If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  Donna was the only signer of the ad inside the cathedral that day. She waited her turn in the long line to introduce herself to Cardinal Hamer and refused to take off her black armband. As she approached him, a woman protestor snapped a picture. As the camera’s bright light went off, the cardinal went into a rage. He left Donna and chased the woman out of the building. When he returned, he was towering over the small nun.

  She introduced herself. Cardinal Hamer accused Donna of organizing the protest. She dismissed that. What she wanted to ask him, since he, too, was of the Dominican order, was how might he help women and children in the shelter where she had a job-training program for women. She got as far as the word “Dominican” when he shouted at her, “You are not a good Dominican!”

  She felt dizzy knowing this was a man of Rome . . . a man of the Vatican . . . a man of the Church to which she had given her life, who was angry with her. As black dots appeared before her eyes, she prayed she wouldn’t faint at his feet. She mustered all of her courage to ask him if he would just take a meeting with the signers of the ad. Enraged, he replied, “You come to Rome . . . I will give you a meeting.”

  Donna went away with a determination to help women with reproductive issues from that day forward. “A woman cannot have real autonomy unless she has reproductive autonomy,” she told me.

  Donna is ripe with ideas.

  Ask her what she thinks about the new pope and she quickly responds, “How many women were on the ballot? How many women voted for this pope or ever vote for the leadership in the Church? Women must be given the right to vote in the Church.”

  When the Vatican held their election conclave following the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, Donna was furious with the fact that women weren’t involved in the voting process.

  “There is all of this talk about the gray smoke and the white smoke, and I started thinking, We need some pink smoke.” She wondered about starting a campaign of burning pink smoke around the country to underscore the point that women had been left out of the conclave. Pink smoke, Donna soon learned, isn’t so easy to come by.

  “I thought all you would have to do is have incense burners and throw a pink or a red piece of material on top and it would send up pink smoke,” she said. “There is something lacking in my science background, because I found out that you still get black or gray smoke.” A brother of a friend of a friend had an Army job down in West Virginia. He was able to get Donna pellets that, when burned, could produce smoke of almost any color. Purple was the closest to pink in the bunch. Donna and the Women’s Ordination Conference crossed the country for prayer vigils at cathedrals, sending up the purple-pink smoke at every stop.

  “I just wanted to show people the lack of women in the election process. The intent was to signify that it ain’t white or gray smoke, it is pink smoke that we need. I don’t think most people understand the significance of the fact that women have no right to vote in the Catholic Church. The institutional Church has put us down and tried to keep us down. The Church is one of the biggest institutions in the world, and they are probably the most notorious for putting women down and not giving us our full rights.”

  Donna now sees ordination as part of a hierarchical system.

  “Ordination was just something created centuries ago by men looking for power and looking for a way to keep women out of it. When we started the Women’s Ordination Conference in 1975, we said we would create a new priestly ministry. We didn’t just want to put women in vestments and zap us into something. It would be a whole new way of ministry. The ordination thing . . . just isn’t needed. What we need is a whole new sacramental system, one where a man doesn’t need to be present for the seven sacraments.”

  For inspiration, she looks to the Eucharist, or the practice of spirituality in everyday life.

  “I am a Eucharistic person. I see the Eucharist in everything.” I asked her to clarify what exactly she meant. “I am inspired by God and I see God in the people that I walk with. That is what Holy Communion means to me, that compassion between two people,” she told me. “It is about being present.”

  Donna no longer stands outside abortion clinics, but she promises to keep up the fight for women’s rights through political organizing and lobbying. She will go down shouting about what she believes is right.

  “This is my issue,” she told me. “I would die for this issue.”

  When Donna Quinn dies, she wants two things: a microphone in her casket and for people to remember her fight for women.

  “We need a new sacramental system that tells the stories of women—stories our children will be proud to pass on to their next generations . . . stories told with pride by women, about women,” Donna told me. “That is what we need, because we are all sisters.”

  Epilogue

  Never let a nun get a pass at editing your book. As a journalist, I rarely let my subjects look at, much less touch, the stories I have written about them. But there was something about the nuns that made me feel like they deserved more than a fair shake when it came to how their lives would be presented to you, the reader. Maybe I felt that way because it seemed to me, after writing this book, that no one else was giving them their due. Maybe I’m not as agnostic as I like to believe and thought crossing the nuns would somehow lead to bad karma or a first-class ticket straight to hell. So, for whatever reason, I did let the sisters see bits and pieces of this book before it went to press. Most of them really enjoyed their chapters. One or two of them asked that I remove an offensive word or two. A couple of them spent days on end on the phone with me discussing how they were portrayed. In the end I did not make any major changes to this text. I was reminded that many of these women spent decades teaching grammar to schoolchildren. With their revisions, I have never handed over such clean copy to my publisher.

  As I came to the end of my two-year journey with the nuns, people kept asking me what they saw as the obvious questions. There is the sarcastic one: Are you going to run off and join a convent now? No. That is usually followed by more serious ones: Do you feel holier? Are you a Catholic now?

