Activist Nun Faces New Challenge in Nicaragua : Director Leaves House of Ruth to ‘Confront Injustice’ in Central America

When Judy Vaughan entered the convent straight out of high school in 1963 her father made a comment that she took to be an admonition, she recalled recently:

“ ‘I hope you’re not entering religious life because you see it as a safe vocation,’ he said to me. Now he says he wonders why he said it.”

As well he might.

As she has interpreted and lived her vocation, it has gotten Sister Judith Vaughan, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, into frequent trouble.

Year in Nicaragua

Right now she is facing a future, where perhaps the only certainty is that trouble will not be behind her. She is about to spend a year in Nicaragua and it was on the eve of her departure that she found herself talking about the irony in her father’s remark.

“There’s a freedom in religious life that allows you to confront injustice. We have nothing to lose. We know in the end what’s important is what we can do to bring about the vision Jesus had. The safety . . . is in coming to understand the commitment, which frees you to do what others might find daring.”

For example:

She has been arrested “nine or 10 times” for acts of civil disobedience regarding U.S. immigration policies, particularly as applied to Central Americans.

She incurred the wrath of the Vatican in 1984 by signing an ad, along with 96 other Catholics, among them 23 other nuns, saying that there was a diversity of opinion among Catholics on the subject of abortion. The Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes called it a scandal and an act of defiance demonstrating a serious lack of “religious submission of will and mind.” The Vatican threatened her and the other nuns with expulsion from their respective religious orders if they did not retract.

Locally, that action brought a directive in 1985 from the Welfare Bureau of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles forbidding social workers in its agencies from referring homeless women to the House of Ruth, the shelter for homeless women that Vaughan directed in Boyle Heights.

The matter with the Vatican has been more or less settled through negotiation--with her statement that she respected the sanctity of human life. The local dispute has been put “on hold” by the archdiocese until the new director, Nancy Berlin, has settled in at the House of Ruth. Now in her early 40s, Judy Vaughan, as she usually identifies herself, is moving on.

She left for Central America Sunday, first to study Spanish for several months in Guatemala and then to Jalapa, Nicaragua, on the Honduran border--an area that has seen much contra activity.

“I’m going to be with the people and to do whatever needs to be done at this present time,” she said at the House of Ruth several days before her departure. “More important to me is to hear the stories of the people to give me strength to do what I do up here.”

Women of Conscience

What she does up here is confront what she sees as injustice to Central Americans and abuses of their human rights by commiting acts of civil disobedience with a loosely connected group called Women of Conscience. She also works with the Women’s Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean, which she described as part of a larger international women’s front to change U.S. policy.

“I’ve done a lot of work trying to change U.S. policies and I feel (the situation) is worse off than when I started. So I feel it’s a good time to be with the people who are impacted by those policies. The House (of Ruth) has been in good shape. I’ve been with it for four years. I felt it was time to move on.”

This is a nun talking, a woman who has taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, who has worn, in fact sewn, a traditional religious habit early on in her vocation, who has taught second- and third-graders in parish schools and loved it. Her roots show even now that Sister is dressed in a raspberry striped skirt, lavender sleeveless blouse and huaraches (not a religious emblem in sight) and talking about getting arrested or disagreeing with ecclesiastical authorities.

She delivers her ideas and recounts her story in the carefully enunciated, clear diction and firmly polite, positive manner of a nun. It would not be surprising to have her come out with the plans for the spelling bee. However, she does not.

Rather, she describes her history as a somewhat socially aware nun, doing a little volunteer work in a soup kitchen in her free time from teaching at Mount St. Mary’s College, who received her “first clue” of what lay ahead for her when she went off to the University of Chicago to study for a doctorate in social ethics.

“I said to my colleagues at the religious studies department, ‘I think I want to be ordained a priest.’ ”

That wish did not lead to her ordination in the priesthood but did lead her to work on the first women’s ordination conference in 1975, an event that was planned for 200 and drew 2,000. The consciousness-raising continued and by 1978 she was part of a group of 50 women who “celebrated the Eucharist” at a gathering in Baltimore.

