If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  The women come to Sister Joan completely broken, having been abused and tortured physically and mentally. She told me she doesn’t push the women to talk to her about what they have gone through. She doesn’t need to ask questions to learn about their scars.

  “To say a person has been trafficked is to say they have had their freedom taken away from them through force, fraud, or coercion,” Sister Joan said. “They are treated like a commodity, not a person, and their humanity is stripped away from them. This is done in insidious ways: abusive behavior, rapes, starvation, the withholding of food, and the forced use of drugs. Sometimes they will be forced to have sex with up to twenty people in a day. That is like a chain around their brain,” she says. “The trafficker finds something to hold them. They tell them that their family or their child will be harmed or killed.”

  The former slaves barely know how to live and behave as free individuals once they are finally out of their captors’ grip.

  It takes time before they begin to feel safe and move freely as themselves. Safety is the number-one priority at the house, which has one of the best security systems money can buy. The women are instructed to never answer the doors themselves.

  The very first woman who walked through the doors of Sister Joan’s safe house, a victim of labor trafficking, burst into tears when she saw her very own bed, where she could sleep without worrying that someone would abuse her in the middle of the night.

  “Oh my God, this is beautiful,” she said, over and over again.

  It is beautiful. Sister Joan and her staff were meticulous in making sure that the safe house felt like a home. Every woman has her own bed, her own dresser, her own small night table.

  “Setting the house up was one of the fun things we got to do,” Sister Joan said with a lilt of delight in her voice. “We had the entire staff hanging curtains, washing windows, and making sure everything was homey and well done.” Most of the furniture was donated secondhand, but Sister Joan made sure the beds were brand-new. It was important to her that the women have new beds. LifeWay even created a registry with Target to outfit the home, providing the women with dishes, knives, forks, a toaster, a fridge, even a television. To protect the safe house’s location, they had all of the gifts delivered to LifeWay’s Forest Hills office. The nuns schlepped everything out to the safe house themselves.

  One of the former slaves told Sister Joan that living in the house was like being able to live with her mother all over again. Another young woman was thrown her very first birthday party at the house.

  “She had never had a birthday party. You should have seen her face. We had so many candles on the cake, we almost burned the house down. Everyone’s face was lit up by all those candles,” Sister Joan remembered.

  During the day, the women in the safe house work on rebuilding basic life skills, the kind most people take for granted. Many haven’t sat at a table to eat in years. In their other lives, they had been forced to sit in corners and beg for food scraps.

  “They have been treated like animals,” Sister Joan told me, disgusted more by the idea every time we speak about it.

  “They were never allowed to come to the table. When they get to us, they are amazed that they are allowed to sit at a table and have real conversations. That is one of the healing parts of the community, the fact that we are all one group, eating together.”

  Many of them don’t speak English at first, so the LifeWay staff teaches them ESL. In the house, English is spoken almost all of the time.

  “The main thing in the end is that the women want to be able to work and be independent, and all we do is work to help them achieve that goal,” Sister Joan said. “What about education? What is the level of education they need?” They study for their GEDs. One woman recently trained to be a nurse’s aide. If they don’t have their immigration status, LifeWay works with them and finds a lawyer to assist them. And finally, they try to find a way to prosecute the traffickers who sold them in the first place.

  “All of those things are huge; nothing is small,” Sister Joan says. “You put the trafficked person in the middle and all the spokes coming out are all the services needed to bring that person back to who they were, to create safety and trust and let them know how precious they are as a human person. All of that is necessary.”

  Most important, just being around people who don’t treat them like property makes them believe they have value again.

  There is a lot of darkness in Sister Joan’s days. The very idea of human slavery once turned her stomach; now she lives it and breathes it. Instead of wanting to turn away, she told me she wishes she could spend even more time with the women and less time focusing on the administrative tasks that keep the roof over their heads. The key to her stamina is knowing how to unwind.

  “I enjoy reading novels,” she said. “I love to do my gardening. I exercise every day. For me, the exercise is the key to burning off any negative energy. I notice, when I don’t do it, I am crabbier and more tired.” The five other Sisters of Halifax with whom she lives help to bolster her spirits. Together they form a family-like unit. “I could never do this kind of work if I didn’t have the kind of support that I get from them,” Sister Joan says. Each morning they pray together in community. They pray for one another and they pray for the women that Sister Joan protects.

  Taking time out for prayer and contemplation is another thing that keeps Sister Joan sane, and the way she enters into a time of prayer makes sense even to someone who isn’t at all religious. Prayer, for her, is a time outside the everyday droning of distraction from e-mailing, texting, and decision-making. It is a time of contemplation and silence in a world gone crazy.

  She lamented to me that in our modern lives, most people, herself included, have no time to be silent.

