Lighting My Fire: Memoirs Between Two Worlds: the Passionate Journey of a Young American Woman

By Geraldine O’Leary-Macías

This book offers biographical aspects of the authoress and a selection of her conferences on the revolution in Nicaragua and the foreign politics of the United States in the 80s. The conferences were given to religious leaders, university students, the Reagan administration, and the Congress and leaders of diverse organizations in the United States.
It helps us to visualize the process of internal transformations that Maryknoll, the most revolutionary missionary order of the United States, experienced at that time and the participation of many of its members in the processes of change of Central America. Through her interesting annotations, the authoress helps us to visualize the process of internal transformation that Maryknoll suffered, and the participation of many of its members in that process of change given a quote of martyrdom. One of the nuns who worked in Nicaragua with the authoress, Sister Maura Clark, was murdered later in El Salvador together with others nuns as well a lay volunteer.
The book also offers a vision of the popular participation in the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979, an aspect little known and that the authoress was touched by. In 1992 she had to leave of Nicaragua and live in exile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466985995

Geraldine O’Leary-Macías

A young American woman who lived through the transformations of the ’70s in Latin America, first as a nun and later as a lay person. She lived ten years in Nicaragua doing social work and was present in the insurrection against the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. Her memoirs offer a vision of her journey and of the Nicaraguan revolution itself.

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Copyright 2013 Geraldine O’Leary-Macías.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8598-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8597-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-8599-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905776

Trafford rev. 05/30/2013

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Contents

Foreword Lighting The Fire Of Her Life By Edgard Macías

1 A Woman’s Mission

2 Maryknoll On The Hudson

Epistolary I

3 The Dream Begins

Epistolary II

4 Mission In Nicaragua

5 Sister Katie And Inprhu

Epistolary III

6 The Other Face Of The Revolution

7 Two Democratic Leaders

8 The Myth Of Solentiname Island

9 A Profile Of Genesis Ii

10 Exiles From The Land Of Lakes And Volcanoes

Epistolary IV

11 Crossed Paths

Epistolary V

12 An Idealistic Mother

13 Christians In The Revolution

14 The Democratic Left In The Revolution

15 Christian Base Communities: Spiritual Renewal Or Political Manipulation?

16 A New Christian Neo Colonialism

17 Helping With The Eyes Closed

Epistolary VI

18 The Most Dangerous Weapon

19 Geraldine Macias On Maryknoll

20 The Wanderer Asks Geraldine Macias About…

21 Ex-Nun Raps Sandinistas

Epistolary VII

Epistolary VIII

Afterword

Eulogy

Curriculum Vitae

Colophon From The Editor

Pictures

ALSO BY GERALDINE O’LEARY-MACIAS

The Puddle with No Bottom, 1972

Estimulación Infantil (Infant Stimulation); three pamphlets, 1975

Awareness Raising with Women’s Groups, 1977

I’ll Walk by Myself, 1977

El Parto Psicoprofiláctico (The Psychoprophylactic Labor), 1982

El Método de la Ovulación (The Ovulation Method), 1982

Renacer (Reborn), a bimonthly bulletin, 1979-1982

Manuelito (Little Manolo), a daily educational cartoon strip, 1981-1982

A New Christian Neocolonialism, 1983

Only Another Tyranny, pamphlet, 1983

A Revolution Stolen, 1984

Foreign Christians Are the Problem, 1983

Christian Base Communities, 1985

Nicaraguans in Exile, pamphlet, 1985 and 1987

The Church in Nicaragua, 1986

To

The people of Albert Lea, Minnesota

The people of Nicaragua

FOREWORD

Lighting the Fire of Her Life

by Edgard Macías

Heaven will be not heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.

—Andrew Jackson

I first saw Geraldine O’Leary on a Saturday afternoon. Destiny brought her to my home. At that time, March 1973, we were waiting for a new Maryknoll nun to join the Human Promotion Institute (INPRHU), where I worked. She was to work with Sister Kate Kelly (Madre Catalina) in directing religious activities in the communities where INPRHU worked, as well as be part of our adult education team. The previous Monday, Sister Catalina announced that the new nun would arrive on Friday afternoon; but for unknown reasons, she did not arrive until Saturday. After meeting her at the airport, Sister Catalina decided to stop by my house and introduce her to me since I lived on the way to OPEN 3, the large neighborhood where Maryknoll Sisters lived.

