Sisters - Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (Review)

Catholic Nuns and the Making of America

By John Fialka

St. Martin’s Press 380 pp. $27.95

Reviewed by Colman McCarthy

Any Catholic who’s been around for awhile has a favorite nun story. Mine is about Sister Stella, a Carmelite who ran St. Patrick’s Home for the Aged in the Bronx a half-century ago. She was my aunt, and my earliest tutor in God’s holy truth that no sinner is without some virtue. For theological proof, she told of her friendship with Frank Costello, king of the New York mob in the 1940s and 50s. Whenever Sister Stella ran short of silverware, dishes, linens, beds, refrigerators, sofas and other necessities for her beloved old folks, she didn’t call Catholic Charities. She phoned “my dear friend Francis.” Hours later, a truck showed up at St. Patrick’s, with the booty hauled in by holstered goons. Sister Stella called these future capos “my angels,” while elevating Costello to the higher rank of archangel. When the mobster survived a barber chair assassination attempt—a hit man aimed between the eyes but the bullet only grazed the skull—Sister Stella called it divine intervention. And the trucks kept delivering.

Beg pardon for taking up all that space for one nun story. But after reading John Fialka’s well-sourced and often sparkling narrative about legions of spirited and spiritual Catholic sisters, and being reminded of the countless ones I have known and written about, only one paragraph was pure self-restraint.

Fialka, a seasoned reporter in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal and whose byline guarantees fairness and thoroughness, offers the argument that Catholic sisters “were America’s first feminists.” If “you were educated in a parochial school, nursed in a Catholic hospital or had other contact with a church institution, the face of the church you saw most often was a woman’s. For every priest there were at least three sisters…They built the nation’s largest private school and nonprofit hospital systems. They were the nation’s first large network of female professionals in an age when the pervading sentiment was that a woman’s place was in the home.”

From the 18th century to now, more than 400,000 sisters have served in the United States, members of some 400 religious orders. They range from the well-known—Ursulines, Franciscans, Benedictines and Norbertines, all with Europeans roots—to the out of sight cloistered Cistercians. Without the sisters, American Catholicism would have become just another marginal Christian church. Their numbers peaked at 204,000 in 1968, to be followed by a shrinkage that leaves only 75,000 today. Their median age is 69.

Before arriving at the last of his 27 chapters to analyze this decline, Fialka concentrates on the Sisters of Mercy to tell the story of religious women whose surefire labors girded an early immigrant church and turned it into the nation’s largest denomination. The “Mercies” were founded in Ireland in 1840 by Catherine McAuley, who rallied her novices to not only educate and serve the poor but to personally embrace sacrifice and discomfort. “Without the cross,” she believed, “real progress cannot come.”

Of this penitential approach to life, Fialka writes: “Seen from another land and from a decidedly different age, that might appears an antiquated spiritual statement, even a cruel one to some Americans. Yet in our locker rooms and fitness centers, some of us apply it to our bodies daily without a thought. It is ‘no pain, no gain.’”

The pain of the sisters came, often enough, from local bishops or parish priests. Many were overlords and landlords who paid the women little or nothing, ignored living conditions in rundown convents and had no interest in providing pensions for aging sisters. In 1973, Fialka writes, “the bishops’ department of education recommended that Catholic churches take a national collection to develop a retirement fund for sisters. The recommendation was ignored.” Some nuns kept agitating. Now there is a collection: “After decades of procrastination, confusion, benign neglect and worse, the Church fathers made sure that some checks are finally in the mail.” A lay fundraising group—SOAR! (Save Our Aging Religious!) is on the scene, as well as the church’s National Religious Retirement Office.

A heavier cross than cheapskate bishops and priests has been the denial of leadership roles to sisters, a subservience traceable to Pope John Paul II and his Vatican. In his concluding pages, Fialka is hopeful that power-sharing—and not just women’s ordination—can renew the church and attract women to join religious orders. Maybe. Miracles do happen, but as the numbers slide, and the pope’s decrees harden, the odds keep growing.

Anyone know the patron saint for long shots? And it’s not Frank Costello or his bookie.

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Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace.”