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CHAPTER 1

Oh Sister, Where Art Thou?

"WHAT'S A NUN?"

"Don't be a smart-aleck, Yvonne," Mrs. Ogle told her fourth graders. That morning's CCE instructions called for discussing vocations such as joining the priesthood or becoming a nun. "You know, women who join religious orders and spend their lives totally devoted to God."

None of her students responded.

"Women who take vows of poverty, chastity, obedience?"

Nothing. Not a word from the nine-year-olds, most too young to know the meaning of chastity and none of them keen on poverty or obedience.

"They're called 'sisters' and wear special clothing that sometimes includes a veil?"

Finally, a hand in the back of the room crept upward.

"Yes, Maggie."

"My parents told me about sisters from the olden days. They were really old, even older than you, Mrs. Ogle," Maggie explained as her classmates snickered. "And they didn't have hair!"

"Um, Maggie, that's not exactly true."

"Some were really fun. My mother remembers playing hopscotch with them," Maggie went on. "And they were smart, too. Dad says they seemed to always know what he was up to, even before he knew. Sorta like mom, I guess."

"Mrs. Ogle, tell us more about sisters! Where are they now?" her class pleaded.

Nuns had been fixtures in Catholic schoolrooms for decades. As permanent as Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, sisters were a part of every Catholic kid's routine — like it or not.

From the time they awoke until after nightly prayers, Catholic schoolchildren's lives were touched by nuns. Mark would run straight past his bowl of Puffa Puffa Rice and into the bathroom every morning so he could dig night gunk out of his ears. He figured Sister Anastasia would be inspecting them later that day. Kris would scoot out the door and grab her uniform beanie knowing Sister Elizabeth would be standing at the church doorway checking for head coverings. How Kris hated getting stuck with a makeshift veil, one of Sr. Elizabeth's old tissues that she pulled out of her oversized sleeves like a magic trick and bobby-pinned not-so-gently on barren heads.

Outside Catholic schools, nuns' austere habits and sheltered lifestyles veiled them from most of the world. They were novelties, even to cradle Catholics. To casual observers, they were God's angels, creatures of mystery cloaked in awe. To millions of Catholics, nuns were teachers, nurses, confidantes, spiritual mothers, and defenders of the faith. Living symbols of piety, hope, and charity, they were simply "sisters." And they were everywhere.

Like military recruits answering a call to duty, hundreds of thousands of women enlisted in God's army as foot soldiers serving in America. Hometown girls, often inspired by sisters who taught them, signed up by the dozens. Some even went on to establish their own orders. Sister Elizabeth Seton formed the Sisters of Charity, while Mother Katharine Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People during the nineteenth century. Both eventually became saints.

Others traveled from afar, participants in a spiritual French Foreign Legion fulfilling a sacred mandate. For example, Sisters of Mercy came from God's country, Ireland, to spread His holy word and the legend of St. Patrick but not necessarily in that order. The nuns established missions in America that brought them face-to-face with war, disease, and anti-Catholic hatred. By the 1950s, nuns' front lines shifted to baby-boomer classrooms. Sisters took on new battles — shielding youngsters from Elvis's pelvis and Marilyn's pucker. This proved a more daunting battle than war, disease, and anti-Catholic hatred.

While nuns came from and taught in different places, the experiences they bestowed on their charges were eerily the same. Whether preparing youngsters to receive the Church's sacraments or explaining to them what little they knew about the facts of life, nuns everywhere seemed to teach from the same handbook.

Children who had never met and lived thousands of miles apart from each other in Brooklyn and Los Angeles learned blood oozed out of the communion host if they bit into it. They were chewing Jesus, sisters explained. Students in Pittsburgh and Buffalo reported the price for chewing gum in their schools was having it stuck to their noses. Almost universally, adolescent girls were taught to be wary of boys wearing patent leather shoes. After all, they did reflect up!

Occasionally, inquisitive (and nervy) children asked sisters how their lessons could be the gospel truth when their sources couldn't be tracked down. Searches of the Gospels, Baltimore Catechism, and even Mad Magazine revealed no such information, youngsters claimed. Good nuns everywhere referred to their manuals and delivered identical responses: "It's a divine mystery."

Whether on target or not, sisters delivered the Church's teachings, along with an outstanding secular education, with passion and verve. They did so using their own recipe: mixing large doses of determination and motivation with a pinch of fear and throwing in a touch of palm swatting to taste.

By 1965, a record 5.5 million children attended Catholic schools staffed almost entirely by nuns. Parents deposited their children on sisters' doorsteps each Monday morning, just as their parents and grandparents had done. Stepping into a class taught by nuns was just one more Catholic ritual, like toting tuna sandwiches to school each Friday or lining up for weekly confession on Saturdays. Children blossomed under the sisters' unwavering devotion while the nuns' firm discipline helped students settle into the required one-size-fits-all learning environment. Sisters taught students both to love and fear God. Along the way, children grew to love and fear the nuns, too.