When the two Sisters entered my home, I was writing on an old typewriter.

Hola (hello), said Sister Catalina in her charming Spanish, this is Gerry, the new Sister who will work with us in INPRHU.

Hola, I said, greeting Gerry, we expected you yesterday.

Yes, she answered, problems with the airplane.

She was the sexiest nun I had ever seen, standing with a hand on her waist, with long dark hair, a purse hanging from her shoulder, and a light smile in her face. She wore a cream-colored blouse and a gray skirt.

At work, Gerry was a quiet but enthusiastic and cooperative member of the adult education team. She could quickly sketch pictures for work awareness, concientization, with each group we were working with. She liked to participate in assemblies and meetings about the situation in Nicaragua. Pretty but aggressive, said a friend who, like a good Nicaraguan man, preferred dependent and submissive women. The truth is, at first, Gerry was actually shy. But like others working with the psychosocial method, she changed and matured profoundly. Gerry became an enthusiastic social worker and leader, with an immense amount of energy and creativity, which she used to serve a good cause. While she already had good character, the psychosocial method helped to round out her development. After she was authorized to leave Maryknoll, her energy and initiative brought her to work with CEPAD, Comité Evangélico de Ayuda al Desarrollo or the Evangelic Committee to Help to Development, an umbrella organization of evangelical (Protestant) churches, where she began a program for children. Later, she worked for other agencies until she organized her own independent program, Genesis II. She used the slogan A new beginning for children who needs a better life. Despite its meager outside funding, she organized it so efficiently that it gained a great public image, with coverage on several radio programs and newspaper articles. She ran it with that legendary American administrative efficiency that, unfortunately, no longer exists.

The Maryknoll nuns were different from the Americans we had met before. They were made out of a special fiber suited for missionary work. As a result, they overcame the suspicion many Nicaraguans had developed following American interventions and were widely loved. They replaced the image of the arbitrary and interventionist ugly American with a different one, of Sisters living in the same conditions as the poor people they worked with.

When Gerry and I began to work together and became friends, I discovered she had a passion for missionary work. Immersing herself in both adult education and living in the Nicaraguan reality, she developed her concept of missionary work and a vision of herself as a missioner. No more naivetés. No more mission in a vacuum. For this reason, later on in exile, she was not simply a freedom fighter, but a missionary for democracy or, in the words of David Barron, chairman of the Jefferson Foundation of Washington DC, a champion of freedom.

She was also a natural for missionary work. Even after she left the religious order of Maryknoll, she continued being a Maryknoll at heart. She always had the zeal of missionary work. It was the same zeal, the same internal fire that impelled her to organize a program for children in CEPAD and found Genesis II. The same flame was still burning when she discovered the pediatric program at the University of Miami. She immersed herself in all of them, dedicating herself to them as if they were a mission. She was a believer in the Maryknoll founder’s thesis that mission is a concept, not a physical site. Therefore, denouncing the situation in Nicaragua was a mission for her. She fell in love with Nicaragua, its people, its landscape, and its lakes, which were so similar to those of her beloved Minnesota. Gerry was a voice for Nicaraguans, like a modern prophet who felt in herself the suffering of the people she had adopted when she married me. Nicaragua was her home, as she herself said in her memoirs. Being in exile affected her psychologically. She was born in a rural town in Minnesota and was educated in a religious order far from the mundane world. Then she went to live in Latin America, in countries like Panama and Nicaragua, and married a native who was also a social worker and a politician. Both her daughters were born there. She loved the United States, her Minnesota, her native town, the O’Leary Callahan clan, being an Irish; but her heart was in Nicaragua and its struggle for freedom, democracy, and development. As a result, when she left that country without even being able to take her family’s photograph albums, returning suddenly to the United States was like arriving in a foreign country, almost as strange to her as it was for me. Because of this, exile hit her as much as it did the Nicaraguans.

