I received my best and most important education as a child at the Sacred Heart Convent in suburban D.C.
My parents took me there in the second grade after pulling me from a D.C. public school, where I was abused verbally by a teacher and ended up in bed with asthma for two weeks. I converted to Catholicism at the cloistered Sacred Heart Convent in the second grade.
The Sacred Heart nuns did this for me, and more: taught me how to read as I could not in second grade due to a mild form of what they would call dyslexia now; taught me about faith and trust in Jesus and the supremacy of divine love; taught me about self-control and focusing my ambition to the good. When my hearing left me permanently at age fifteen, I was thrown back on what I had received from these holy, cloistered women: a weak vessel, I know the nuns saved my adulthood and therefore my life.
The Sacred Heart ‘mothers’—the ‘Sister’ order to the Jesuits with that teachers’ charism- set a high bar for my subsequent interactions with nuns. Since then, I have been in periodic contact, both distant and personal and professional, with a variety of nuns.
Here, I want to concentrate on the ‘radicalized’ nuns, the ones who began to exercise some political force via South America’s Liberation Theology movement (at the time of Pope Francis’ Jesuit education there.)
By the 1970s, the radical nuns began to show their influence in the Catholic Church. They were in outright rebellion from selected Church teachings is a host of areas. I saw this firsthand when I returned, in the late 1980s, to DC to work at the Catholic University of America.
At that time, I was living, financially destitute, in a dorm room on campus, working, and taking classes in biblical languages. My floor of the dorm was otherwise reserved exclusively for nuns — I got there as a special ‘free’ favor. I was the only woman on the ‘nun floor’ who attended Sunday Mass regularly.
Most of the dorm nuns were kind to me, but distant. My best friend was my cat ‘Nurse Betty,’ an old tabby of mine, who sat on my stomach and nursed me through the start of severe diabetes. I talked to these nuns on the floor, and they assured me that my attendance at Mass was not obligatory and that they saw no reason for me to go. Mostly, I probably amused them.
My husband-to-be, back in the late ‘80s, was himself a victim of a nun’s ‘spiritual formation’ zeal. At the Catholic University of America, she attacked and insulted him verbally and publicly as someone who needed “counseling” for his conservative Catholic beliefs.
The Order of Discalced Carmelites (OCD) has female and male branches. My husband was at that time in training to take his vows as a brother (not a priest) in the OCD order in D.C. He was recommended for ‘counseling’ by this same nun, also a formator. The OCD counseling consisted of a series of abusive ‘psychological’ interviews.
Fast forward to the ‘90s, and I was in charge, still deaf, of the national fund development programs at the Council of the U.S., St. Vincent de Paul (SVdP), in Saint Louis.
At that time, a Daughter of Charity (a sister order to SVdP) was in charge of “spiritual formation.’
SVdP is a lay Catholic organization that gives all forms of free, basic charity by regular home visits to the poor locally.
Soon, there were two sisters (one from another order) working in my National SVdP office — focused entirely on spiritual formation for the laity.
Both sisters at SVdP were politically akin to the ones I bunked down with in D.C.: they openly eschewed such traditional oddities as regular Mass attendance, and the Eucharist, and were outspoken on the needs to bring the SVdP laity, who really just wanted to help the poor at home, into better ‘spiritual’ mettle.
The SVdP nuns in the office changed from enthusiastic about me to very hostile, as they came to understand that I was a traditional Catholic and not a feminist, in their version of that. I was professionally undermined and personally insulted by both, and both, tellingly, spoke derisively about my deafness with other staff in the break room, thinking I could not hear them. (I couldn’t hear them, but my own staff reported back to me.)
If the reader has been patient with my tale thus far, I am now in the present and in Louisiana.
We have in our semi-rural, cherished neighborhood, a female Order of the Discalced Carmelites who share a lovely, small campus and church -- too beautiful and uniquely, aesthetically feminine to believe if you haven’t seen it. The Sisters offer daily Mass, with local priests in service, to the Catholic laity. (Our OCD nuns draw a very regular, even daily, faithful lay attendance - -except during the COVID years, when the heavy liberal hand of the USCCB and the archbishop closed them down, effectively).
It is difficult to overestimate the critical ministry of our local OCD sisters to the faithful laity here; the sisters are essential to both the nearer and wider community.
Very recently, this OCD lost all but two of the current sisters, the balance having absconded in the night, under darkness, to shock and devastate both two sisters remaining — as well as all of the laity who need them. The scuttlebutt is that the local and possibly regional leadership, the nuns, in charge of spiritual formation were/are behind the shock action.
I am told, by one of the two nuns who were left behind as the others absconded, that the formation director -- and possibly the formation group regionally -- was unhappy with the conservative, cloistered, and traditional values — those values installed by St. Theresa of Avila herself, Doctor of the Church, and founder of the reformed Carmelites of the OCD — to which our little church and order pledges fidelity.
Whatever happened, in any fairness, the sisters who abandoned their posts in darkness were well aware of the requirements of their cloistered vocations before and upon entry. The willfulness and brutality of the ‘sneak away’ harks back to the radicalized behavior of the cohort of radicalized nuns evident from the 1960s.
And we wonder why the Catholic orders are steadily failing.
Also, the typical disregard for the strain on the Catholic faithful laity, that now sees its local beloved order and church threatened by closure, is staggering but in no way unprecedented.
This is the same disregard I saw in D.C. and later in St. Louis: the assumption that is, to my mind, characteristic of the radicalized Catholic nun: that she knows better than the Church itself, and its catechism, its canon law, and its encyclicals, what is good for the Catholic Church.
Tell that to Rome. Or, better still, tell that to Jesus.
