Cabrini Parish
no time ago
or else a life
walking in the dark
i met christ
jesus)my heart
flopped over
and lay still
while he passed(as
close as i’m to you
yes closer
made of nothing
except loneliness
—E. E. Cummings
I’m home at our convent in New Orleans. It’s the fall of 1967.
Everything feels the same.
Everything feels different.
Back from my studies in Canada, I’m set to become the director of religious education (DRE) at St. Frances Cabrini Parish. So, who am I now? How am I going to tackle this new job? All I know is that I’m hot in the saddle to put Vatican II’s teachings into practice: the idea that truth can be found everywhere, not only in the Catholic Church, and there’s no secular world over there and sacred world over here, because for those who have spiritual insight, nothing is profane, the holy is everywhere, and it’s high time to start translating the message of Jesus into terms people can understand and—you know—connect with.
In the chapel for morning meditation, I’m listening for the voice within. Sitting still until I sense what I’m feeling—dark and brooding or light and bubbling up. I’ll have to go in slow, do a lot of listening….I’m the new kid on the block….I’ll be working with the priests and mostly with adults. It’s scary—and exciting.
Chris managed to get off the weekend after my return and will arrive Friday night from Houma by Greyhound bus. She says she’ll have to walk with her suitcase from the convent to the bus station, but she doesn’t care. It’s not that long a walk, she says. Anything to get away from the gulag. Just last week, she had to work three sixteen-hour shifts back-to-back.
We wrote regularly while I was in London, but during the last couple of months my letters were pretty much aimed at encouraging her, pumping her up. “Hang in there, I’m coming home soon. Wait until you hear about the new Dutch Catechism. By hook or crook I’ll get a copy for you.” I send it within the first couple of weeks that I’m home. Inside the cover I write: “To our nursing sisters, who have borne the heat of the day.”
In my letters to Chris I didn’t say much about William. I sensed she’d feel threatened. She’s not as sure as I am that relationships endure.
But I’m the one inside myself, and I know what I think, what I feel, and what I intend, and I’m figuring that there’s room inside my soul for both her and William—and the community. Maybe I’m like a carbon atom with valency to form bonds with a lot of other atoms. Different people spark different parts of me—humor, curiosity, spirituality. (Doesn’t every interaction between two people have a unique “chemistry”?) Maybe Chris is more like a hydrogen atom with just one portal open for close relationships. Maybe, when it comes to relationships, different people are just configured differently.
High valency or not, I know I need Chris. I need the way she slows me down, the way she quiets me. Everything she says comes from her soul. She seems incapable of duplicity. Me, in my spontaneous, extroverted thrust, I can be pretty showy and glitzy. Not Chris. She doesn’t trust surface sparkle, and she can spot a fake a mile away. Once at a meeting, after a Sister was exceedingly verbose, spouting one half-baked idea on top of another, Chris said, “I have absolutely no idea what that lady was talking about.” I need that. True-blue Chris. When she stands up to speak at our community assemblies, everybody listens, because she does it so seldom. She’s not good at spinning stuff off the top of her head. She knew right off the bat she could never be a teacher. She couldn’t stand the thought of having to stand in front of a room full of people—kids or not—and talk all day long. The thought made her soul shrivel.
We’ve been friends now for four years. Enough time for the contours of our relationship to take shape. I guess, over time, every close relationship has a way of settling into its natural contours. Maybe like the way a house takes shape. In a blueprint, there seem to be endless possibilities: a deck, a great big room, a large kitchen with plenty of cabinets, a skylight. Then the house is built and the deck has to go (too costly) and the kitchen is more compact than plans originally called for. Like houses, relationships in real life take on actual shape, but with far more fluid contours. Relationships are always in a state of becoming, always flowing, always freshly created—like those lava lamps in the sixties, but more open-ended. Over the course of four years, Chris and I have invested a lot of ourselves in each other. We’ve built trust. And we keep seeing that we’re good for each other. Our friendship tree keeps sprouting fresh green leaves.