When she worked in Nicaragua, first as a religious missionary, then as a lay social worker, she made important contributions that I would like to describe here. In social services, Nicaragua has been moving very slowly toward modern methods. Assistance for poor and abandoned children in institutions, specifically orphanages founded and frequently ran by priests and nuns with good intentions but a traditional view of social assistance, was supported by some wealthy people and more recently by the National Board of Assistance and Social Prevention (JNAPS). This government agency has been trying to modernize the state bureaucracy that took care of social problems. But the situation in Nicaragua was so backward that it was difficult to make changes in the methods of providing assistance to women and children. The level of individualization of personal attention in institutions was minimal. When an abandoned child was found in a hospital or in the streets, the first reaction was to send him or her to an institution.

Gerry organized the first foster home program in Nicaragua, combined with a national and international adoption service supported by Holt International. She formed a network of Nicaraguan foster homes. When it was impossible for a child to be adopted in Nicaragua, her organization, Genesis II, looked for a placement outside the country, sometimes in the United States. Many children who didn’t have a childhood and youth with family love found foster homes and adoptive parents, thanks to these programs. Gerry also began to apply a holistic approach integral to adoption beyond the purely legal concept applied by lawyers. She saw adoption as a progressive psychosocial and human process, seeking the child’s benefit and finding the parents that would be most appropriate for him or her. Several letters from adoptive parents recognized this work. One of these letters addressed to Alana and Genevieve, our daughters, said, I know you will have many memories of the good things your mother did. I want you know that we also remember her with great affection. It is because of her that Chepita, who did not have a family in Nicaragua, now has a family that loves her and a comfortable home here. For that—and many other things—we will always remember Geraldine. Some Sandinistas accused Gerry and me of selling babies. What a contradiction! Genesis II did not receive any pay for its adoption services.

The heart of her innovations was the formation of a program for women, giving them advice, support, and assistance not only in physically related problems but also in seeking to reaffirm the personality of the Nicaraguan woman, improving her relationship with their children, and enriching her capacity as a mother. Among her other contributions in this area were the Lamaze method of childbirth, breast-feeding (through La Leche League), responsible parenthood (birth control) through the Billings method of family planning, and, last but not least, preschool education (the Montessori method).

All these tasks were made difficult by the closed minds of many people, including many medical doctors tied to the traditional concept of hospitalization. Many rejected breast-feeding and encouraged the use of the bottle, not as a supplement but as the primary feeding method. With the breast-feeding program, Gerry was part of the IBFAN (International Baby Food Action Network) and was elected coordinator for Latin America at its assembly in Geneva in 1981. But exile changed everything. In addition, Gerry made Genesis II a model of labor relations, establishing at its offices in the large house donated by the Christian Reform Church a Montessori preschool for the employees’ children and for the children living in the neighborhood. This was in a country with a forty-five-year-old labor law, which required every work center with more than thirty employees to have a child care center—and nobody had one.

There also was the DIACONIA handcraft workshop that produced beautiful paintings and other products under the direction of an English volunteer, Adrian Cliff. These all constituted a unique and tremendously original social-institutional complex. I cannot forget a small project that made many children and their parents happy: a reconstructive plastic surgery program that brought plastic surgeons to Nicaraguan to correct cleft palates and other similar problems. The Sandinistas later made this project part of the work of the health ministry.

I now see Gerry as some kind of King Midas in social services because she improved everything she touched. Even when she was the training director for Peace Corps volunteers in Nicaragua, she was concerned that they received a more realistic view of Nicaragua and its problems rather than just a theoretical one. Several of those volunteers became valuable allies of Genesis II, and some of them even worked as a volunteer there. Many, like Jay Wagner, became friends with the Macias family and would always remember their time with Geraldine Macias. How could this extraordinary work of a woman who did not have the millions of dollars of foreign aid the Sandinistas had, had not awaken the envy of the worst of the Sandinistas? I remember that when I was the vice-minister of social welfare, some of them wanted to organize a jail for children, while another stated that international adoptions were an instrument of the CIA to train Nicaraguan children as spies. Gerry had only a modest funding that she multiplied with austere and rational management, profound and true idealism, as well as hard work and great imagination. She did all this without misusing her resources to enjoy a luxurious life. Our house has always been a simple home, without any luxury.