“Some would say we were faking the Mass, but for those of us who have a sense that the priestly power is in the worshipping community and that together we call forth the presence of Jesus, it was a Eucharistic event.”

After completing her doctorate in 1981 she returned to Los Angeles, resigned from the college, moved into the House of Ruth and became the director, working part time at the Peace and Justice Center of Southern California. The stories of the women at the shelter, many of them from Central America or from oppressed conditions in this country, only solidified her politicization.

The oppression she perceived as a woman in the Catholic Church, she said, steadily led her to identify with other forms of oppression and to see them all as connected, all as requiring her response.

“My touchstone is that we really all are socially related. If one person is suffering, all of us are suffering,” she said.

‘Image of God Changed’

“My image of God has changed so. We have this picture of a Brazilian woman--it’s a photograph of her taken at her husband’s funeral. It’s a picture of a compassionate woman who has suffered. . . . It’s become like a God-image for me. What a relief!” she said, recalling the forbidding, authoritarian images of a remote white male. “The picture really does capture it for me a lot. God is in the struggle with you. God is not an enemy.”

As a Christian she described the world she is working for “in the struggle” in terms of “Jesus’ vision,” and the image that symbolizes it for her is a Eucharistic one.

“It’s a round table where we all do sit around together,” she said of the vision. “We share power. We co-create what reality becomes.”

The particular way she pursues that vision is not in spite of being a nun; not in spite of remaining in the Church. But because she is a Catholic nun. She remains one for a reason and said she believes an institution as powerful as the Church needs to be challenged from within and without.

“The most authentic thing in the church is the prophetic tradition--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus . . . It gets lost in the institutionalism but it’s very important. . . . Also I love the sacramental system that captures everyday life and makes it holy.”

As for staying in a religious community, she said, as she has come to understand it, “We are a group of women who believe in our power to make a change in the world.”

She had been talking about her vocation for several hours and toward the end a woman, a stranger to Vaughan and Catholicism, entered the room and started listening. The woman seemed both interested and confused, and finally asked, had she left the church or was she still active in it?

Will Carry Sign

“Oh, yes I am,” Vaughan assured her without hesitation. “Tomorrow morning they’re ordaining four men down at the cathedral and I hope to be there. We’ll be outside, with signs saying women ought to be ordained.”

Not quite what the questioner had meant by “active” but a clear indication of where Sister Judy Vaughan’s head is at.

Throughout all the talk of the grand vision and the high purpose there is her self-knowledge. She uses it frequently to cut herself down to size.

She did so in describing what she might be doing in Nicaragua:

“It could be in helping one of our sisters there in the literacy campaign. It can be as basic as planting crops, picking coffee, building houses. . . . My hope is that there will be a lot of listening and learning so that I can come back and express that reality more authentically here,” she said, then cut her groping answer off with amused impatience, saying, “It’s really whatever the people need, and I hope I’m not a burden.”

And she did so again in talking about prayer. She’d been mentioning prayer offhandedly, sometimes in a conventional context, but at other times in a context that made prayer sound like a political device, as in describing a group of 150 activist women, herself among them, who tried unsuccessfully to get into Honduras so they could pray at military bases. Just what did she mean by prayer?

“Oh, that’s a good one,” she said, her enthusiasm for the topic propelling her forward in her chair as she started to talk in earnest. “I think it’s an articulation and clarification of the vision. It can happen in a number of ways. There’s quiet time when we go deep within ourselves and get in touch with that spirit within and listen and be open . . . At the same time, when I’m standing in a line doing an act of civil disobedience--that’s prayer.”

That kind of thinking applied to one’s actions could be a nice way of making all of one’s life unassailable. Was she, for example, simply a good little nun saying her prayers, when she signed the ad about diversity of opinion over abortion?

“Oh, no,” she gulped and laughed. Nothing so grand. Signing the piece of paper that crossed her desk was just one of those common-sense, seemingly inconsequential acts that are part of the dailiness of a busy life. She didn’t think twice about it.

More often than not, she confessed laughing, what her prayers really amount to is one of those quick child-like supplications that emerges in her case as, “Oh, please, don’t let me get creamed.”