‘Everyone seemed to fall in love with the nuns, I don’t think they had ever seen one before.’

Sister Virginia McMonagle says anyone who thinks religious life is monotonous is all mixed up. The 65-year-old nun has tended the sick in Bombay, climbed Mt. Sinai, shot the rapids of the Grand Canyon in a raft, and recently spent her vacation working in a Honduras poorhouse and orphanage. She began her work as a nun teaching and mothering boarding-school girls in Seattle. She thinks she saw enough pranks and crises during her 38 years as a teacher and principal to fill 100 best-sellers. When her French holy order came out of cloister in the late 1960s, McMonagle became the principal of a Catholic school in El Cajon and started taking vacations around the world. Now in her 10th year as head of constituent relations at University of San Diego, the loquacious and downright merry Sacred Heart nun plans conferences and parties and works as a liaison with advisory boards, trustees and parents. She lives in a campus residence surrounded by about 900 students. She says she doesn’t think she could sleep without noise--she has been living in school dorms for more than 50 years. She was interviewed by Times staff writer Nancy Reed and photographed by Peter B. McCurdy.

My sister is a nun and my brother is a Jesuit, and my father always wanted grandchildren. So I told him, “Well, Pop, if you think you can handle the scandal, I’ll see what I can do.”

I entered in 1940, and we were a cloistered order up until 1969. So I kept quiet. We could only speak during a half-hour recreation, or to the children and their parents (at school). It was an old monastic custom from the time of the Middle Ages until Vatican II.

For almost a year after the change, we wore short habits and modified headgear, and then went into lay clothes. It was like taking my skin off the first time I did it, but now I would never go back. The starched caps used to rub my ears.

We were allowed to have vacations for one week a year for the first time. So I called all my friends who had yachts in Seattle and I borrowed a home in the San Juan Islands--my parents used to take us there. Some of the nuns hadn’t been out of the convent for over 65 years.

We were still in habit at the time. Before we went, I saw an ad in the paper for bathing suits for a dollar each, so I picked up 38 in every size and shape and put them on the community room table so when they came in for a spiritual reading they saw all these things in bright colors. If you could have seen them--we hit the island with these modern bathing suits. I got them to wear them. It was fun.

When the natives of the privately owned island saw 38 nuns arriving in long, black habits on three yachts, they couldn’t believe it. Everyone seemed to fall in love with the nuns, I don’t think they had ever seen one before. So they thought they would have a tea for us. They wanted to do something very special--so they flew in an Anglican bishop to speak.

I had had the nuns go through discarded tennis shoes at the school to bring on the trip. So when we went to the tea, there we were looking like a bunch of penguins in red tennis shoes. I was trying to be serious--they were being so proper--and it was so funny to us.

It was our first vacation.

We make a vow to work in education and I made a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience and stability--that I would remain in our order until death. I don’t ever give it a thought. When I was principal, the students would vote for the crankiest, prettiest nun, etc., and they voted me the happiest nun. I have as much fun now as when I was 21.

In the ‘60s, a lot of people left. Two of my best friends did. It was devastating, but we keep close to women who leave, it is not a disgrace as it was in the past.

My mother always bragged, “I gave God my 100%.” Yet I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral because I was cloistered. My sister and I climbed on the roof of our convent and watched with binoculars.

And now I give cocktail dinner parties for the university president. So life has changed considerably. It is an interesting time to be alive.