How could it be that Gerry’s work could not attract the love and attention of those Nicaraguans who knew the existence of Genesis II and recognized in Gerry a woman working to help women and children without demagogy and opportunism? How could this healthy social action not to cause the resentment of those Sandinistas who were alienated by a cheap ideology instead of cooperative efforts to form a true government and preferred to destroy those considered dangerous to the absolute leadership that Sandinistas leaders wanted to have? Paulo Freire, creator of the psychosocial method for adult education, affirmed the thesis that educators and students were educating each other through their relationship in this world and that we never stopped learning. Gerry lived this way until the end of her life. When death found her, she needed only her thesis to obtain a master in international relations at the University of Miami, where she worked as a social worker in a program for women and children. Since she was already an excellent public speaker because of her years of giving speeches about the Nicaraguan situation under the Sandinistas, she participated enthusiastically in a Toastmasters program. Because she spoke Spanish so well, without a foreign accent, she was a reliable translator and graduated with honors after studying translation at Miami Dade Community College. She was also a beloved member of DOVIA, an organization of directors of volunteer agencies in Dade County, South Florida.

Her insatiable appetite for reading made a trip to the public library the family’s favorite Saturday recreation, with everybody returning with an armload of books. What can I say about her eagerness to serve women and how she was happy helping young mothers who had difficulty caring for their children, a program in which 60 percent of the clients were Spanish-speaking people, many of them Nicaraguans? It was like returning to her beloved Managua, remembering old times when she was defining herself as a great leader in programs for women and children.

Gerry made another contribution not only for Nicaraguans but for Christians in general. It’s a different type of contribution. Since she was a Maryknoll Sister and I was a Christian, we were part of the Nicaraguan Christian movement that helped to overthrow the tyranny of Somoza. In this struggle, we were immersed in what was later called the Liberation Theology Movement.

Our participation was not only theoretical but also practical since we lived in a unique country where liberation theology was experienced in a concrete way. At that time, Gerry was beginning to distance herself from the political naiveté of the traditional religious orders, and she began to disagree with what the Sandinistas made of the Christian movement. Then she began to have a critical view of liberation theology that was very different from that of the members of the Sandinista Church, later called Popular Church. Her writings and speeches on this theme show her interest in not being manipulated by any ideology or government, even those that use characteristic Christian terminology.

She believed that religious people have to be able to think and criticize the bad policies of any regimen, even those carrying the banner of liberation theology. The religious person had to bravely receive the criticism of former colleagues and have the courage to change his or her opinion and allegiance. I consider Geraldine a living example of this.

And of course, that woman named Geraldine, who was full of energy, had time for love, family life, me, and the education of her daughters. She often went to school meetings and presentations to observe classes and talk to teachers, delighting in the intelligence of our two children.

She liked to write, not only letters to her relatives and friends, but also narratives and short stories about her experience, her work, and the interesting people she knew. This book was possible because I had collected some of these writings, including several letters. The first part was written for Gerry as a draft of an autobiography that was interrupted by her death. I also included some of her writings to denounce the Nicaraguan situation under the Sandinistas of that time and three of the many interviews she gave to the press. Also included is the eulogy made by her friend Cherri Register at Geraldine’s funeral.

Reading them would give you a profile of the life of this charming and intelligent American woman—the anti-ugly American—who grew from her O’Leary-Callahan roots, was enriched by her Maryknoll training, and made her way following Jesus Christ, passing through this life to give out her goodness. This work then is the profile of a woman who was, as Psalm 1:3 says, a three planted by streams of water.

Lighting My Fire combines memoirs and other writings of this modest but remarkable young woman from Albert Lea, Minnesota, who left home one day looking for God and for herself in the world, traveled to foreign lands, loved foreign people, and, like the Good Samaritan that she was, made her life an unending effort to serve others. Like the good ones, she died young.

This is the story of how she lighted the fire of her life.

Edgard Macías

December 1993

Miami, Florida

1

A Woman’s Mission

I don’t remember when I first paged through a Maryknoll magazine, but the images of different lands, exotic people, and missioners helping others impressed me at a young age. Life on a Minnesota farm seemed dull in comparison, despite the fact that I had six brothers and four sisters to enliven my life. The Catholic Church and school were centers of our family activities, and the respect of the Irish for the clergy was an essential part of our formation.

Most evenings, the whole family would kneel together to pray the family rosary and end it with an invocation for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. At St. Theodore’s and St. Mary’s primary schools, the limited libraries were replete with Lives of the Saints and some literature on the Maryknoll missioners and martyrs such as Fr. Jerry Donovan and Bishop Ford.