Now, here comes William, upsetting the balance. I can tell Chris feels tense about my closeness with him. The tension hasn’t hit the air—it’s unspoken—but it’s there, and it makes me feel tense as well. In her last letters to me in London, I could sense Chris was pulling back, and instinctively I pulled back, too. My notes were just as frequent but shorter, and newsy about everything but William. But I’m home now and sure that once Chris and I can talk things through, we’ll be okay. Mama and Daddy always talked things out. That’s what people do who care about each other. Besides, it’s not like Chris and I are married—as if we’re linked solely to each other for our happiness. We’re part of a community, and in our vocation our two boats will never nestle in a snug, domestic harbor. We’ll always be out on the open sea. Maybe that’s true for all of us.
On one life front for sure, it’s true: dying. Every soul passes over into death alone. No matter how others hover closely and try to accompany us, it’s very much a solitary journey. We’re alone in a lot of other ways, too. Behind our eyes, inside ourselves, we’re always teeming with thoughts and feelings nobody else can see. We’re such interior creatures. We carry universes of thoughts, imaginings, and emotion inside ourselves. The tiny revelations that emanate from us, the tiny glimpses others get of us, are so minuscule when compared to the teeming galaxies swirling around inside ourselves, to which we alone are privy. Or, maybe not as privy as we think. I mean, the dark realms inside us that heave and recede without any agency from us, that move us to feel and think and act sometimes in ways that surprise us and leave us clueless. Here we are walking around—movable mysteries. Maybe we’re like the universe itself, which scientists say is made up almost entirely of dark matter and dark energy. Only about 4 percent is visible. Maybe we’re like that. Chris and I are always quoting the wise fox in Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
So, with this man, William, weaving himself into my life, who am I now? And what will happen to my friendship with Chris? When Chris and I talk about this, I know two things are going to be important: that I’m open and candid about my friendship with William, saying what it is and what it isn’t, and that all the words in the world telling Chris what she means to me will never cut it—only my actions, showing her how much I prize her, will do. So we’ll do what we always do—cordon off space and time on our calendars to spend time together. (Spend time, as if we pay it out like currency.) I once heard a friend described as someone with whom we’re willing to waste time. Sounds profligate. But it’s true that when I love somebody, no matter how busy I am, I can feel time opening right up, and suddenly the calendar becomes porous, brimming with openings.
For Chris and me, a bright spot arises: rules about family visits are easing up, and one of the first things we put on our calendars is my visit with Chris’s mama and family in Houma. Chris has told me that her mama can really cook, and no town in Louisiana has better fresh seafood than Houma—fish, crabs, shrimp, oysters, right off the boats. The town teems with Cajun fishermen who trawl for shrimp in the early morning and deliver straight to restaurants or sell their catch in their trucks there on the highway right out of a cooler. In Houma there are all these hole-in-the-wall eating places where you can get boiled crabs and shrimp (everybody uses cayenne-peppered Zatarain’s seasoning) or an oyster or shrimp po’boy. Po’boys, a Louisiana staple, have been around ever since the first poor kid jammed some baloney into a loaf of French bread and washed it down with a soda. I can’t help but talk about food. I’m Cajun.
So I get to go with Chris to her family home and eat her mama’s cooking. What better way to seal a friendship? It’s said that the Last Supper was called the “last” because Jesus was always eating with his friends, and one of those meals just happened to be the last one. The Gospels are filled with stories that include meals. Even after Jesus was killed by the Romans, the way his disciples recognized him as alive again was at meals—breaking bread, or cooking fish on the beach. Maybe Jesus had a little Cajun in him.
William is telephoning and writing often: “I’m coming to see you, Lou, as soon as I can come.” Which sets me scurrying inside myself.
“I can’t wait for you to come.” I tell him that I’m just starting a new job and moving into a new community of Sisters and will need to be present there and settle in. I try to explain that it’s not like when we were in Canada, when I was freer to chart my own time.
