If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

“I’m horrible at getting to all my e-mails,” she explained by way of apology. I took that to mean I should e-mail all the more.

  I wrote to her another time, asking for a meeting, and she was hesitant.

  “I don’t foresee myself as the subject in a book,” she wrote. I just kept trying. I became obsessed with meeting this woman who had accomplished what so many of the 99 Percent in the Occupy Wall Street movement that year had been unable to do—get the big banks to answer back. I begged my friend Kevin Roose, a writer for the New York Times who had profiled Sister Nora, to give me her phone number.

  When I finally got her on the phone, I pushed the subject of how she could possibly shy away from attention after earning so much of it for standing up to Mr. Blankfein at that shareholder meeting. Surely someone who hated the spotlight so much wouldn’t have invited that exchange.

  “I’m not a person to go in front of cameras. I don’t like it. In most cases, I avoid it,” she said simply. “In that case, it had to be done.”

  She finally relented and agreed to meet, telling me I was persistent. She liked that. After we spoke, she warmed to me, at least enough to invite me to come visit her and interview her in person. Just a few days before Christmas, I made the three-hour trip from New York to visit the Our Lady of Angels Convent, an imposing and beautiful granite structure adjacent to the campus of Neumann University in Aston, Pennsylvania. Sister Nora has perfectly coiffed hair that fades from an almond color to a pale vanilla. She was dressed down that day in a blue cable-knit sweater and seemed delighted to see me, a stark contrast to her terse emails.

  “You are fantastic, Jo,” she said. I nearly cried from the praise. Nuns know how to give a compliment that warms your soul. She quickly pressed a gift into my hand, a small wooden Tau Cross, Christ’s cross in the shape of the Greek letter for T, the adopted crest of St. Francis of Assisi; wrapped me in a hug; and insisted on giving me a tour of the grounds and the chapel, simply and elegantly decorated for Christmas.

  “You should take a picture with Saint Francis,” she urged me as we walked by a life-size bronze statue of her order’s namesake, the twelfth-century patron saint of animals, opponent of greed, and fierce and fearless advocate for the poor. “Everyone wants to take a picture with Saint Francis.” I did in fact make sure to snap a selfie with the saint before I left for the day.

  “This is a wonderful place for contemplation. It was magical when I was a novice here,” Sister Nora remarked as we walked through the immaculate hallways and manicured gardens, remembering her early days at the convent more than half a century earlier. The grounds were like a college dormitory back then, she said, with thirty eager young women coming in each year. In 2013, only one new sister joined the congregation. Most of the sisters I met that day were well into their sixth decade. They walked slowly but with intention.

  “We have one hundred sisters in a retirement home across the street,” Sister Nora said. Many of those women need nursing care. Part of Sister Nora’s job is to make sure that the nuns’ retirement funds are invested in companies that will not only produce a profit but will work toward the common good of the planet. It isn’t exactly how she thought her life would end up.

  As a little girl growing up in County Limerick, Ireland, Nora dreamed about becoming a missionary in Africa. She would endlessly thumb through the two missionary magazines in her house, The Far East and Africa, until they were dog-eared and tattered. She even went door-to-door selling them in elementary school to raise money for the kids on the exotic continent so far away.

  “Even as a kid, I was into social justice,” she told me. “I didn’t know what we were raising money for, except that it would help the tiniest kids in Africa go to school. All I ever really wanted was to act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with God.” And so her goal was to be a Franciscan missionary in Africa. Her mother put her foot down.

  “It was hard to come home from Africa in those days, and my mom just wouldn’t accept that,” Sister Nora told me with a faraway look in her eye.

  One kindly neighbor was a Catholic sister. On days when Nora didn’t have to go to school, she would tag along with her to the hospital and volunteer with the patients.

  “I liked the work she was doing, and that gave me some of my inspiration,” Sister Nora said. There was a Franciscan retreat house not too far away, and when she visited there right after high school, Nora felt the call to become a sister full-time. She soon traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to live in the Franciscan convent outside of Philadelphia.

  “I haven’t looked back since the Lord called me. We all have our up and down moments, but I have been happy in my life,” she told me.

  Her first ministry was teaching, and Sister Nora taught every grade all over the Eastern seaboard. She had a ball in Massachusetts, where snowstorms kept the kids home from school for such long stretches that they would actually beg to come in to see their friends and work on the school newspaper. One school in New Jersey was rundown and neglected enough that her provincial superior told her she couldn’t possibly make it any worse when she took it over. Two priests had already been assigned to the parish and failed. In just a few years, Sister Nora, with the help of the PTA and two monsignori, made it one of the biggest success stories in the diocese.

  Needing a breather, she took a sabbatical and enrolled in postgraduate classes for a year at Notre Dame, which was where she took her first business ethics class, a whisper from the universe that her life was about to turn in an entirely new direction. In the beginning of 2001, her congregation asked her to consider a job she never expected to take on—corporate responsibility ministry. They needed someone to ensure that the order’s sizable portfolio and retirement investments were responsibly invested in companies that shared their values. Additionally, she would allocate social justice grants and community development loans.

  “It was hard to get someone who was really interested in it,” Sister Nora said. “But I was committed to working for justice and working for the common good. I liked the idea of working with corporations, because if we are to share in the benefits of the corporation, then we must actively engage in environmental, social, and governance issues. Corporate responsibility is on our shoulders also.”

  When a nun takes up the call to put herself into God’s service, she doesn’t question where that service takes her.

  “You just do it. You fulfill the call. God’s hand gets involved and then it can move in a different direction,” she told me. For the sisters, corporate responsibility involved monitoring their investment portfolio from a moral and ethical perspective and then exercising their rights and responsibilities as shareholders to hold corporations accountable for their policies and practices. “For us, that means a deep consciousness of human rights, environmental rights, and the increasing consciousness of sustainability,” she said.

  When they took a close look at their investment portfolio, some sisters were troubled by what they saw as irresponsible investing. Religious communities had amassed sizable pension funds by the 1980s, and they were making some smart investments. They really had no choice. Even then, it was clear that their populations were aging faster than they were adding to their ranks and they would need funds to care for the sisters as they grew older.

  The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia partnered with ICCR, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility—an umbrella group of religious organizations that pool their funds to have more clout with the companies they target for responsible management.

  “We’re not some fly-by-night group filing a resolution,” Sister Nora said. “ICCR is a highly respected organization whose members manage major pension funds and billion-dollar asset management organizations. I do think that the fact that we come at the cases from a place of faith shows that we are presenting the truth and aiming for good in society.” She knows when to use faith to her advantage. She is quick with a good Bible jok
e, for example. Some of her favorites include:

  Q: Who was the greatest female financier?

  A: Pharaoh’s daughter. She went to the bank of the Nile and drew out a tiny prophet.

  Q: Who was the greatest babysitter in the Bible?

  A: David. He rocked Goliath to sleep.

  Q: Why didn’t they play cards on the Ark?

  A: Because Noah was standing on the deck.

  As a matter of taste and morals, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia don’t invest in companies that deal in things like tobacco, gambling, or pornography unless they are trying to motivate a company to change. They also typically avoid sizable investments in defense contractors. But when the congregation wants to try to change a company, they invest just a modicum of money—the minimum amount the SEC requires for them to be considered shareholders is $2,000. And so they own $2,000 worth of stock in companies like Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. They have worked with Philip Morris on drawing up agricultural policies to protect tobacco farmers in Malawi from pesticides, with Lockheed Martin on human rights issues, with Chevron on fracking, and with Walgreens to try to convince them to stop selling cigarettes.

  “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 churc
h 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

  Sister 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.