"What was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be." Every Catholic embraced the notion that life with nuns would be everlasting.

That was not to be.

Nearly overnight and much like the habits they wore, nuns seemed to disappear. Perhaps the ninety-hour workweek wore them down, or maybe it was facing fifty or sixty students at a time, but it looked as if God's army went AWOL.

Many weren't physically gone, but their identifiable marks were. Missing were head-to-toe shrouds, monastic lifestyles, and traveling in packs like wolves. Sisters traded in their medieval drapes for street-length attire but kept their trademark black shoes. They replaced flowing, offbeat headdresses with petite veils exposing hair for the first time. Names changed, too. Mystic-sounding Sr. Euphrasia became Sr. Sara while masculine Mother Paul turned into Sr. Karen.

Oh, Sister, where art thou? Why hast thou left?

The Catholic Church's Second Vatican Ecumenical Council — Vatican II — which convened in 1962, set forth a wave of modernization and unleashed the "Church's revolution," as one man described it. Trying to open up to the masses, the Church gave itself an overhaul that created more angst than the switchover from Bewitched's Darrin #1 to Darrin #2.

Face-to-face reconciliation replaced anonymous dark-room confessions, and priests no longer had their backs to congregations during Mass. Along with the facelift came serious house cleaning, discarding centuries-old practices to a holy landfill. Latin Mass, mandatory head coverings for women, and nuns themselves, it seemed, were tossed aside like St. Christopher's relics. Worst of all to some, silent head nodding replaced moaning breast thumping, and parishioners actually touched each other with handshakes during Mass. Some married couples even kissed, in church, for Godless sake! What were elderly churchwomen to make of it all?

When Vatican II Council ended in 1965, nearly 180,000 sisters served in the United States. The next year, that number began to decline; by 2004, the Church counted fewer than 75,000 nuns in its service. Sisters were disappearing. Some searched out new front lines serving the poor and less fortunate. Others simply left their orders. Compounding the matter, new recruits weren't joining in large enough numbers to replace departures. Sisters had all but vanished, relegating a significant chunk of Catholic heritage to memories. What memories those were!

Nuns were much more than stereotypical knuckle-crackers and pious disciples. Filled with a bulldog's determination and the singleminded passion of a hungry farm cat stalking its prey, sisters created uniquely colorful experiences for generations of schoolchildren. From those adventures came inspired storytelling.

Driven by a poker player's up-the-ante mentality, yarn spinners tried outdoing each other. Nun-story-swapping evolved into a form of entertainment, typically beginning when a couple of students gathered together outside parish grounds. "Sister Gerald caught me talking in the bathroom line and made me clean out the stalls for a week," one youngster might begin, quickly folding when his companion topped him with a tale of Sr. Mary Cavanaugh chasing down a student through the parking lot after he told her homework was a "crappy idea."

From there, storytelling one-upmanship evolved into a vocation to "Go forth and share the truth." Some of the most powerful tales came out of religious beliefs and practices that sisters taught their students.

Stephanie (Sellers) Mazzon recalled her First Holy Communion fiasco in Seymour, Indiana. She lived out every second grader's communion nightmare — vomiting. She threw up Jesus! More than thirty years later, she cringed at the memory while her listener blanched, remembering her own Sister Mary Joseph's admonition never to touch Jesus' body — let alone spew Him out.

Sisterly discipline triggered some of the most captivating memories. One woman talked about the day a nun banished her to a closet. After Sr. Georgiana caught Betsy Adams crowing like a rooster to her classmates, she decided the teenager needed more time practicing her newly found talent. Sister forced Adams to spend an hour in a cloakroom crowing the entire time.

Another man recalled a classmate presenting a bamboo stick to a sister as a gift. Maybe the young boy hoped she would thank him for his gesture by "sparing the rod" the next time he got out of line. No such luck. Like the mad scientists on so many cartoon shows of the day, the boy was doomed by his own invention and earned the privilege of allowing Sister to break in the gift on him.

Poignant memories demonstrating nuns' powerful influence have made for stirring storytelling. An elderly woman tearfully recalled the day more than fifty years earlier when doctors advised her and her husband not to have any additional children. Their firstborn child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a genetic, fatal disease. Distraught, the couple confided in Sr. Cecelia. Sister Cecelia was more than a spiritual advisor to the couple; she was the woman's blood-sister.

"Don't fret," Sister Cecelia told the couple. "Remember, God will give you no more than you can bear." Her unflinching faith convinced the couple to have more children. They produced eight more children, none suffering from the deadly disease.

Many stories moved beyond nostalgic recollections to legends-in-the-making. Tales of gate-hurdling nuns, nuns toting guns, and even bare-all skinny-dipping sisters surfaced, opening the doors for new material to entertain future audiences.

