Who Will Answer?

Sister Clement Mary wasn’t much of a nun, as far as I was concerned.

She was the last of my CCD teachers, back in seventh or eighth grade. Unlike the other nuns I’d encountered, she was thin and hyperactive and wore the then-new shorter habit. She was maybe a dozen years older than I was, and played guitar. Boy, did she love to play that guitar and sing new songs, songs we heard on the radio, like Ed Ames’ “Who Will Answer?” She’d swing that guitar around and strum like crazy as we all sang the lyrics, no one louder than she, about love and suicide and nuclear destruction and the verse that began, “Is our hope in walnut shells worn ’round the neck with temple bells…”

After Clement Mary, I had no contact with nuns for more than thirty years. After I returned to the Catholic Church in 2005, I was able to find her via e-mail. She’d left her order, married, and now was retired. She apologized profusely for not remembering me–I told her there was absolutely no reason she would–and wished me well.

Since then, I’ve grown in faith, and in my admiration for women religious. I think of Sister Jane Abeln, who for my fiftieth birthday took me to perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, an hour that quieted my soul in a way nothing but adoration ever has. I think of Sister Benedict Kesock, my current parish’s retired principal and the second woman religious ever to open the U.S. House in prayer, a woman who comforts those close to death in our community. And I think of Sister Joan Chittister, whose sermon at the National Cathedral a few years ago stirred my heart and whose books inspire me and propel me to write deeper and better.

I don’t always understand the totality of the issues that pit Catholic against Catholic, or the Church against the U.S. government. But I am troubled by the conclusions drawn by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, conclusions that seem to point to a hierarchy for social justice ministries. I signed a petition in support of the sisters, and pray for the conference members as they discern their response. I pray for us all that we lose no more sisters like Clement Mary. I am confident God will answer.