  “We have iPhones and iPads and i-everything. We are always connected these days. We have no space for quiet unless we carve it out,” she said, telling me that she sets aside a special time each day, typically in the morning, for prayer.

  Sister Joan changes up how she prays from one day to the next. It can be a meditation on a particular issue or person or it can be less specific, just holding that person or issue in her thoughts. Sister Joan compares a lot of what she does to the Buddhist style of meditation. “It isn’t even really thinking about something. It is more holding it and being contemplative. It goes beyond thinking. When we are thinking, we use our minds. We are trying to control things. We just have to let ourselves contemplate, be still, and let go. It is difficult, but that is God’s gift to us. It is like eating and breathing. If I don’t set aside time for prayer, I can’t live.”

  Sister Joan became a nun late, relative to the rest of the women I worked with for this book. She never felt the early tug of a calling that most nuns will tell you they experienced in childhood or their early teens.

  “I never wanted to be a sister,” she says. “When you are a Catholic girl growing up, people always ask you if you want to be a nun. I said no. I always liked a guy too much or liked something else too much.” But by joining later in life, she was able to bring rich experiences to a life now devoted completely to God.

  One of six kids, with a mom who stayed at home and a dad who worked various jobs as an accountant, never making much money, Joan lived a simple childhood in England. Looking for a new adventure, Joan moved to Bermuda in her late twenties and soon found work in the island’s booming hospitality industry, where she started out as a front-desk clerk and quickly moved up the ranks. She first encountered the poor while working in one of the luxury resorts on the upmarket island. As the general manager’s assistant, she ran the personnel department for the hotel, where she met the gardening staff, composed mostly of immigrants from the Azores, as well as the men and women who worked in the kitchens.

  “They were so humble and beautiful. I began working with the poorer guys who did the gardens and the people who worked i
n the kitchens and the back areas, all the parts the [guests] never see, and I got the feeling that these people needed a voice,” Sister Joan told me. “I began to feel the draw of religious life mainly because I wanted to work with the poor.” She spent less and less time around the island’s elite and more and more time with the Sisters of Charity of Halifax, whose focus was on education and caring for the poor. At one point, while living in Bermuda, Joan juggled three different boyfriends, one of whom she knew wanted to marry her.

  “I just knew it wasn’t enough,” she said, in hindsight, of the possibility of getting married. “I know that is an awful thing to say about another human being, but it is true. He just wasn’t enough, and I knew that I was meant to do something different.”

  When she finally joined the Sisters of Charity of Halifax, they gave her the option to choose a community in Nova Scotia, Canada, or in New York City. Sister Joan chose New York because she thought it would be exciting, a new adventure like Bermuda had been, and over the next several years she attended St. John’s University before receiving a master’s in pastoral studies at Loyola University of Chicago. She ultimately returned to New York City to settle into parish life.

  “When people hear about human trafficking, they think it is overseas and faraway. Really, it is very prevalent in the United States,” Sister Joan said. But the five boroughs of New York are one of the busiest hubs for trafficking in the United States due to their transient nature, plethora of airports and trains, and a culture where people don’t ask too many questions.

  Between May and December of 2010, LifeWay Network and Hofstra University’s Department of Sociology conducted a survey of service providers and law enforcement agencies to try to determine the number of people trafficked within New York City and to shed light on the need for and availability of social services. Based on data from that survey, they estimated that private service providers in the New York City metropolitan area interacted with at least 11,268 survivors between 2000 and 2010, considerably exceeding previously released official estimates.

  Sister Joan worries about money. She operates LifeWay on an annual budget of just $200,000 but is constantly thinking of ways to raise more cash. She has dreams of opening a second safe house and ultimately finding permanent housing and support for survivors. The Hofstra survey found that more survivors would benefit from long-term or transitional housing than they would from emergency housing. But despite this need, they found that safe and affordable long-term housing is virtually nonexistent, with only 3.9 percent of victims who need housing actually receiving it.

  In 2012, President Barack Obama made an impassioned commitment to crack down on human trafficking in a campaign speech at the Clinton Global Initiative.

  “It is barbaric and it is evil and it has no place in a civilized world,” the president told the audience members, among them Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, Rwandan president Paul Kagame, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers in Midtown Manhattan. “Nations must speak with one voice: our people and our children are not for sale,” he said. That kicked off efforts from the White House to raise awareness of trafficking and to find ways to fund initiatives that could make strides in combatting it. A year later, Sister Joan learned that LifeWay was named a finalist in a competition for $1.8 million in public and private funding that would allow them to open a second safe house for younger women, aged eighteen to twenty-four, and implement new social services to provide them with sustainable aid.

  The finalists were told they would participate in a three-day “Innovation Workshop” in Washington, DC, in January 2014, where they would be paired with expert coaches from social enterprise development, technology start-ups, medical and mental health experts, and communications and public relations professionals to further refine their ideas. The winner would be selected later in the year.

