A trio of skipping Sisters of St. Martha are pictured at Scarborough Bluffs Park.Harold Robinson/The Globe and Mail
Allison Grande is a producer, integrated project manager, writer and editor of special interest features for Maclean’s magazine.
The nuns at Our Lady of Mercy could be ruthless.
I vividly remember the day Sister Kateri decided to announce each student’s IQ score to our Grade 5 class. Without warning. And while mine ranked second highest, I cringed when I was called up to the blackboard afterward to solve a math problem in what seemed, to my nine-year-old mind, an attempt to say: “See, this is what those with a higher IQ can do!”
Ugh. I shrank back into my seat, embarrassed by my participation in an exercise to make my classmates feel less-than.
Our Lady of Mercy was a convent school in Orchard Park, N.Y., meaning it housed both the school and the convent. To the right of the statue of Mother Mary was the school; to the left, the convent.
I often sneaked around the convent side, peering into the empty rooms amid the deafening silence coming from that side. What did the nuns do here? Most rooms had coffee tables surrounded by wooden chairs and small sofas upholstered in drab brown fabric. The religious art and crucifixes that adorned the walls bordered on the macabre. I wondered what kinds of conversations happened there. Did they talk about normal stuff or did they just pray? Did they ever play cards, listen to music, laugh? But, realizing that my extended washroom break might get me into trouble, I’d scurry back to my classroom to face the next dreaded task pressed upon me to perform.
Whether or not Sister Kateri had anything to do with my eventual abandonment of Catholicism or any other religion is unclear to me. But by the time I was 10 years old, I confronted my father with a firm belief that people only believe in God because they fear death. I asked him to end the torture of my elementary Catholic school education in favour of application to the private school of my choice in the city.
My father obliged, although I don’t think he had much choice. I switched schools, discovered Freud and enjoyed some concrete validation of my 10-year-old insight.
I came to Toronto to study psychoanalysis. A staunch Freudian at the ripe age of 17, I was adamant that any belief in God could only be explained in terms of humanity’s need for something beyond this life to hang our hopes on. This life couldn’t be it. That would be too devastating to swallow. Moreover, by assigning to God all of our greatest attributes, the “believers” seemed to be saying, “Hey, someone got it right, even if we didn’t." And He forgives us. And even better, if we’re not too bad, we might get a special place up there, beside Him. (Notice I’m using capitals, just in case.)
But despite all my precocious cynicism, critical thinking and studies, I remain fascinated by nuns.
My mother’s family were devout Catholics. My grandmother would routinely entertain priests for dinner at my grandparents’ house, with her usual spread of Italian-American delicacies: pasta in a homemade tomato sauce, rolled-meat bruscoli, sausages, stuffed peppers, fresh bread from the local Italian bakery. The wine, poured from bottles in straw casks, would flow liberally with the conversation.
I was so impressed by my grandmother’s allegiance to these priests that I actually wondered if she might be having an affair with one or more of them. Or at least fantasizing about it. When I was in Grade 10, I wrote a short story about her relationship to these priests (which, I should say, won me top prize in the short story contest at my school).
I saw up close how the priests got all the acclaim. They were wined and dined by parishioners, such as my grandparents, on a weekly basis. They had cars, money, invitations to events, tickets to the opera, vacation plans.
Yet nuns seemed entirely absent from parishioners’ appreciation – or anyone else’s appreciation, for that matter. They vowed a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, yet they worked hard, in hospitals, schools, orphanages and missions.
Some historians, such as Heidi MacDonald, dean of arts at the University of New Brunswick at St. John, claim that 40 per cent of our Catholic schools and hospitals were built on the backs of nuns between the late 19th and 20th centuries. But that contribution to the Canadian work force and economy has been deeply under-valued over the past century and a half in large part because Census Canada never accurately accounted for their work in their enumerations.
Nuns can be found in both Christian and Buddhist religions, but the vast majority in Canada have been Roman Catholic and affiliated with the schools and hospitals that served about 40 per cent of the population who identified with that denomination between 1871 and 1961, as noted by Dr. MacDonald.
The Ursulines were the first order of nuns to arrive in Canada in 1639, led by Marie de l’Incarnation. They established a convent in Quebec and started the first school for girls in North America. Their students were Indigenous and French girls. The Ursulines eventually spread their work West and as far south as New Orleans. I was lucky enough to visit the historic complex in the French Quarter which was a former site of the Ursuline Academy and now stands as a museum to commemorate their work not only in establishing the first Catholic school for girls in the United States in 1727, but in running an infirmary for the orphanage also housed within their convent. The current building that houses the Ursuline Academy is a few blocks up the street from the Old Ursuline Convent Museum and remains the oldest school for girls in the United States.