  The answer to both is no. I am still an agnostic who reads the New York Times on Sundays instead of going to church. But the book did inspire a kind of spiritual shift in me. The question I wish that people would ask me is How have the nuns changed you? The answer to that is quite a lot, actually.

  These days, I often find myself thinking, What would the nuns do?

  When I get tired and crabby at the end of a long run, I think to myself, What would Sister Madonna Buder do? I smile and imagine she would compose a haiku that would keep her running for another mile, or ten. Like Sister Madonna, I use the running to push away my anxiety and allow myself time to think about my problems.

  When I am quick to pass judgment on something or someone, I think about Sister Megan and shut my mouth, bite my tongue, and change the subject.

  When I see injustice happening around me, I think of Sister Simone, and instead of turning away, I try to understand why it is happening and think about ways I can confront it and then change it.

  When I need to face something that makes me uncomfortable or squeamish, I think of Sister Joan facing the world of modern-day slavery and force myself to be just a little bit uncomfortable.

  When put into a situation that is unjust, I think about Sister Dianna and stand up for myself, no matter the cost. I received an e-mail from Sister Dianna after I sent her the chapter about her, soon before we went to press.

  “For years I have sought to erase the memories of the past and to begin life anew. I suddenly realized that in so doing, I forget those who were with me in the clandestine prison. This is something I refuse to do. They are part of my life and a part of who I am today,” she wrote. “Thank you, Jo, for once again reminding me that I have no right to forget the past. By so doing, I become indifferent to this crime against humanity that continues to destroy
and shatter the lives of so many people around the world.”

  Today Sister Dianna is working with a group called Education for Justice to create educational resources that explore the root causes of torture and follow its relation to such issues as poverty, war, food scarcity, economic inequality, and climate change.

  She continued: “The spoke I’m driving into the wheel of injustice is in the form of gently nudging others [myself included] to stop standing on the sidelines and connect the dots amongst the issues that lead to torture, human trafficking, and other human rights violations.”

  While writing this book I quit smoking. I took up running. I bought a juicer and I meditate every day. I grew up a little, embracing adulthood in a way that living in New York City allows you to postpone almost indefinitely. Is it because of the nuns? Some of it is.

  As I was writing this conclusion, I stumbled upon a book called Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy sitting on the coffee table of a yoga studio while I languidly waited for a class to begin. I flipped aimlessly through the pages and landed on the day’s words of wisdom for January 5. It began with a quote from a woman named Emily Hancock, the author of The Girl Within: “Many women today feel a sadness we cannot name,” the quote read. “Though we accomplish much of what we set out to do, we sense that someone is missing in our lives and fruitlessly search ‘out there’ for the answers. What’s often wrong is that we are disconnected from an authentic sense of self.”

  Without meaning to, this quote summed up something I had been learning from the nuns for twenty-four months.

  We live in a culture obsessed with finding happiness in the mundane, with being ecstatic every day of our lives. Books about this quest for fulfillment become instant bestsellers. Nuns are one of the few groups of people that I can genuinely say are happy more often than they are not. There is so much that nuns can teach us about happiness and living an authentic life. Perhaps it is because they lead a life unburdened by the things that can make us unhappy—relationship struggles, fights with kids, worries over our future . . . But I think it has more to do with how they live. They live very much in the present, embracing each moment. They have good habits. Most of the women I spoke to rise with the sun and get eight hours of sleep each night. They told me they work exercise into their day. They eat right and they pray. For most of the sisters, prayer is a form of meditation that they practice every single day without fail. They’ve taught me to be still, to be contemplative. Through them I have learned that inviting in moments of silence is as nourishing as remembering to eat the right things.

  I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about nuns. I am sure there are plenty of jerk nuns out there, but the ones I met were kind, warm, and generous—so much so that I think a sequel to this book should be How to Be Happy Like a Nun, which would (or should) become an instant bestseller.

  My biggest regret about the book being finished is that I never got all of the women in one place during the writing process. I can’t even imagine what that would have been like. Imagine if Sister Joan and Sister Tesa could have traded ideas about how to help women who have endured a life crisis, be it trafficking or prison, reacclimatize to regular life. Imagine if Sister Simone could give Sister Megan legal advice, or lobbying tips to Sister Nora. I am hoping to find a way in the next year to assemble them all in a single panel somewhere. I told Sister Jeannine about the idea as she handed me a sixth homemade scone in her kitchen.

  “It would be like The View, but with nuns, so it would be so much better,” she said, and clapped her hands with delight.

  Exactly.

  Like me, many of the nuns are still skeptical about Pope Francis.

  Sister Simone told me that during Good Friday, right after Francis was elected pope in 2013, she meditated on the fact that he gave her hope, but that she was terrified that hope would be betrayed. Going into another Easter season for 2014, she told me she still felt the same way.

  Speaking to the public radio station WBEZ Chicago on the occasion of the pope’s first anniversary in March, Donna Quinn said she hadn’t seen very much action on the Church’s “women issue.”

