park in a suburb of Richmond.

  Just reaching Cantor’s office was a struggle for the bus. Destructive weather, including tornadoes, wreaked havoc on the Virginia countryside that weekend. Roads were flooded and trees were ripped from the ground by their roots. I considered bailing on the trip.

  “Be careful,” Sister Simone e-mailed me. “But I hope we get to see you.”

  She and the sisters were beyond determined to reach just the parking lot of the congressman’s office, never mind getting inside.

  “We said this was a stop we had to make because of how important Mr. Cantor is right now and how he is missing so much of the story that is happening in America,” Sister Simone told me. Her fellow nuns, whom she referred to without irony as her “peeps” and members of her “posse,” nodded aggressively in agreement. “We want to tell these stories on Capitol Hill. So often these folks on Capitol Hill are disconnected, and they want us to believe people are lazy and dependent. They are not lazy and they are not dependent.”

  As with the entire trip, that meeting was mostly about being as present as possible.

  “I didn’t expect him to come, but we needed to come. We needed to be here to say I had seen his office and I’ve seen his people,” Sister Simone told me outside. “We had to come to Cantor’s office because Cantor is a key player, second in command in the House, and he has scuttled a couple of key steps forward for our nation that Speaker Boehner thought were a good idea that then got scuttled for other political reasons. We’ve got to wake him up. This is not a game.”

  Later that afternoon we visited the Shalom Farm, a cooperative community that grows food to feed the needy. Sister Richelle Friedman, who had grown up on a farm in Iowa, took a turn driving the tractor.

  The final stop on the tour was Washington, DC, at a stage erected in front of the graceful United Methodist Building, catty-corner to the US Capitol. As the nuns arrived, they ran—to the theme from Rocky, no less—through a scrum of fans, shaking hands and giving hugs. Security guards in dark black sunglasses looked important as they kept the crowd at bay.

  “The Nuns on the Bus tour comes to a close today, but by no means are we finished standing up to the misguided politicians who will harm people on the margins of society,” Sister Simone said to deafening applause in front of a large American flag. “We will not be silent.”

  “Get your T-shirts, Nuns on the Bus T-shirts here,” yelled a pimply-faced kid barely into his twenties, a devotee of Nuns on the Bus and a true capitalist who printed his own i’m with the nuns T-shirts and sold them for $15 apiece. The shirts, like concert tees, had a list of the cities the nuns visited: Des Moines, Janesville, Milwaukee, Toledo, and Cincinnati. They sold out in an hour.

  Sister Simone was energized onstage, pumping her fist in the air.

  She was exhausted by the time she left it.

  “What next?” I asked.

  “I want to do my laundry and take a shower,” she said with a smile.

  After all that, Paul Ryan finally agreed to a meeting. He asked that no media be informed or allowed to attend the one-on-one engagement at his Capitol Hill office.

  “He spent most of his t
ime trying to impress me,” Sister Simone said when we discussed it later. During their brief time together, he boasted to the nun, trying to wow her with his asceticism, saying he often slept overnight on a cot in his office.

  “Is that good for you, or for your family?” Sister Simone responded. It’s just not possible to out-Catholic a nun. He quickly changed the subject.

  “I was looking to build a connection, so I proposed that we both say we care passionately about the future of our nation, and he just said, ‘Yeah,’” she told me. “He just really lives inside his own head. It is so sad.” She joined the congressman on a walk across the Capitol’s grassy lawn to his next meeting. Their good-bye was stilted and cordial.

  When she got back to her simple brick office on E Street, she penned Ryan a note saying that she hoped after the election the two of them could sit down and try to find some common ground. She waited for a response.

  From there, the Nuns on the Bus movement took on a life of its own. In September, more than two hundred nuns gathered at the Whitehall Ferry Terminal in Lower Manhattan for a protest called “Nuns on the Ferry.”

  “We were told that a bus is no big deal in New York,” said Sister Mary Ellen. “So somebody said, ‘Could they get on a ferry?’” They certainly could.

  “The idea for the ferry was that the Paul Ryan budget was in Never Never Land, so we should ride a ferry,” Sister Simone said, underscoring how “ferry” sounds like “fairy.” “It makes sense.”

  To get to the ferry terminal, Sister Simone had taken the A train into Manhattan from the Daughters of Charity­ House in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn­. “It was Nuns on the Subway,” she cracked when I met up with her at the terminal.

  “We need to do Nuns on the Train,” Sister Mary Ellen interjected.

  “We should go interfaith,” Sister Simone countered. “Rabbis on Roller Skates.” They both buckled into laughter. Nun jokes.