I ended up a producer in film. A few years ago, I pitched an idea about nuns to a major Canadian broadcaster. I had interviewed three nuns for this pitch, all of whom had fascinating stories about why they had chosen to enter the convent.
It seemed unfathomable to me that, despite the depravity in the world today, anyone could still see it fit to grant humanity that kind of devotion, and so I asked them the same question: “Where do you find such faith in humanity in this day and age?”
One said she felt a calling while acting in a production of the Dan Goggin musical Nunsense. And she needed to pursue that calling. Another intimated that, no matter the state of the world, there must be some who have faith both in humanity’s promise and in the effort to help those in need around the world. She turned down a marriage proposal in a three-year relationship in favour of a marriage to God and servicing those in need.
But who does this any more?
Well, it turns out that, despite a steady decline in the number of women joining the religious life between 1965 and about a decade ago, some orders are seeing a rise in women choosing the conventual life.
Over the past year, I’ve witnessed a group of nuns, on several occasions, enjoying the beach in my Toronto neighbourhood. The first time I observed them, they were running along the sand, their habits fluttering in the wind, giggling like school girls under the setting sun.
This image of them was so bracing that I stopped to watch them for a few minutes, while trying to be discreet about my spying. They appeared other-worldly: beacons of peace and days long gone by. They were the very essence of hope – in humanity. That they still existed in this world was anachronistic and marvellous all at the same time.
After a little digging, I figured out that the order of nuns I keep seeing on the beach are the Sisters of Life, a very traditional order of nuns that chooses to wear full habit all of the time. The Sisters of Life are one such order that is seeing rising numbers of women joining. Their order more than doubled in size between 2006 and 2016. And there seems to be a trend with orthodox orders gaining momentum in increasing size. The Dominican Sisters of Mary, a conservative order based in Ann Arbor, Mich., has recently expanded to Austin, Tex. Founded in 1997, they now have more than 120 sisters whose average age is 30.
Yet, despite the growth and contributions they’ve made to teaching, hospital work, institutionalized social work and missionary work for the past four centuries or so, nuns continue to play second fiddle to priests. Not only are they not allowed to be paid directly for their services – their paychecks go to the congregation – but they live in poverty, unlike the priests, who enjoy many accoutrements of life.
Nuns tend to stay out of trouble, too. And I would venture to say that anyone who still believes in the sanctity of the Catholic church might as well credit the nuns for their faith. Some priests sure let everyone down.
In pondering anyone’s motivation to join the religious life and to remain devoted both to God and to those in need, despite the dire state of the world and its increasing secularization, it occurs to me that there is something to be said for sheltering oneself from the drudgery of daily news. We are bombarded by evidence of a declining culture obsessed with empty celebrity and the pursuit of materialism, poisoned by political partisanship, marked by abuses of our most valued institutions – our courts, our legislatures, the very foundations of our democracy. Turning on the news on any given day is demoralizing, infuriating and just plain depressing.
The nuns sure seem to have it right. Turn off the news. Focus on the contemplative life, a life full of meaning, goodwill and service. Live actively, not reactively. Focus not so much on why there is so much turmoil and suffering in the world but, rather, on how you can make it better. How you can contribute to the healing, whether locally or abroad. Nuns don’t concern themselves with trivialities – they’re much more concerned with who is in need today, and how they can serve.
Perhaps if we all adopted this kind of single-mindedness and disregard for who is to blame, we’d all get along better. The nonsense of the world would be replaced by nun's sense. And I’m guessing we’d all be a lot better off.
And while I know very well that this utopian dream is never going to happen, it begs both consideration and considerable appreciation of their service. Not that they expect any thanks. The charitable work that nuns contribute is selfless, pure and not expectant of any reward – the very essence of virtue.
So my hope is that the next time you cross paths with a nun – on the street, in a grocery store, on the beach – you will stop to appreciate that you have been blessed. Not only by crossing paths with her, but by her presence in your world.
Editor’s note: (Apr. 29, 2019) A previous version of this piece incorrectly named the Dominican Sisters of Mary as the Dominican Sisters of Mercy.