I feel the stretch. As I’ve said, priests have a lot more freedom to travel than nuns do, and they have more money at their disposal. In a heartbeat William can jump on a plane and come to New Orleans. He also doesn’t have a community in the rectory to whom he needs to be accountable. When he leaves, all he has to say is that he’ll be “out” and when he expects to get back. So, here he is on the phone: When, Lou, when? How about next weekend? How about today, tonight, right now?
One day the convent doorbell rings and the local florist is delivering a dozen red roses—to me. I try to take it in stride and say, “Well, isn’t that sweet? Father William is sending us flowers,” and take them right to the chapel. But already, there they go, twenty sets of eyebrows arching upward.
I’ve barely been home two weeks.
The Great Balancing Act begins.
ALMOST AS SOON as I arrive back home, the big news is that we Sisters who work at Cabrini will soon move into two houses in the parish. The pastor, Father Paul Raymond Moore, my new boss, has leased two houses for nine of us—one on Mendez Street, where I’ll be, and one on Paris Avenue. Both are in the Lakeview suburb, just a few blocks away from the CSJ motherhouse, where I made my novitiate. Both houses are also close to the church, so we can go to daily Mass and share evening meals. Sister William Matthews is going to be the new principal of the school, and she will be living at Mendez, too. I’m glad about that. I like Willie. Like me, she grew up in Baton Rouge and attended SJA. Unlike me, she was an excellent basketball player with a deadeye for the basket. We called her Billie in high school. She was named after her father, who died before she was born. So, it was an easy switch: Billie to Willie. A lot easier than Helen to Louis Augustine.
Nuns’ living in the neighborhood close to the people is one more change in religious life inspired by Vatican II. We’ll gather in the living room morning and evening for prayer and attend Mass together, but there will be no chapel, no bells calling us to assemble. Making time for personal meditation is up to us, and we’ll decide together about times for daily common prayer. I’m sharing a bedroom with Sister Bernardine, an older Sister, so, to pray in solitude, I usually head for a chair way over in the backyard behind the garage, where there’s an awning, so I can be there even when it rains.
My new job as parish director of religious education brings some big changes into my life. I’ll no longer be part of the school staff (a little heart wrench here) but part of the parish team with the priests, and I’ll have an office in the parish center with the pastor as my boss. That’s different. All the other women employed by the parish do secretarial work, cooking, or housekeeping. I’ll be in charge of my own time management and I’ll have funds to buy books and other educational materials, and wheels—I’ll have use of a car. Did I say car? No longer having to plan weeks ahead to sign up for use of the community car? And maybe the biggest change of all: After only four years of teaching kids I’ll be educating adults.
The terrain’s opened up. I think of Psalm 18: “He freed me, set me at large.” DREs on the parish scene are entirely new entities. I’m being handed an empty drawing board on which to design and carry out programs, and I’m in charge. That’s what I call executive agency, and, for the first time, I’m going to partner with men and women colleagues outside the circle of Sisterhood. (Good training for the day when I’ll be thrown outside the pale of “nuns’ work” into roiling public debate, but we’ll be coming to that.)
In a Catholic parish, the pastor and his priest associates are in complete charge of just about everything: what is preached from the pulpit and who does the preaching, which hymns may be sung at Mass and what musical instruments can be used, which textbooks will be used in religion classes, who is acceptable to serve as acolytes (boys, yes; girls, no), and, most serious of all—the hiring and firing of every parish employee, from the principal of the school all the way to the guy who cuts the grass.
If a pastor arrives at a parish that happens to have a fully functioning lay parish council and school board and decides to dismantle them and take complete charge of everything himself, he has the power to do it. The people can write letters and make phone calls in protest, or even picket in front of the church and call out the media, but to no avail. Almost invariably, they get word back from the bishop: The Catholic Church is not a democracy. And unless there’s been a flagrant, scandalous abuse, you can bank on the bishop’s backing up the pastor. We nuns are in there somewhere with the laity, though we’re supposed to have a kind of honorific status as “consecrated brides of Christ.” But honorifics don’t count for beans when it comes to decision-making power.
