Column From teaching tables to changing the world
By TIM UNSWORTH
Early in Holy Week, my sister
Virginia entered St. Josephs Hospital in Yonkers for what was to be the
first of two colon surgeries -- the curse of the Unsworth clan. She emerged
terribly weak from them but in good spirits, even as she chased both my brother
and me off the phone.
After nearly 55 years as a Sister of Charity of Mount Saint
Vincent, she was still strong. My wife Jean and I had taken her to dinner in
lower Manhattan just a few weeks before and, while it was trout instead of
steak, she had cleaned her plate.
But just before Holy Thursday broke, she complained to one of the
sisters who shared her hospital room that she was feeling very tired. She never
made it back to her bed. She was dead before she hit the floor.
It was a pulmonary embolism, a complication of deep-vein
thrombosis, in which a blood clot detaches from the wall of a deep vein and
moves into the bloodstream, through the heart, and along the pulmonary artery
toward the lungs. If the clot is big enough, it results in heart failure and
the collapse of the circulatory system.
It was a mine disaster. We are still inhaling all the secondhand
smoke of different opinions about her death, all the resurrected laughter, all
the meals, all the letters from relatives and friends, and all the remembered
debates. (Dont ever write about me in NCR! she used to
warn. Ginny was prudent.)
Ginny was the 12th sister in her archdiocesan congregation to die
this year. There are now 81,000 religious sisters in the United States, down
over 22,100 in the past decade alone -- a drop of 21 percent. They are
relentlessly aging. There are now more sisters over 90 than under 30. Although
religious women tend to live longer than other females, their average age is
now approaching 70. Its likely that the vast majority will be in their
graves within a few decades.
At her funeral, I looked over my shoulder at a sea of gray heads,
most of them older than Ginny, who died just short of her 73rd birthday. Many
resembled people at a train station, their bags packed, patiently waiting for
God.
Ginny was a religious sister to her very marrow. From the time she
entered high school in 1942, she was a Sister of Charity. She entered formally
in 1946 and took her habit in the very chapel from which she was buried.
She loved being a sister. She lived through changes that were
bigger than Vatican II itself. (Only one religious sister was even invited to
Vatican II and she only as an observer. But religious women brought about far
more positive changes than the men in watered silk. It may be because male
clergy understood power while religious women understood love.)
Ginny shelved her coal scuttle bonnet and old habit and adopted a
modest dress and congregation pin following Vatican II. She learned to drive
and to put aside the dire warnings of Thomas à Kempis and his
anti-intellectual Imitation of Christ that claimed that each time
I go among men, I return less a man. She had hundreds of friends, some of
them acquired while earning her bachelors, masters and doctoral
degrees.
She had an enormous intellect, one that sometimes hobbled her
communications. (Once after visiting a prison in the Bahamas where she was
stationed for years, a prisoner said to another sister: Hey, you
dont talk like that one. She talks like a dictionary. Ginny
couldnt help it. She was a classical FM station.)
Her intellect and her innate kindness sometimes clashed. At times,
she sounded more like Gracie Allen. To a student who had flunked her history
class, she soothed: Now, dont feel bad. Of all those who failed,
you got the highest mark.
Then there was the grateful Asian student who wrote her a note of
thanks. His salutation: Dear Sister Virgin Unworthy.
I thought she might spend her life clapping erasers and teaching
tables and catechism to runny-nosed kids in the Bronx. Instead, she taught at
all levels in New York, Brooklyn, the Bahamas, Hong Kong, and for about half
her life at the college level. She became a regional superior and, after
turning down a chance to be the congregations leader, she became a
Maryknoll Associate and went to Hong Kong where she spent several years.
Religious sisters have changed the world. They get only footnotes
in church annals while the bishops look out from heavy oil paintings on the
glossy pages. They are arguably the most talented group of women in the world,
eons ahead of their female colleagues in other professions. Indeed, in many
cases, women religious prepared and welcomed those who took their places.
Sr. Virginia had dreams of teaching in China. Her doctorate was in
Asian Studies. She made working trips to Central and South America and to Third
World countries in Africa. She monitored her congregations investments to
be certain that their portfolio did not contain stock in companies that paid
prison wages.
Within her community, she chipped away at the ecclesiastical
church in order to move the Rock of Peter at least a little and to improve the
quality of life for the sisters. She believed in parish life and took an active
part in St. Margarets, her Bronx parish. And she volunteered in a soup
kitchen, pushed wheelchair patients in a Sisters of Charity hospital, and
cleaned out closets at a Harlem shelter.
Ginny was just one of thousands of sisters who served in this
country almost from the first Fourth of July. My first was Sr. Philomena, my
kindergarten teacher at St. Alices in the early 1930s. I flunked sandbox
and was still too young for first grade, so I spent another year mastering
blocks and drinking hot chocolate.
Since then, I witnessed religious sisters protesting the death
penalty, taking part in civil rights marches, standing outside government
buildings, praying silently for peace, standing up at stockholders
meetings and calling CEOs to task, defending the rights of homosexuals even
while being punished by gay clerics who hide behind their collars. In short, I
think its safe to say that bishops derived their pastoral statements from
the quiet placards of religious sisters, carried well before the bishops spoke
out on these issues. (It came together for me at Ginnys wake as I chatted
with Sr. Theresa Kane, the Mercy sister who gently asked John Paul II to
examine the role of women in the church in 1979. Ginnys friend put her
religious life at risk.)
In time, I suppose, given the present trend, religious sisters
will become an entry in a Catholic encyclopedia that might read: For a
period of about 1,000 years, religious women performed a wide variety of tasks,
especially in education, health care and work among the poor. In time, partly
because they educated dedicated laity to perform these tasks, vowed, female
religious quietly faded away.
Sr. Virginia Unsworth now rests quietly on a hillside in Yonkers,
together with other sisters. She shares a grave and modest headstone with one
who died well before her. I might have forgotten to mention that religious
sisters were likely the first to teach us not to waste anything in creation --
even their narrow resting place.
Tim Unsworth writes from Chicago where he is an evolving
Catholic. Evolve with him at unsworth@megsinet.net
National Catholic Reporter, July 13,
2001
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