Although old-style Catholic nuns have slipped away, memories shared by the millions they touched will never fade. Recollections become more meaningful each time they're passed along, as New Yorker Tamara Valles revealed with her remembrances of a special sister:

Sister Bon Bon Lives On

As a reporter for the Staten Island Advance, part of my job has been reviewing the paper as it came off the presses, checking for mistakes. Sometimes I was fortunate to have the time to peruse the paper from a reader's perspective. One Monday, enjoying just that luxury, I flipped through the pages and paused to read a few stories.

I stopped at the obituary page. As a twenty-five-year-old, I didn't often read that page unless I was reviewing an obituary I had written. For some reason, maybe because it was a slow news day or I just had a few extra minutes, I skimmed the listings. A name jumped off the page:

"Sister Bonaventure Scarangella"

My mind spun backward to when I was a small child. My parents and grandparents often told me many stories about the nuns who taught them. The tales that stuck out most in my mind were those about how the naughty children were disciplined — hands mercilessly slapped with rulers, girls' hair and boys' ears pulled, and kids forced to stand in a classroom corner for hours. Although those stories frightened me, I didn't dwell on them. I attended public school, after all.

I began to worry about those stories when, as an eleven-year-old, I was enrolled in Catholic school. Trying to calm myself, I reasoned that nuns were devoted to God and probably much sweeter, kinder, gentler folks than those remembered by older family members. They were admirable women bearing qualities of honesty, love, and respect, right?

On their good days, they were. On their not-so-good days ... well, God help the soul who crossed them. Especially if the nun happened to be Sr. Bonaventure.

Sister "Bon Bon" gave new meaning to the word "tough." She was born and raised in Brooklyn, possessing that city's trademark attitude and accent. If anyone broke the rules, Sister Bon Bon could be counted on to share a few very loud words with the culprit. Subtlety, thy name was not Sister Bon Bon.

Sister usually backed up her words with action, sometimes in creative ways. Caught chewing gum in class? Bon Bon stuck it on your nose, where it stayed for the day. Didn't turn in your spelling homework? Sister required you to write the words hundreds of times or until your wrist turned limp. Dared to clown around, interrupt the class, and generally act like a bratty kid? Bon Bon forced offenders to kneel by their desks for an hour or so, never allowing them to lean back on their heels.

I was one of the overachievers in Sister's class and usually didn't rile her merciless side. However, I never did take the hint that I talked too much in her class! She scolded me about that more times than I care to remember.

It was easy to whine about Sister's stern demeanor and to protest that we could never get away with anything. She seemed to have eyes in the back of her habit! When we weren't fussing over Sister's rigid manner, we moaned about her drill-sergeant techniques, such as requiring us to repeat over and over again in a sing-song fashion a list of one hundred prepositions or the eight parts of speech.

Sister also freely dished out advice, sometimes even evoking a chuckle or two from us. Whenever the classroom topic turned to sex and dating, which happened quite often during my inquisitive preteen years, Sr. Bon Bon admonished us with: "Remember, girls, no one will want to buy the cow if the milk is given away for free."

As rough as Sister Bon Bon seemed, I now realize she was trying to prepare me for life. Her job was to produce first-class students with the intentions of turning them into well-educated, decent, moral adults. She took to that vocation with passion and drive.

As I read Sister's obituary, I was taken aback with shock and genuine sadness. Remorse hit me hard, too, as I regretted not visiting her after my eighth-grade graduation and for never making the time to write her a letter, thanking her for everything she meant to me. And now she was gone.

I was struck by a parting thought as I lay down the obituaries and turned to my job as a features writer. I hoped my subjects and verbs always agreed and that I used my prepositional phrases in precisely the right way. Sister Bonaventure, perched above in heaven, would easily discover otherwise and certainly find a way to make me repent my grammatical sins. Rightly so, too.

God bless you, Sr. Bon Bon. Rest in peace.

* * *

My years with the nuns were filled with learning prayers, memorizing the Baltimore Catechism, preparing for and learning how not to "chew Jesus." But nothing is more memorable than when Sister put the fear of God in me. Actually, it was a fear of hell.

For hell to have meaning, Sister first taught us how perfect heaven was. It was a place where you'd find candy, your favorite food, no homework, or your dead hamster from kindergarten brought back to life. Generally, heaven was pretty much the opposite of what I was going through in second grade.

Hell was another matter. Words alone couldn't adequately convey the despair of an eternity roasting in an all-consuming fire, so Sister relied on St. John's Catechism Film Strip series. Even though there was no color and sound was iffy, the movie presented a horrific depiction of hell complete with fire, brimstone, and revolting characters.

It showed new arrivals to hell: a blue-collar laborer, a perky housewife sporting a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat, and a business executive wearing his gray power suit, skinny tie, and still toting a briefcase. None were too happy about walking through the inside of a giant Weber grill as the devil and his creepy companions leered and poked at them. The only thing missing was Jason in his hockey mask.

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Excerpted from "Don't Chew Jesus!"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Danielle Schaaf and Michael Prendergast.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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