We’re definitely not clergy—that’s for sure. Canon law, the Church’s legal code, categorically states that only baptized males can be ordained priests. I don’t question this. I didn’t want to be a priest, anyway. I just wanted to be a teacher. Priests, it seemed, were always saying Mass and baptizing babies and hearing confessions, paying utility bills, or having fundraising drives for a new organ or altar or…something. Besides, their lives in rectories seemed so lonely. They don’t have community like we do in the Sisterhood.
I TRY TO sound casual, but inside I’m nervous as all get-out when at supper with the community I announce that my priest friend William is coming for a visit. I’ve been talking about him, that he’s from Boston and in charge of religious education in the diocese, that we studied together in London, and that he’s very spiritual, very dedicated. I want them to know he’s rock-solid in his priestly vocation (as I hope they know I am in mine) because we’re really pushing the edge here—a priest-and-nun friendship—with all the stories going around of priests, and nuns, running off to get married.
I tell about Will’s coming visit pretty much all in one breath, carrying them along in the gushing current of words—a good way to forestall questions. I’m the only one who knows how very, very much depends on their being okay with his visit. Will has been so overwrought, pressing me so hard to be able to visit soon. So, if there’s a snag, some kind of scheduling problem, a community event going on I had forgotten about, or, worst of all, if even one member of the community has a real problem with his visit—I mean, so upset she feels bound by conscience to report it to the provincial superior, to prevent scandal—that’s a real problem. I’m banking on Sisterly trust. With so many nuns leaving and all the changes happening in religious life—realizing we don’t all have to always be doing every single thing together to have unity—we’re being stretched to trust one another in ways we never have before. Okay—that’s the theory. But seeing Will and me living out our friendship right in front of their eyes is something else.
The Sisters seem fine with the visit. No questions. These days priests traveling to visit Sisters is not exactly common, but just a few weeks ago Sister Alice Marie’s priest friend came all the way from Canada to see her. There’s a guest room for priests at the motherhouse, and the academy right next door has a makeshift guest room in the counseling office. At the end of the meal at which I announced William’s coming, I finish by saying that I’ve been telling Father William all about them and he can’t wait to meet them, and he’d like very much to say Mass in the chapel at the motherhouse if we’d like that. There’s some talk about when he’ll arrive and where he’ll stay, all of which I have worked out in fine detail—Swiss-watch detail.
So, it’s done. William’s coming and the Sisters are okay. Afterward, I go to my private praying place and take some deep breaths. This tension about William is like no other I’ve ever known. What I didn’t say out loud to the Sisters, what I kept tucked inside and couldn’t say, are the feelings I have for William, the commitment I’ve made to love him through thick and thin. Not marry. But love in this new way—the “third” way—which we are forging together.
Will’s a manly guy. He says what he thinks and goes for what he wants. He’s really smart and logical and must have a photographic memory. He can digest reams of information, organize it, and write about it or teach it in such a way that it comes out all coherent and organized. Unlike me—no fuzzy-feeling-amorphous stuff for him. I’m always kind of feeling my way into what I’m thinking. I almost never just talk about bare facts or historic data. I constantly try to make connections, to relate facts to experiences, to ask about significance, personal implications, teasing out metaphors, trying to see what things point toward. Maybe William is like prose and I’m like poetry.
William is the first man I’ve ever been really close to. He has awakened me deep inside, and when I’m with him, I’m far more in a receiving mode than I usually am. He’s the initiator, he woos, he pursues. I respond, I receive. He tells me over and over how beautiful I am, how desirable, and he showers me with presents. And his energies are all so charged, so like a current, pulling me in. There’s one thing about a current, whether it’s water or electric or sexual: It courses through you, it catches you up in its power. When you’re in it, you’re in it, and with William I know I’m in it.