Despite the influence of the local Franciscan community, Maryknoll was always first in my mind, and mission life attracted me more than anything. But as I finished public high school, I was still undecided and opted for college and received two scholarships to go to St. Teresa’s in Winona, Minnesota. It was 1963, and in November of that year, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Not only had I admired him because he was an Irish Catholic that had been successful, but his death at a young age made me feel that I was wasting my time by not following through my interest in Maryknoll. I sat and wrote the Motherhouse in New York. To my surprise, I was told that Maryknoll didn’t automatically accept everyone that applied. There was a process of medical exams, letters of recommendation, a personal interview, and an ongoing correspondence to establish motivation. I also learned that candidates did not enter Maryknoll in New York but at one of its two novitiates. The one closest to me would be Valley Park, Missouri. The other was in Topsfield, Massachusetts, and accepted the East Coast candidates, or postulants, as they were called. By Easter 1964, I had progressed to the point of a personal interview in Missouri.

Friends of the family drove me and my parents there, where I met with the novice mistress, Sister Miriam Agnes, and her assistant, Sister Miriam Samuel. Both were warm and friendly, but I was surprised to learn that neither had ever been to the missions. In fact, one of the things that they emphasized was that mission was a concept, not a place, and that some Maryknollers never went overseas. I heard them and agreed that prayer was also important but never doubted that such a tragedy would happen to me. All I knew of Maryknoll was that it worked in the foreign missions, and the novitiate itself emphasized this with Chinese screens in the parlor and knickknacks from other countries on the walls and tables.

The novitiate was a strange combination of two buildings. One was an old pink stucco structure nestled back in the trees that overlooked a river. The other was a newer T-shaped cement block building that projected toward the driveway that wound up the hill from the tiny city of Valley Park. The property was isolated and surrounded by woods. The newer building was frankly ugly inside. The architect had decided that it was artistic to leave the metal struts and rafters in sight, and it gave an unfinished look to the whole structure. The contrasting pictures I had seen of the Motherhouse in New York, an immense field stone building in the style of ancient monasteries, made me regret that I would have to spend two to three years at Valley Park. During the interview, I learned that Maryknoll’s tremendous ongoing growth made the training period (several months as a postulant and two years as a novice before making temporary vows) unfeasible at the overcrowded Motherhouse. Shortly after returning from Missouri, I learned that I had been accepted by Maryknoll, and the entrance day at Valley Park would be on October 18. The Topsfield postulants would enter a few weeks earlier. I began to gather the list of required supplies which included not only personal clothing such as black cotton stockings, flat black shoes, and sets of sturdy cotton underwear, but also dozens of bars of soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoos, and other sundries. They also required a two-hundred-dollar dowry. There was enough to fill a trunk, and that item was also on the list. The local Franciscan Sisters, still hoping to recruit me, offered an old trunk they had in storage. It had belonged to a Sister Bonita, who was recently deceased after teaching hundreds of first graders for several decades, many of them in my hometown of Albert Lea, Minnesota. I filled it to the brim and shipped it off to Valley Park.

One of my former Franciscan teachers took me aside as they gave me the trunk and asked if I were aware that their community had recently opened a mission in Bolivia. This was part of the nationwide response to Pope Pius XII request for all U.S. religious communities to send 10 percent of their members as missionaries to Latin America. You now, she said, that not all Maryknollers get to the missions. We can practically guarantee that you will receive an assignment overseas since most of us don’t enter for such work. Think about it. Again, I refused to seriously contemplate the possibility of not going overseas. Maryknoll, known to me from its magazine, was dedicated to the foreign missions, and that was what I wanted. I was also influenced by a negative opinion that I had of the local Franciscan’s recently built Motherhouse. Although I liked many of the Sisters individually, I had visited their Motherhouse for a retreat and came away puzzled by how a community that followed St. Francis, known for his radical poverty, could have such a luxurious building with Italian marble in the chapel and expensive furniture in the visitors’ rooms. Dozens of visitors were shown around on Sundays to admire the structure and its contents, all of which were donated and did not reflect the lifestyle of the individual Sisters but nevertheless gave an unfortunate image of people vowed to poverty. I was sure that Maryknoll would offer a more austere lifestyle and image. Their magazine showed stark poverty, with both Sisters and priests working with the poorest. My idealism was only briefly challenged when I mentioned the contrasting images I had of the Franciscans and Maryknoll to a fellow student at St. Teresa. She was an exchange student from Hong Kong who had graduated from the Maryknoll School there.