  “That money would change everything for us,” Sister Joan told me breathlessly. “We would be able to focus on more of New York’s young people who have been trafficked. We could focus on economic empowerment and bringing them more social services.”

  One Bible passage in particular stands out for Sister Joan when she tries to put her life’s work in perspective. It is a passage from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus declares what God has asked him to do.

  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

  because he has anointed me

  to bring good news to the poor.

  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

  and recovery of sight to the blind,

  to let the oppressed go free,

  to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

  “That’s the one that speaks to the call that I have for the work that I do,” she said. “The poor don’t always have to be the economically poor. The poor can be those who have suffered tremendous injustice. God’s reign is about bringing peace and justice to people. I just work towards providing that.”

  6.

  Keeping an Eye on Corporate America

  If you own shares in a corporation,

  you have a voice, and you need to convince these

  corporations to work for the common good.

  —Sister Nora Nash

  The last thing anyone expected to go down at the Goldman Sachs 2011 shareholder meeting (typically one of the most staged and staid events on the banking calendar) was for a religious sister to confront CEO Lloyd Blankfein over the excessive amount their executives were being paid that year in the midst of one of the worst recessions to hit the United States in decades.

  “Execs have amassed untold wealth while a billion people suffer from poverty and food insecurity,” Sister Nora Nash, a small but sturdy woman with an Irish accent, said to the imposing CEO and the room of three hundred Goldman employees and shareholders in a pointedly humble auditorium in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Goldman’s glittering forty-two-story office tower.

  Sister Nora was attending the meeting as a shareholder, there to present a resolution to ask the bank’s board to evaluate why they paid their top dogs so much money while the rest of the economy floundered. The year prior, the firm’s five top executives were paid a total of $69.5 million, impressive in a lackluster year for the company’s stock. Yes, 2010 was a good year to be an executive in America. It was a difficult year to be an average American. By the end of the year, median pay for chief executives in the country was rising annually at a rate of 27 percent, while household income was falling by approximately 1 percent.

  Addressing Mr. Blankfein, Sister Nora said, “You make more in an hour than most people make in a year.” Discussing it later, she told me that she believed Goldman’s compensation for its top staff was egregious.

  Sister Nora knew her resolution had no chance of passing, but she wanted her voice heard that day. She is a pro at filing shareholder resolutions, and even though the majority of them don’t pass, what matters to her is that corporations know she and other socially responsible shareholders are out there—watching them.

  “I wanted to speak to the issue of pay disparity between executive compensation and the rest of society,” Sister Nora said, explaining why she went after Goldman. “We have millions of people living on the margins of society, and Goldman Sachs is affecting the equity of distribution. Goldman Sachs is at the top of the pyramid, the heart of the financial world, a place where executives have amassed tremendous amounts of wealth, as people at the base of the pyramid are suffering. I asked Goldman Sachs to think about economic justice. I asked them to be a leader.”

  The bank did in fact reject the shareholder proposal. Their excuse was that the preparation of such a report would be “a distraction” that “would not provide shareholders with any meaningful information.” They claimed investors already had all the in
formation they needed about executive pay. A month later, Sister Barbara Aires, the coordinator of corporate responsibility for the Sisters of Charity and a friend and colleague of Sister Nora’s, prodded Mr. Blankfein on progress the firm was making on disclosure to their shareholders about their pay packages.

  Mr. Blankfein playfully replied that the tone of her questions made her sound like a member of Goldman’s management.

  Sister Barbara quickly parleyed back, “Do you want to hire me?”

  Mr. Blankfein calmly, and with a bit of wit, replied, “I don’t think we can outbid your current boss.” But what he could do was give them a meeting. And so, months later, Sister Nora and several other shareholder activists were invited across the river to that gleaming tower to meet with Goldman board members about executive compensation. Sister Nora considered that a win.

  Nora Nash’s job title with the Sisters of St. Francis is Director of Corporate Social Responsibility, which means that she spends her days wading through quarterly reports and earnings statements, participating in dialogues, filing shareholder resolutions, and attending meetings with corporate giants. And as she tells it, this position is her calling from God. She is unwavering in her conviction that corporations have an obligation to act morally. Goldman is just one of dozens of companies that Sister Nora has targeted to up their ante on corporate responsibility. With her at the helm, her congregation has become a force within the world of shareholder activism. She and her assistant director, Tom McCaney, have challenged the grocery store chain Kroger over the rights of farm workers, Hershey’s chocolate company over child labor, McDonald’s over childhood obesity, Walmart on raising their minimum wage, and Wells Fargo over predatory lending practices. Most recently, they have gotten into the debate over fracking. The list goes on.

  Sister Nora hates drawing attention to herself and rarely grants interviews. I had to e-mail and call about a dozen times before I finally heard back from her.