But there’s this countercurrent, too—this holding him off—because he’s coming on so strong. And he’s telephoning constantly, and writing so often that I make it a point to get the mail first, to intercept the letters so the Sisters don’t see the bombardment, and with no privacy on the community phone in the hallway, I’m always finding excuses to go over to the parish office so I can talk to him. It’s not that I want to be sneaky, but I know we need privacy. Every close relationship needs privacy. I want to let William in—he brings vibrancy and aliveness and a sense of completeness—but he’s so forceful.
As old Sister Tharcilla used to say: “The Lord in his mercy, help Lady Percy,” and this Lady Percy knows she needs a lot of help. I pray, Lord, help me be authentic. I know that with my commitment to my vows and the community, it’s going to be all about balance. I’ve watched some of our Sisters get involved in close relationships with outsiders (“seculars,” we used to call them) and drift right on out of community. They might show up every now and then for community events, but even when they were present, they weren’t really there. As for me, I’m going all in. I can do this. I will do this. I’m going to be William’s friend and still remain a bona fide, wholehearted nun. It’s not going to be either-or. It’s going to be this-and. Anyway, that’s the theory, that’s the plan.
Will knows I’m happy as a nun, and we banter about how I could never be “domesticated.” He admits that marriage would hem me in, and I say, laughing, “No, h-i-m me in,” and he gives a little laugh, but it’s kind of weak and his heart’s not in it. Whenever we discuss this subject, he always comes away sad. He struggles with loneliness, and he is always telling me how much he misses me, how much he can’t wait until we’re together again. He has this hole in his heart, he says—a hole only I can fill. When he tells me this I feel sad—and anxious. I hate not being able to make him happy. When all is well between us, Will says that he wants from me only love that I can freely give, that he’ll never force me into giving what I don’t want to give, and it’s enough for him to know he has a special place in my heart.
He likes being a priest. He prays, he has deep faith, and he loves to tell me again about the frigid day in February in Boston when he was ordained in the great cathedral and how his hand trembled as he held the long white candle during the procession up the long aisle, the choir in full voice singing “Tu es sacerdos…in aeternum”—“You are a priest…forever”—and in his heart it was indeed forever, a promise he had made to God as a young man, his mother and father in full support and so very proud of their son, who would have the power to forgive sin and anoint the dying and at Mass to summon Christ himself to be present when he bends over the bread and wine and whispers: “This is my body, this is my blood”—the awe of it.
William gets into a kind of reverie as he takes me through the ordination ceremony, his voice low and reverent, remembering every detail of how he and his forty-six classmates, clothed in long white albs, had lain face down in the sanctuary, prostrate before the bishop, to profess celibacy and obedience as they would to Christ himself. The bishop, summoning them to rise, laid his hands on them and anointed them with the holy oils, imprinting on their souls forever the indelible seal of holy orders, which nothing in heaven or earth could ever erase. Even if they faltered and left the priesthood, even then the seal would still be there, even at death: You are a priest forever.
After the ordination ceremony, he tells me, the most humbling part of all were the lines and lines of people passing slowly before him to receive his first priestly blessing, pressing envelopes into his hand and murmuring adulation, full of respect and awe, “Pray for me, Father—you’re close to God now.” Then, there before him, were his own mother and father, in line with all the rest, bowing their heads to receive his blessing. He says that it was humbling and exhilarating at the same time, to know you were just like them, a human being, but chosen to put your hands on their heads and draw down divine blessings.
My own religious community relies heavily on the service of priests. Priests come to the motherhouse to celebrate Eucharist and teach us theology in our junior college and preach at our annual six-day retreat. Priests can bank on nuns’ unquestioned affirmation of every syllable they utter and expect that even the most threadbare attempt at humor or cleverness will be met with outsized laughter or giggling.
But, hands down, the single most challenging service priests rendered nuns has to be canon law–mandated weekly confession. Weekly. A formidable challenge for both sides: we nuns to drum up a week’s worth of sins or semi-sins or maybe-might-be-sins, and they, poor souls, to open their priestly ears to the mind-numbing experience. No wonder a priest once compared nuns’ confessions to being pelted to death by popcorn. But ah, the deference—the over-the-top hospitality priests receive the minute they step into the motherhouse. We serve them on our best china in the special priests’ dining room, and during weeklong retreats we clean and tidy their rooms and do their laundry—even ironing their undershorts.