Her normally placid Chinese face went even blanker when I told her I was entering Maryknoll for its poverty. Then she frowned so slightly and said, You might be surprised, Geraldine. Maryknoll in Hong Kong has one of the finest schools for the upper class. Once again, I clung to the image presented in the Maryknoll magazine and the simplicity I had seen at Valley Park to convince myself that I was right.

Before the Maryknoll Doors

October 18 was a beautiful autumn day at Valley Park. My parents drove there, accompanied by the youngest O’Leary, Kevin, who was three. My older brother was in his second year at the St. Mary’s Seminary in Winona, and I had said good-bye to him there. Eventually, he was to leave the seminary, join the Peace Corps, serve in Africa, and then settle down and marry in Minnesota. But in 1964, with him in the seminary, and me, the second child, entering the convent, life seemed very ordered and settled. In and around the novitiate, there were white-veiled novices acting as hostesses to the other forty-seven postulants and their families. They looked so holy and dedicated that it was hard to believe that they had only been in the habit since June. Sister Miriam Samuel, a postulant mistress, was in charge of us. Sister Miriam Agnes supervised the group of novices. As each family group arrived, the candidate was led upstairs to a large dorm area, shown to a cubicle which consisted of a bed and a metal closet, which could be enclosed by a curtain slid on a rod overhead, and told to dress in a black postulant outfit. Each of us was also told with glee that the ugly, sturdy object on the bed was the slip. It was of heavy cloth and consisted of white short-sleeved top sewn to a faded blue skirt. Each of us had a new postulant outfit, a black mid-knee-length dress with a white collar and a flimsy black nylon tied behind the neck, as well as a white piece sewn across the front. Inside the closet was another used postulant dress. The four or five inches of exposed legs were covered by the black cotton stockings—putting these on made the entrance into a strange new life feel real and tangible. The only mirror was a tiny one each of us had been allowed to bring, but since all the rest of the postulant were dressed alike, it felt like walking around in a fun house mirror room, seeing yourself reflected but changing constantly in height and shape. As each of us was readied by a novice host, we returned downstairs for the final good-byes; and eventually, a bell rang, calling us to the chapel and the parents to leave.

The chapel was a large room divided into two areas. At the back were regular rows of pews where visitors sat. All of the Sisters, novices, and postulants sat in little stalls, boxes of wood with a seat that could be lifted up to reveal a kneeler. Kneeling, you faced the altar. Sitting, you faced the boxes across the chapel, with a broad aisle in the middle. Each stall had a box which contained a breviary and sheets of music. That first evening, for the first time, we postulants participated in office, the reading of psalms and scriptures according to the church calendar and the current saint’s day. Because Maryknollers belonged to the Dominican Order canonically, the office ended with a ceremony honoring the Virgin, called the Salve, which consisted of songs, responses, and singing. Eventually, all of us who continued in Maryknoll would be called on to lead the office and the singing and learn how excruciating the experience could be for the shy and the off-key singers. Any mistake resulted in the person kissing their scapular (a long apron like garment that fitted over the habit) and lying on the floor in what looked like a quick faint but was actually the person falling to their knees and extending the body out on the floor in humiliation for the accident. Months later, as new novices, we were to practice this movement assiduously (and secretly) in the basement corridors, fearful of falling on our faces during the prayers or getting on the floor and not being able to rise gracefully. But the first night, I just felt as if I was in the midst of a mystical experience, so ancient did the recitation sound and so hauntingly beautiful, the music.

The chapel was the core of the novitiate’s activities. The day began there with early Mass, which followed the 5:15 rising, half-hour meditation, and the first part of the daily office. The priest who said the Mass was an elderly Maryknoll, an old China hand who regularly interspersed his sermons with memories of his days on the missions and the dangers of communism. His health seemed precarious, and there was little contact with him beyond the morning Mass and the other occasional ceremonies he officiated. During the day, there were regularly programmed return visits to the chapel for the rosary as a group, and individually for the required private visit of fifteen minutes, and the rest of the office. Bedtime was 9:30 p.m. We were encouraged to make holy hours (times of meditation, reading, and prayer) and frequent short visits to the chapel. All of us were required to do daily spiritual reading for fifteen minutes from the approved list of the saints, history of Maryknoll, or theological writings. Some of these books, like Thomas Merton’s, G. K. Chesterton’s, and C. S. Lewis’s, made the task easy.

