Those Old Italian Nuns

Ariel Edes

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ast autumn, I visited a Franciscan convent twice a week. It was a small convent, but its nuns came from many places: Italy, Romania, Kenya, Zambia, and America. Eight nuns called the place home.

   

Prayer cards, rosaries, neon buttons with the Pope’s face on them, religious trinkets of different kinds were strewn across the the carpet. The nuns were selling them as gifts.  Sister Ann was arranging them in a display cabinet. Classical music played from an old radio in the kitchen. 

“In Assisi I was known to go to all the concerts,” Sister Ann said. 

She placed a box of colored Italian glass, pieces shaped like candy or flowers, on a low shelf. “I’d like to have it be all Franciscan, but I don’t know where this would go.” She put a Kenyan hippo carved from wood on a Romanian cloth she’d spread out on the center shelf.  She stooped to pick up dolls from Korea and a silk sachet.

I picked up a photograph of a bronze sculpture. It was a picture of one of the outdoor sculptures that the town of Assisi had installed to depict scenes from Saint Francis’ life.

“See” said Sister Ann. “There are three monks. One is looking at the stars and kind of measuring…” She lifted her fingers to her eye as if measuring the width between two stars. “One is kind of designing something in the sand, and Francis--Francis is just on his back looking up.”

 

The sisters’ car was parked out back, behind the convent, beside the basketball hoop someone had nailed to the house. Sister Violeta climbed into the passenger seat; I took the back seat. Sister Ann drove.

Long roots of pine trees gripped the eroding embankment of the driveway. Sister Ann steered past the statues of Mary and Francis. The sisters kept silent for a moment before reciting a sequence of prayers beginning with the Hail Mary. They crossed themselves, forehead-belly-shoulder-shoulder.

There was a little plastic Jesus by the heating vent and a Catholic social justice newsletter on the seat. Otherwise, it was a secular car. We were driving Sister Violeta to her English grammar class.

“But I don’t learn much grammar,” Sister Violeta said in her quiet sad voice, as though she didn’t want to be heard. She had lived in the United States for a year.

“Will your classes end for vacation soon?” I asked.

“In December,” she said.

“You must be happy about that.”

“No,” she said.

“You’ll have to practice speaking English with us afterwards,” Sister Ann said. 

The road ahead was slick with rain. Sister Ann slowed the car to a crawl.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get there,” she said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

She pulled into the circle drive of Holyoke Community College. Sister Violeta stepped out.  Students waited for their rides: bored twenty-somethings, wearing backpacks with attached water bottles. They didn’t glance at the grey-habited Romanian nun approaching the cement buildings.

 

Sister Chiara wore a plaid apron over her habit. This was the first time I had visited when Sister Ann was absent. 

“We were going to have a feast, but Sister Ann isn’t back,” Sister Chiara said. She scrutinized the label on two packages of egg noodles, then ripped open a bag. Several twisted yellow noodles fell to the counter. “Oops,” she said to herself. She accompanied her progress in the kitchen with muttered words. Her hairline was marked by brown age spots.

“We take turns,” she said to me. “It comes often, my turn, when someone is gone, missing.  That’s okay,” she said. Sister Ann was in Albany, taking care of her mother.

She dumped the noodles into a pot of boiling water. In a separate pot, she cooked some broccoli. Then she sat down across from me. 

“You moved here in 1961?” I asked.

“1962. We came three of us, from Italy, and we found two other sisters at the airport to get us.” Of the original five Italian sisters in the United States, only Sister Chiara remains. One became sick after three months and returned to Italy. One went to a mission in Africa and then left the sisterhood. One was sent to another community. One decided this wasn’t her vocation. 

“How many sisters have come and gone?” I asked.

“How many? I don’t know. Different ones. Let’s see,” she said. She rubbed a finger against her cheek. “They came. No one stays. One way or another they leave back.”

“How come you stayed when they all left?”

Sister Chiara beamed at me. “How come I stayed? It’s a good question.” She went to the stove and lowered the heat under the noodles.

“I thought my vocation was to come here,” she said. “My vocation was always to be a missionary. When I was a novice, I said to the Mother, ‘I don’t mind going.’ Though I would prefer Africa or somewhere else more like a mission. But anywhere you go is a mission.”

She sat at the table again. “You always ask yourself, why here? Seeing people who need so many things. No matter where you go, inside or outside, is a mission.”

“Did you ever think of joining a cloistered order instead?”

Sister Chiara returned to the stove. “Let’s see.” She lifted the heavy pot of broccoli and walked quickly to the sink, emptying it into a colander. Steam rose from the broccoli. While it drained, she turned back and talked with me.