  “I see this nice wonderfulness of words in the media,” Donna said. “Why doesn’t the media pick up on the fact that the Church is all men? All men are in power.” The one hopeful sign, she said jokingly, was the pope’s decision to ditch his fancy red shoes.

  “If he has taken off those expensive shoes and the garb and walked with the people, he is taking that first wonderful step,” she said. “There’s a lot more to follow, hopefully.”

  I e-mailed Donna to tell her I liked her joke.

  “Hope the readership gets the comparison of shoes to first step toward working with women globally,” she wrote back. “Little by little we will change this Church, Jo . . . Love, Donna.”

  The new pope has shown that he may be willing to make progress on the Church’s woman problem, but even if he is willing, it remains to be seen whether he is able. Changing Church doctrine is a multilayered process that would require changing the hearts and minds of hundreds of male church leaders, many of whom have never been required to have any dealings at all with women, much less strong, powerful, and opinionated women.

  We can only hope that somehow “Frank” will end up on Sister Simone’s bus or that Sister Maureen will be able to meet with him to give him her version of Women 101.

  One thing that stuck with me on every subsequent read-through of this book was the strength of the women in its pages. I keep returning to the idea that both Jeannine Gramick and Bob Nugent were asked to back away from gay ministry. Father Bob abandoned a ministry he had devoted half of his life to. Sister Jeannine stayed. All of these women have stayed their course, despite the Nunquisition, despite an institution they have dedicated their lives to telling them they are wrong. I can’t think of a better definition of strength in the face of adversity.

  In 2012, Sister Joan Chittister delivered the baccalaureate speech to the graduating class at Stanford University. To the crowd of future doctors, engineers, and founders of fancy technology companies, she said:

  If you want to really be a leader, you must be a truth-teller. Remember, there will be those among the powerful who try to make you say what you know is clearly not true, because if everyone agrees to believe the lie, the lie can go on forever. The lie that there is nothing we can do about discrimination, nothing we can do about world poverty, nothing we can do about fair trade, nothing we can do to end war, nothing we can do to provide education and health care, housing and food, maternity care, and just wages for everyone in the world. Nothing we can do about women raped, beaten, trafficked, silenced yet, still, now, everywhere. If you want to be a leader, you, too, must refuse to tell the old lies.

  That is the thing about nuns. They stopped believing in the old lies a long time ago and started living out their own truths.

  I say it so many times in this book: if nuns ruled the world, so many things would be accomplished. I truly believe this. But I didn’t start this book as an attack on the institutional Church and I don’t want to end it that way. What I do believe is that the Church does itself a great disservice in keeping nuns out of positions of power. I can’t even begin to imagine all of the good a female pope could do in the world, but I hope against hope that one day it becomes a possibility.

  Sources

  Introduction

  “Frequently Requested Church Statistics.” Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Georgetown University, n.d., cara.georgetown.edu/caraservices/requestedchurchstats.html.

  Gibbs, Nancy. “Pope Francis, The Choice.” Time, December 11, 2013, poy.time.com/2013/12/11/pope-francis-the-choice.

  Chapter 1

  Becker, Suzanne. “Interview with Megan Rice, June 22, 2005.” Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, digital.library.unlv.edu/api/1/objects/nts/1247/bits
tream.

  Broad, William J. “The Nun Who Broke Into the Nuclear Sanctum.” The New York Times, August 10, 2012, page A1.

  Munger, Frank. “Plowshares Protesters Found Guilty of Injuring National Defense, Damaging Government Property.” Atomic City Underground, May 8, 2013, blogs.knoxnews.com/munger/2013/05/plowshares-protesters-found-gu.html.

  ———. “Y-12 Protester Sister Megan Rice: ‘The Last Time I Looked at My Watch, It Was a Quarter to Five.’” Atomic City Underground, August 25, 2012, knoxblogs.com/atomiccity/2012/08/25/sister_megan_rice_the_last_tim.

  Zak, Dan. “The Prophets of Oak Ridge.” The Washington Post, April 30, 2013, washingtonpost.com/sf/wp-style/2013/09/13/the-prophets-of-oak-ridge.

  Chapter 2

  Basu, Rekha. “Rekha Basu: ‘Nuns on the Bus’ Possess Credibility That Few of Us Have.” Editorial, The Des Moines Register, June 19, 2012, desmoinesregister.com/article/20120619.

  Campbell, Sister Simone. A Nun on the Bus: How All of Us Can Create Hope, Change, and Community. New York: Harper One, 2014.

  “Catholic Sisters’ Letter in Support of Healthcare Reform Bill.” NETWORK, A National Catholic Justice Lobby, Web, March 17, 2010.

  Feeney, Lauren. “Nuns on the Bus Brings Light to Capitol Hill.” BillMoyers.com, July 4, 2012, billmoyers.com/2012/07/04/the-nuns-on-the-bus-bring-light-to-capitol-hill.

  Nichols, John. “Is the Pope Getting on Board with the Nuns on the Bus?” TheNation.com, September 13, 2013, thenation.com/blog/176277/pope-getting-board-nuns-bus.

  Chapter 3

  Curran, Charles E. Catholic Moral Theology in the United States: A History. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008.