hugely controversial and causing a major stir in religious orders, but she had no idea. It was by a cardinal, so why should she object? I went on in this way and received and read books by Hans Kung, Andrew Greeley, Karl Rahner, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. My superior’s laxity allowed me to send uncensored letters to Greg and others, where I spoke of my feelings and problems with a directness I could never express in letters submitted to a superior-censor.
I threw myself into my teaching. I made tasteful and progressive decorations for my classroom. I prepared my lessons with great care. I liked being out of the cloister and mixing with people in the wider world again: the pupils, their parents, the parishioners. I volunteered for a job supervising the putting out and putting away of folding chairs for weekend functions with the eighth-grade boys. I liked the banter with the boys. During the week, I stayed after class, so the girls could come talk to me if they wanted. Soon the eighth-grade boys started coming, too, along with stray kids from other classes. This brought resentment from other sisters, particularly the one who taught the eighth-grade boys. A few accused me of courting popularity and trying to show up other teachers. The superior admonished me to stop singling myself out and doing whatever stirred up such resentment. I remembered the instruction given to Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story to fail her examinations because another nun felt humiliated by her academic achievement. My situation wasn’t as drastic, but it came from a similar place.
Further problems arose from the racial tension then wracking the parish. Riots had broken out in North Philadelphia in August 1964. It was difficult to deal with the racism of the white working-class parishioners, who feared that their livelihoods and modest properties were threatened by the arrival of black families in the area. It was even more painful to discover the racism of the pastor and principal, who wanted to impose a “legitimacy rule” to keep black kids out of the school. More than a righteous support for civil rights, it was a strong attachment to the school’s black students that fired me. Sometimes they would come crying to my classroom and everything in me wanted to pull their faces toward me and caress them reassuringly. The pastor was as backward as the superior. He conducted the liturgy tediously, and saw no reason to change anything from the way it had always been done. Vatican II might as well have happened on another planet. I felt that I had to do everything in my power to bring renewal to the parish, starting with my own classroom. I was critical of the syllabus. I followed the basic structure, but tried to infuse it with vitality and meaning, moving away from rote learning and toward active engagement.
By then the election of 1964 was underway, and I was passionately for Johnson and against Goldwater. (Nuns were discouraged from politics, but allowed to vote. I could not vote, as I was only twenty, whereas most others in the convent could vote, but showed little interest in doing so, not least because both candidates were Protestant.) The civil rights movement was on the move, too. Watching news broadcasts on the march from Selma to Montgomery in spring 1965, I saw nuns walking with all the rest. Why couldn’t I be doing that, I thought. I went around singing “We Shall Overcome” in my head and taught it to the kids in my class.
Nuns were treated like goddesses, not only in the parish, but on the streets. I found it especially awkward when old women would get up to give me, a healthy twenty-year-old, their seats on buses. I was happy to volunteer for any errand that would take me on public transport and into the streets—always, of course, in the company of another sister. One day I went into City Hall and looked up some of my old mentors. I had a particularly fine visit with Judge Alexander. My companion was quite charmed by him too, astonished by an encounter with such an elegant and educated black man. It was a bit beyond the bounds, especially as he was not a Catholic. From then on he regularly sent me books and letters and called when I was at Corpus Christi. One day, walking around the parish, I spotted a girl, the older sister of one of my pupils, playing guitar and singing in an alley. As I listened to the lyrics, I was mesmerized. It was as if the world was speaking to me with utmost urgency. Every word was weighty and expressed exactly what needed to be said about the world as I saw it. It was “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” I stopped and asked her about the song and told her how moved I was. This, of course, was yet another instance of “unnecessary intercourse with seculars,” which I had been doing a lot lately.
Eventually I reached the conclusion that virtually everything in me that was natural and human and healthy violated some convent rule, and my relation to the whole monastic ethos came to a point of crisis. The times they were a-changing, and I wanted to change, too. Around this time, Greg came to see me at Corpus Christi. He celebrated mass for the sisters in the convent chapel. It was the first time I had seen him say mass, and he did it in a manner that was more expressive, more meaningful, than any mass I had ever attended. He said my name and looked me in the eyes when he gave me communion. He came to my class and taught the kids to sing “Kumbaya.” Then we talked for hours and I let loose all my stress, my questioning, my frustrations, my crushed aspirations. He listened. He sympathized. He affirmed me in my refusal to repress my thoughts or my passions. He held me. After he left, I stayed up all night crying, praying, pushing myself to the point of decision. By dawn, I had achieved some sort of clarity, and I decided to leave. The next day was one of the most difficult days of my life. I had a day’s work to do as a teacher, but everything was different. I was still wearing a nun’s habit and being addressed as Sister Helen Eugenie, only I didn’t feel it was me anymore. I still had to arrange my departure and finish the school year, but I no longer abided so strictly by the rules. I made phone calls and mailed letters without permission. I couldn’t live this way for long. I couldn’t bear the feeling of not being at one with myself.
My superior was bewildered by the reasons I gave for leaving. She told me not to mention it to any of the other sisters or parishioners and sent me up to the mother house to explain myself. She was only one of many who were oblivious of the change about to sweep through the Church like a tidal wave. There were not many leaving then, but just a few years later nuns and priests would be leaving in droves. It was arranged for me to leave on the last day of the school year. I would not come to class that day, which was hard, as I couldn’t say goodbye to my pupils. The other sisters were to leave for school as usual without noticing my absence, When my mother arrived with clothes, the superior brought them to me and sent me into the nearest lavatory. To be asked to remove this habit, which had been given to me in such splendor, in such a desultory fashion, infuriated me. I took it off, remembering what each part of it symbolized and how carefully I had always handled it, and left it in a heap on the lavatory floor.
I believed I was leaving for all the same reasons that I entered. I still felt called. I even considered joining another order more in tune with the whole spirit of aggiornamento. I did not anticipate that the questioning that had brought me this far would ultimately lead me not only away from the convent, but out of the Church altogether. People later told me that I had been “ahead of my time,” that I had come too soon, that if I had waited, the institutions around me would have changed, and everything would have been all right. But by then, I too had moved on. I may have been moved by history, but I was tossed and torn at the crest of each wave and not dragged onward at the tail end of each unavoidable advance. For the time being, I still burned with the faith of our fathers (and mothers). When I sang “We shall be true to thee to death”, I meant it. I felt that I would stand up for it “in spite of dungeon, fire and sword.” However, not all promises, no matter how sincerely made, can be kept.
P.S. ON SSJS: ALTHOUGH I PARTED WAYS with the Sisters of Saint Joseph, whose way of life has dominated this chapter and I had little to do with them after 1965, these years decisively marked my life. Various episodes throughout subsequent years brought these years and those who shared them with me back to my attention. I saw the film The Nun’s Story many times and I could never see it without tears. No other film has ever captured an aspect of my life experience so accurately. The convent eventually become more like what I had wanted it to be back when I was in it. Nuns could read newspapers and watch television. They could receive and read books without permission, write and receive uncensored letters, articulate their own preferences regarding their studies and their mission. They began to aim for self-actualization rather than self-abnegation. They could form healthy relationships without