“This idea of going out. I knew how to sew. If I sew for the friars, even if I do not go out, they are going out.” She meant that she was contributing to missionary work even while working for the friars. 

 

It was time for prayer. 

“Meditation,” Sister Luminita said. 

“Quiet time,” said Sister Chiara.

The sisters sat one per pew. I looked at the backs of their heads in front of me. Panels of stained glass alternated with clear windows. From the pews, the sisters could see their backyard. A piece of apple wood held up the altar. Its empty white tablecloth conveyed a feeling of expectation. The wood was from the crux of two apple branches, intricately whorled.

In the rack ahead of me, a prayer card testified to the memory of a sister who had died. It paraphrased the Biblical passage about Jesus’ resurrection: ‘Non stare vicino alla mia tomba a piangere. Io non sono qui; non sono morta.’ ‘Do not remain close to my tomb to cry. I am not here; I am not dead.’

I looked at the carving of Mary beside the altar. She was three times bigger than the crucifix. Human size. Sister Ann said she was a gift from the friars. Mary held a golden basket for the Eucharist. Her skin and robes were carved from a beige wood. The more I looked at her, the more alive she looked. Over the rims of my glasses, her eyes seemed to flicker.

The phone rang. The sisters did not stir. The answering machine clicked onto speakerphone. ‘You have reached five eight two…’

A pipe clattered. None of the sisters moved.

“Jesus, we thank you,” Sister Luminita said. She led the prayer. “We adore you,” she said. The other sisters replied, “We bless you.” Sister Luminita’s high voice and Sister Ann’s low one bracketed the quiet voices in between.

 

Sister Ann led me to the second dining room to talk. A lace tablecloth covered the table. A glass vial of grappa al mirtillo was tucked among the glasses and dinnerware, rarely used, displayed in the dark wood cabinet. On top, there was a set of three-inch, rosy-cheeked, porcelain nuns, dressed in habits, holding baseballs and mitts.

"A gift from long ago," Sister Ann said. Since entering as a postulant in 1978, she has watched the community evolve.

I chose the seat nearest the window. It was foggy and dark. The overhead electric chandelier remained off. Sister Ann sat beside me, laying out a piece of stationary and a pencil. The house was quiet. 

“Our expansion worldwide in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s,” she began. She spoke in fragments at first, gesturing with her glasses. “We’re different from other American communities. Our struggle – ‘already or not yet.’ We can be perceived as pre-Vatican II, simply because we wear the habit here, but I know that in our heart and in our ministry we’re not. Other communities look ultramodern, but I don’t think they’re connected to their roots.” 

She began to speak more quickly. 

“What is our gift – chastity, poverty? A priest that was teaching us said it was community, fraternal life. Not ‘be holy’, ‘be holy together.’ It’s an adunanza, you can’t do that alone. That stuck with me.” Adunanza means “gathering.”

Sister Carol had been looking at the vase of synthetic roses and lily of the valley in front of her. Now she looked at me with excitement.

“Especially as Franciscans. ‘God gave me brothers.’ And that was an essential part of how he lived, accepting that gift. Whenever we go to Assisi – just ten of us – we witness. Same dress, five different nationalities. That has to say something about who we are and who we want to be.” She seemed surprised at herself.

“I’m preaching to you today."

 

The table in the main dining room was a long, handsome piece of mahogany. A Virgin Mary nightlight cast a gentle glow on the dining room’s thermostat. Mary’s pure heart shown beneath her clasped hands. On the table, all the napkin holders were mismatched. Some were cheap plastic, some were beautifully carved wood.

The sisters stood behind their places at the table. They prayed with their hands folded over the backs of their chairs. “Bless us O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord, amen.” They crossed themselves and sat.

“Welcome,” they said to me.

Sister Chiara remained standing with a ladle in her hand  “Do you like soup?” she asked me. “Lenticchie?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Lentil soup,” Sister Ann said to the table. “Not everyone speaks Italian.”

Sister Chiara handed me a bowl with an inch of noodles, lentils, and carrots under broth. 

“You can have more, of course,” she said. She muttered something about how she hadn’t known, and how this was “poor people’s food.”

My spoon stirred lentil dust into the broth.  It tasted salty and thin. The sisters each took a single Low Fat Ritz cracker from a box.

Sister Evelyn began to tell us about a conference she had gone to. 

“The other sisters wear earrings and suits,” she said.

“And pants,” said Sister Chiara.

