If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  “Those women seemed so happy and they were doing good things, so it just made sense to me.” Sister Tesa pulled a picture out of her drawer to show me. It is an old picture of her sitting on a park bench with her mother and father, taken in the ’60s, the day she joined the order. Sister Tesa is wearing a full black-and-white habit. As a Vatican II sister, it was one of the only times she would ever wear the full habit. These days she is partial to perfectly pleated jeans, brightly colored sweaters, and smart blazers. In the photograph, her dad is gazing at her with a mixture of pride and concern.

  Sister Tesa laughs. “I think he is just wondering, ‘Is she happy?’” The answer was yes. She says she has been happy since the day she took her vows.

  God is a constant in Sister Tesa’s life. “God is in the fabric of my day. We walk together every minute of the day,” she told me. She finds herself talking to God all the time. After she mentions it, I catch her, in the middle of regular conversation, taking a second to ask the Lord for something.

  In 1986, Sister Tesa was living with other sisters in her order and working as the curriculum coordinator for the Brooklyn diocese. A friend, Sister Elaine Roulet, the director of the Children’s Center at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, asked her to escort a young child to Rikers Island so that the child could visit her mother.

  Sister Elaine is a legend in the world of prison reform. As recently as the 1980s, many women in prison had no way to see their children on a regular basis while they served time. It was she who established the precedent of connecting imprisoned moms with their babies.

  It all began while Sister Elaine was teaching the women inmates of a maximum-security prison in New York how to read. The reading program was fine, the inmates told her, but could she help them with what they really wanted? They wanted to know where their kids were, what they were up to, and how they could communicate with them. Sister Elaine became something called a prison family liaison for the next ten years and answered those exact questions. Most prisons in our country still use the model she put in place to try to maintain some kind of continuity in a family while mothers are locked up. Sister Tesa’s first trip with Sister Elaine took just over an hour and completely changed the trajectory of her life.

  “I couldn’t imagine what happened to children when their mother was taken from them,” Sister Tesa told me. “So in retrospect, it was God’s divine providence, because I was hooked.”

  Seeing firsthand the consequences of forced separation on a child was gut-wrenching. There was uncertainty and fear preparing for the visit, followed by separation anxiety and depression on the way back. It just wasn’t right. Sisters Tesa and Elaine tried to work out a way to fix it.

  Step one was to make sure that the children of inmates had a safe place to grow up while their moms were away. Could Sister Tesa take them in? God help her, she had no idea. When she became a nun, she gave up on the idea of ever being a mother, and she was happy with that decision. She prayed and meditated on the idea and ultimately knew the right thing to do. Sister Tesa and the other sisters, five of them in all, became foster mothers and committed to raising the children until their mothers were let out. They found a space in the Convent of St. Rita’s on Twelfth Street in Long Island City. Volunteers, family, and friends all came to help clean it out and turn it into a place that was fit for kids to live and grow up in.

  Their first charge was a fifteen-month-old little girl named Naté, who was born in prison and had never seen wide-open spaces until Sister Tesa brought her to Queens, both of them uncertain about what the next few months would hold. Three other kids came in the first year, including a little girl who arrived on October 31 with a suitcase and a Halloween costume.

  They didn’t want the children in their care to feel alienated from the other kids in the neighborhood or at school, so they named the building “My Mother’s House.” That way, when outsiders asked them where they were going back to, they never felt like it was lying. They said, “My Mother’s House,” and no one asked them any more questions. Sister Tesa became a licensed foster mother, which she quickly learned was a completely different job from taking care of the kids during the day as a teacher.

  “It was a real eye-opener. I got a crash course in empathetic understanding of what parents go through,” Sister Tesa told me. “It was hard. You had highs and lows. You had to let each child be an individual. The babies were actually easier to bond with. It was harder with the teenagers, who came in with all the baggage of life.”

  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 oppor
tunities 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

  She was famished. Men, and even a few women, walked by Sister Maureen Fiedler i
n 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.