So, here comes my new priest friend, William, to visit, and I am ready. I am so ready. We’ll be in New Orleans for two days—Chris is coming in, so she can meet him—and we’ll visit in Baton Rouge, so Will can meet my family. I take Sister Rita with me to meet him at the airport. When we were in London, priest-nun rules were a lot looser, but here in Catholic New Orleans, the rule is that it’s not considered proper for nuns even to sit in the front seat of a car with a man, lest scandal arise.
William’s visit will be very much a community affair—I’m making sure of that. Every event will send the strong signal: He’s my friend, but we’re not going to run off and get married. William will share a meal with the Sisters in my community and say Mass at the motherhouse. He’s good about going with the program, and he remembers names and teases the older Sisters, drawing them out. He’s charming, and he really knows his theology, so his homilies have heft and make people think.
Priests always know theology better than nuns do. Their seminary training is more rigorous than our highly devotional studies, and they’re grounded not only in philosophy and theology but in canon law as well. As for canon law—no big loss there for me. I never did have much desire to learn the legal code of the Church. But Vatican II shifted the balance dramatically, and nuns began relentlessly pursuing studies in scripture, theology, and spirituality.
Sadly, parish priests always have one foot nailed to the ground of administration of the parish along with their pastoral duties: saying daily Mass and maybe six Masses on Sunday, and hearing confessions, visiting and anointing the sick, and all their other sacramental duties. We nuns are freer to study. And study we do, getting BAs and MAs and PhDs in our professional fields as educators, and taking advantage of local classes, workshops, seminars, and symposia in theology on weekends and summers. We’re all over the study thing. (We still are.) Talk about a turnaround. When, in the late fifties, a member of our community, Sister Jane Aucoin, went to study at Notre Dame University, she was talking to a priest, and he asked her what she was studying, and when she said theology, he said, No, nuns study religious education—only priests study theology.
So, now in 1968, I’m excited to hear that leadership has selected me to study for a master’s in theology at Notre Dame. My community has worked it out with Cabrini Parish for me to study in the summer. This will be rigorous, disciplined study with first-rate scholars, which I know I need, and I’m keen as all get-out to study scripture, with all its varied literary genres: mythology (Garden of Eden), history (never straight-out history, always from the point of view of faith), and, of course, the four Gospels. I’ve been praying with the scriptures my whole life, but in a pious, not scholarly way, ferreting out personal inspiration wherever I can find it.
I read commentaries when I can, but that’s catch-as-catch-can. I want to know how the different parts of the Bible got composed and who the different authors were, the situations they were up against, and to whom they were pitching their message. You can be sure, for instance, that the last book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation—which sounds, in some parts, like a bad drug trip, filled as it is with fierce dragons, and, in other parts, like a war manual, with Jesus in the final battle coming back to earth with a sword in his mouth to cut unbelievers to ribbons—just had to be written by somebody or some community engulfed in a terrible persecution or war. I want to know how to interpret these writings.
One thing about William—he has a disciplined mind. He loves learning, knows how to do systematic research, and is good at presenting information crisply and cleanly. He knows a hundred times more about theology and history than I do, and that’s a big part of my attraction to him. He has great respect for the “scripture men,” and says that they’ve “paid their dues,” meaning the long, long years they spend learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic. I’m such a lightweight. I barely know a little French. Everything I read has to be in English.
HERE IN CABRINI Parish, an all-white suburb near Lake Pontchartrain, everything is neat and clean—houses with trimmed lawns, fathers with good jobs, wives busy with children, generous contributions in the packed Cabrini church on Sunday mornings, most children in Catholic schools.