“You can’t tell they are sisters,” Sister Evelyn complained. “Suits of all different colors. We in our black and white habits looked like penguins. ‘Those old Italian nuns’, they said. They didn’t know what we were, nuns or penguins.”

Sister Betsey and Sister Luminita began talking about school. 

“Our classrooms are next to each other,” Sister Betsey said. She wore a sweatshirt from her college, Our Lady of the Elms, over her traditional clothes. “We hear them. In my economics lectures, they are laughing. We are studying, they are watching movies.”

“Not all the time,” said Sister Luminita. “Only three times this semester we watched a film.”

“And you’ve had six classes,” Sister Betsey teased. “Almost every class.”

“Last year, in History of Oppression, it was movies every class, it’s true,” Sister Luminita admitted. “I was saying, ‘Oh my God.’”

“What oppression,” Sister Iulia put in.

“But now, only sometimes.”

“You’ve moved on to Salvation,” Sister Barbara said.

The sisters thought this was very funny.

“Mamma mia,” Sister Evelyn exclaimed, shaking her head.

“Any tests today? Any papers?” Sister Barbara asked the Elms College students.

“I have to write two papers,” Sister Luminita said. “For Theology, about how the Church has changed. I said to the teacher, ‘I was not born with the nuns.’”

“You weren’t born in a convent?” said Sister Barbara. “She must have been surprised.”

All the sisters laughed.

Sister Luminita was serious. When the sisters stopped laughing, she explained. 

“No, I didn’t grow up with nuns. Here you had Catholic schools. We didn’t have any of that. How the Church has changed in the past fifty years, I don’t know.”

Sister Barbara said she thought her students might imagine she was born in a convent herself.

“When one of my students found out I had a brother – ‘You have a brother??’ – ‘Yes, I have a brother, and I have a mother and a father too.’”

 

I asked Sister Ann about being a sister in contemporary America. She said, “We’re as suspect as anybody else. I don’t want to be on a pedestal. We witness, but it’s not that we have an answer, The Answer – that’s not it at all."

“That’s good,” she said, pointing to a page of my notes. I had copied a line from a book that she’d translated, Assi: Encounters That Make History.

The followers of Jesus and Francis are not scholars who deal with ideas. They are people who are capable of believing, to the depths of their being, and of paying for, with their own flesh and blood, whatever their minds have understood and their hearts have dreamed. (De Roma, 31)

 

Sister Evelyn carried food and tableware into the kitchen. Sister Ann poured the leftovers into dishes. Sister Chiara arranged what was left in the fridge. Sister Betsey rinsed dishes; Sister Iulia stacked them in the dishwasher; Sister Violeta stood by with a dishtowel in hand to dry water-pitchers or other clean things. They were mostly silent, practiced. Sister Chiara cleaned the tinfoil, brushing it repeatedly with a towel until it was clean and shiny. She put it aside to reuse. 

The sisters entered the chapel singly. Each first knelt in front of the altar and then at her usual pew. I chose an empty pew, usually occupied by sister Evelyn, who was working late at catechism class tonight.

I flipped through Liturgy of the Hours in the rack ahead of me. Tassels and loose pieces of paper marked the pages. There was a blue, construction paper bird, wings outspread, onto whose breast the word sapienza was glued. There was also a prayer of Francis’; at the end of which someone had written in cursive "'I chose to call you because you need it more than the others.' Sufi Master."

The liturgy began when all the sisters were kneeling. They took turns reading aloud. Some of the sisters had trouble reading the psalms. “Unless you acquire the heart of a child, you cannot enter the kingdom of God,” Sister Violeta read, carefully pronouncing the “h.” 

“Rejoice in hope, be patient under trial…”  She looked at the liturgy doubtfully.

“…pre-…preserve in prayer.” She waited, then read the word again: “persevere.”

Sister Iulia pointed to an insert in the book that listed the daily Vocation Petitions. “Lord, let our community grow in numbers and grace,” we intoned.

Everyone knows: The population of religious women has been shrinking.

Steadily shrinking.

“We pray for Sister Ann’s parents,” said Sister Chiara. “Lord, give them strength.”

“We pray for the new government leaders,” said Sister Betsey. “Let them carry out the promises they have made to the people.”

After the conclusion of the prayer, Sister Iulia knelt by the altar. 

She blew out the candle, and turned out the light.

 

 

Photo Credits:
St Francis, Convent Entry, Sister Chiara mending, Sister Luminita washing dishes, Chapel window: Ariel Edes.
First sisters in America, Sister Ann awaiting the Pope's address: courtesy of the Sisters.