If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  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 t
o 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.

  The American bishops considered the issue settled. The nuns, and a lot of other Catholic women, did not.

  In 1977, Sister Maureen cast a wider net for women’s rights, co-founding the organization Catholics Act for ERA. The ERA was a simple amendment with tremendous consequences that would add a single line to the United States Constitution: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Lobbyists spent the next ten years trying to ratify the amendment in the required thirty-eight states. For four years, Sister Maureen lobbied in Illinois, Oklahoma, Nevada, Missouri, and Florida in favor of it, meeting all the major players in the feminist movement, Ellie Smeal, then the President of the National Organization for Women (NOW), as well as Molly Yard and Patricia Ireland, who would both go on to lead NOW. She learned to fund raise and became a seasoned speaker on the issue of women’s rights, ready to give a stump speech in front of three thousand people at a moment’s notice.

  When Pope John Paul II made his first visit to the United States in October 1979, Sister Maureen helped to organize the “Stand Up for Women” demonstration at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, where fifty-three Catholic sisters wore blue armbands and refused to sit down during the pope’s speech in order to call attention to the lack of gender equality in the Catholic Church.

  “We stand in solidarity with all women out of love and concern for the Church, to call the Church to repentance for the injustice of sexism, because we believe the Church can change,” read a statement distributed at the event.

  At the same event, Sister Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most of the nation’s 140,000 nuns, stood up to the podium wearing a brown suit and a jaunty checkered blouse with a bow at the neck. The pope cocked his head, poised to listen, forming a wide steeple with his fingers in front of his face. Sister Theresa took a deep breath before asking the pope for equality for women. “The Church in its struggle to be faithful to its call for reverence and dignity for all persons must respond by providing the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries of our Church,” she said, growing more confident with each word. “I urge you, Your Holiness, to respond to the voices coming from the women of this country who are desirous of serving in and with this Church as fully participating members.” It may have been the only moment that a sister would have been able to confront the pope on an issue like this. The pope was taken aback.

  “You know, I was looking at him that day,” Sister Maureen later said with a laugh in an interview with NPR in her warm but frank way. “And it didn’t look like he had a smile on his face. He seemed like he was thinking, ‘Oh my, nobody vetted this speech, did they?’”

  Nuns began leaving their communities in droves in the late ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, as more and more opportunities opened up to women who lived outside of convents. The leader of Sister Maureen’s order in Erie vacated her post to marry a former priest and was replaced by a conservative sister who still wore a habit.

  “It didn’t look promising for nuns like me who were out there fasting for the ERA,” Sister Maureen told me. “A friend—Dolly Pomerleau—said to me, ‘You are a nun at heart. You can’t just leave your community.’ Mind you, she had left hers.”

  Sister Maureen sent résumés to ten orders, looking for a family that would embrace her dedication to social justice. Only two sent back a personal response: the Sisters of St. Joseph, home to Helen Prejean, whose work with convicted murderers would eventually be turned into a memoir and an Academy Award–winning movie (Dead Man Walking), and the Sisters of Loretto, known in progressive circles as the social justice nuns. She opted for Loretto and has never looked back.

  Meanwhile, Sister Maureen was working as a co-director of the justice-oriented Quixote Center. In the 1980s, she spent several years organizing and lobbying against the Reagan administration’s wars in Central America. She was part of the Quest for Peace Project, which organized massive amounts of humanitarian aid for the people of Nicaragua who were victims of war—even matching the amount of aid that Congress had approved for the US-supported “contras.” At times, she joined in acts of civil disobedience to protest US policy. “The worst thing I did, I guess, was join others
to pray in the Capitol rotunda. That earned me five days in the DC jail.”

  As the new millennium approached, Sister Maureen found a new calling. In the late 1980s, she was commuting home to care for both of her dying parents. During those long drives between DC and western New York, mostly through rural Pennsylvania, she had nothing to keep her awake but fundamentalist Christian radio.

  “I would get furious when I listened to it. It wasn’t Christian as I understood ‘Christian.’ It was anti-woman. It was anti-gay. It never talked about peace.” This was the way people heard about religion, through the radio, through a lens of intolerance.

  “I thought I could create an alternative.”

  There is no doubt about it: Sister Maureen’s voice was made for public radio. Her tone is measured and soothing, her humor dry. She hits her marks. One Sunday afternoon, she put me on speakerphone during one of our talks so she could tidy up and prepare to put her chicken dinner in the oven while we spoke.

  At one point the toilet flushed.

  “It’s not what you think,” Sister Maureen said, explaining that one of her three cats had “deposited his poop in an inconvenient place and I got rid of it.” She is a straight shooter, whether she’s talking about the Islamic tensions underlying the Arab Spring or one of her cats, Napoleon: Conqueror of All He Surveys. Napoleon, a longhaired tuxedo, was born right in her bed. Sister Maureen had no idea that his mother, Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, was pregnant when she took her in, but she woke up one morning to find Cleopatra licking off three newborn kittens. The third cat is a tough guy—Einstein, the Three-Legged Genius.

  Sister Maureen began doing commentaries with NPR in the late ’90s and started a commercial call-in show called Faith Matters, which had a short shelf life from 1999 to 2001. Then 9/11 happened. The Saturday after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, Sister Maureen felt called to round up a group of interfaith guests for a three-hour special called “Religion & Terrorism.”