If I were to venture six blocks south down St. Bernard Avenue and take a quick left, I’d be in the St. Bernard housing project, where African Americans live. But that’s a world away from my life now. What’s happening to African Americans in the ten major housing projects of New Orleans is not my concern. They’re not “my people.” My people are the parishioners of Cabrini Parish, and all I want to do is get in there with some good religious education so we can revitalize our Catholic faith.
I put a notice in the Cabrini bulletin and issue an open invitation to people to join an adult discussion group. Pretty mild stuff—a group of grown-ups meeting to discuss religious beliefs. Not exactly a revolutionary cadre. But for the Catholic Church it’s going to be revolutionary, all right. The axis of teaching authority is about to undergo a radical turn. For the first time, regular folks, the laity, are going to dig into the faith in light of their own life experiences, weighing, discerning: Yes, this rings true, or, No, that can’t possibly be right—that doesn’t make any sense.
A new form of authenticity is being born. It’s not that we’re becoming a loose conglomerate of fierce individualists, each going his or her own way. Not that. Belonging to the Catholic family means taking seriously what has been handed down in the tradition. But there’s no denying the fresh spirit of inquiry rippling through us all. At last, there’s respect for individual conscience. It has another name: religious liberty. Vatican II was the first Catholic council ever to unequivocally affirm religious liberty for other faiths. So, how could it affirm this freedom for other religions while not also affirming freedom of conscience for its own members?
This, of course, means an educated conscience, and that’s where I come in—that’s my job. Once adults in the Church come into their own and begin taking personal responsibility for their faith, a top-down authoritarian church is bound to lose traction. Simple juridical pronouncements about faith or moral behavior will no longer be enough to ensure compliance, to say nothing of threats of censorship or punishment. Something more will be required: moral authority—which persuades rather than dictates.
The Dutch Catechism that I gave to Chris is something new in the Catholic Church—new because it didn’t come from Catholic central headquarters (the Vatican), but from a local gathering of Catholic bishops—in this case, from the Netherlands. As a result of their experience at the council, these bishops felt empowered to be pastors to their people in a whole new way, and here’s their catechism to prove it. Before Vatican II, a bishop tended to see himself solely as a delegate or vicar of the pope. But the experience of collaboration with the global body of two thousand bishops from around the world changed all that. The publication of the catechism in 1966, just one year after the council ended, put the Dutch bishops in the forefront of pastoral leadership. The dust jacket of the catechism states:
The greatest overall achievement of the Second Vatican Council was its conscious proclamation that Christianity is an adult religion. It is the child who leads a submissive, compliant existence….In controversial areas, rather than supply a traditional though unsatisfactory solution, it is frankly acknowledged that a great many problems remain unsolved, and that only time and candor in the face of reality will provide answers.
Candor in the face of reality? How about this rambunctious reality: College students taking to the streets, occupying buildings, burning draft cards to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. And not only young people, but two priests—Daniel and Philip Berrigan—burning draft files, getting arrested, going to trial, where they make impassioned speeches, quoting Jesus’s own words: “Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who mourn, who hunger for justice.”
Everywhere, every place you look, young people are questioning church, government, educational institutions. Bumper stickers are popping up with the words “Question Authority,” and at our own St. Joseph Academy in New Orleans, a small group of African American students are refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag. There’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and right here in the Cabrini neighborhood, a few African Americans are moving into the previously all-white Parkchester Apartments, which unleashes a firestorm of fears: “Property values will plummet; the neighborhood’s going to go to the dogs!” Then, there’s the cataclysmic assassination of Martin Luther King, which sets off rioting in D.C. and Detroit, Harlem, and Watts. The lid, it seems, is coming off the whole blooming country, everything busting wide open, kids with long, shaggy hair and beards and beads around their necks, demonstrating and singing protest songs.
These bristling realities will be a large part of the subjects I’ll be dealing with in Cabrini Parish. I’m thinking of what Bob Dylan says: “The times they are a-changing.” And that other line: “It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.” It’s a good time, a wonderful time, to be a young nun.