The whole day was set up to be God orientated, with specific minimum time limits assigned to the list of spiritual duties. We were reminded that our novitiate training was the time for prayer and meditation so available to us until, if and when, we retired.

Life of a Novice

Living at the novitiate were examples of retired Sisters. None of them was unemployed. Even the former mother general, Mother Columba, who lived there, kept busy doing public relation work for Maryknoll, writing to donors, and occasionally hosting them for lunch. Many of these donors were the parents of Maryknollers on the missions. She had spent most of her Maryknoll life as the secretary of the founder of the Sisters, Mother Mary Joseph, and had been elected to the post of mother general when the founder’s health failed. She had, however, visited the missions extensively. I was to gradually become aware of how she dominated the novitiate even though officially, she was superior only to the small group of professed (under vows) Sisters there. Physically, she was a large woman whose loose-fitting habit couldn’t hide the fact that she enjoyed food. In fact, she was famous for going into the kitchen to make her special treats, in particular, thin dainty onion sandwiches. Among the older Sisters, there seemed to be opposing feelings toward her.

Apparently, she had ruled with an iron hand while in power, and some still feared her. Others who had enjoyed status while serving her as mother general continued to serve her now in what was a type of exile to the boondocks and they were submissive. Her close contact with the now-dead founder gave her an aura of superiority and a supposed unchallengeable knowledge of what a Maryknoller should be. But as time passed, I found that many Maryknollers did challenge her ideas and the results of her rule on Maryknoll.

There was an ongoing struggle as Maryknoll, following the advice of Vatican II, attempted to return to its roots and revive its original dream. For many Sisters, Maryknoll under Mother Columba had become complacent, institution orientated, and too comfortable. With the founder dead, everyone who had known her was free to speculate on what she would have done in the current reality of the church. Other than the opinion of the personal friends of the founder, the arguments centered on the writings, few in number, which were sermon-type meditations and a couple of scratchy, taped spiritual lectures she had given late in life. We listened to these as part of our morning meditation several mornings. But the combination of the early hour, the bad tape, and Mother Joseph’s bad health (she had a stroke) and age made it difficult for us, the postulants, to relate to her. In fact, most of us found it difficult to understand the awe felt toward her, manifested by the professed Sisters. The pictures of her on the convent walls were either ones of her after her stroke when she looked emaciated and frankly ill or pictures of her in middle age when she was enormously fat. Mother Columba and several of the other older Sisters who had never been to the missions resembled her in size. It was only the young Mary Josephine Rogers, her name before beginning at Maryknoll, that attracted most of us. In those pictures, she was a tall, strikingly handsome woman with beautiful long hair, who had risked her future by supporting two Irish American priests who wanted to make missioners out of young Americans. In their time, they had been radicals, since Americans in the early 1900s were considered immature and spoiled brats by both the Roman hierarchy and the traditional European mission orders.

Originally, the small band of women who wanted to help the U.S. mission efforts had been content with giving support services: cooking and serving the meals for the priests and seminarians, doing their laundry, serving as their secretaries, and helping to put out the first Maryknoll magazine, the Field Afar. It was only when their number grew that the women began to be assigned as missioners to the original Maryknoll mission, the Orient. The first habit was a gray dress that Mother Joseph had liked, and there were months of experimentation before the final bonnet—veil—were decided on. The first missioners accepted their mission assignments to China, feeling that they would probably never return to the United States. Travel in those days to China was months on a freighter, and life on the mission assignment was difficult and dangerous. One of the founding priests, Father Price, had died in China as a result of an appendicitis attack. Others, such as Bishop Ford, had died at the hands of the Communists. Even the Sisters had suffered imprisonment and torture, both under the Chinese Communists and under the Japanese, in prisoner-of-war camps in the Philippines during the Second World War. An essential part of novitiate training was reading these histories, listening to older Sisters, and meeting with some of these giants who