3 Lives Filled With Caring and Teaching
The cornerstone at the Carondelet Center in Brentwood is inscribed with “House of Studies, 1955.” The inscription says much about the way things have gone for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, and for Catholic sisters in general.
Less than 35 years ago, the graceful Spanish-style stucco building opened as a novitiate, its halls enclosing living quarters and classrooms for young women starting out religious life. At one time there were more than 150 novices or sisters-in-training.
But with only one new candidate having come forward this year, the house of studies has been converted into a retirement center--home to about 60 sisters, most of them self-sufficient, but some of whom require skilled nursing care.
It is a quiet, peaceful place of gardens, parquet floors, Oriental carpets, oil paintings and the slightly stiff parlor furniture that convents seem to have patented. But the gentility belies the encroaching financial difficulties that Sister Diane Pedroni, director of ministerial services for the Western province calls the “unfunded liability”: the difference between the projected cost of care for all of those now retired, and the reserves available to pay for those costs.
The retired sisters are not oblivious to these problems. They confess both distress at being a burden to their community and some consternation that such a situation should exist. But how they will be cared for is clearly not their overriding concern, and there is little evidence of guilt, as they tell their stories.
SISTER MARY FABER
‘You know, I feel very educated. Not book learning, but very broadened by experience.’
Wearing a black jumper and pink blouse and pushing her wheelchair before her, Sister Mary Faber walks into the parlor, looks warily at her visitor, and settles into a chair. She has a glint in her eye which turns out to be the outward expression of a sharp wit.
Hands folded ladylike in her lap, she comments on the health problems that brought her to the retirement home seven years ago. “I’ve got a blown-up heart. And osteoporosis. You get more beautiful as you get older,” she says, trying to look deadpan, failing and chuckling. “I’ve been on my death bed 14 times. Life is funny.”
Born in Chicago in 1900, she entered the convent in St. Louis in February, 1918--”a long time ago, huh?”
She hopscotches mentally around the years of her life, including 70 of sisterhood:
Because she had to care for her sick mother, she was not a high school graduate when she entered, thus she received all her education in “the community.”
“I persevered till my A.B. That was enough. I got my teaching credentials. Interestingly enough, I taught for 50 years. Evidentaly I didn’t spoil the kids. They tell me now I was an excellent teacher. But after 50 years, I was getting pretty tired. I was beginning to get too crabby, and that wasn’t fair to the kids. Anyway they landed me here. . . .”
She started her teaching career in 1920 when she volunteered to go to Arizona and teach the Puma and Papago Indians. Nine years there, 18 years in the slums of Oakland (“For some reason that was my preference, to work with the poor”), and 13 years in Hawaii, where most of the children were Chinese.
“You know,” she said, “I feel very educated. Not book learning, but very broadened by experience. I don’t have any trouble with acculturation because I think people are beautiful.”
Then came her years of working with senior citizens, first starting a center for them at St. Jerome’s in Westchester, and later back in Arizona.
“I started taking them on tours. I took them on 90 tours of different length. They were swell,” she said, clearly savoring the memories. “Since I did all the organizing, I’d get a free ticket. Free my foot! I worked hard. Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, New Mexico--I got to be a regular bum. I loved it. Once we went all the way to New York and at 79 years of age I climbed the Statue of Liberty. Oh, boy, it was swell. . . . “
She never worried about money, joking, “I always had the soap I needed.” But then she was appointed superior of a convent in Maui in 1945.
“We were getting $35 a month per sister for 10 months, but we were lucky enough to have a music teacher who brought in money. I don’t know how we did it. I didn’t think anything of it and gave a percentage of our income for the upkeep of the generalate (in St. Louis).”
She has seen many changes in religious life, and some of them have been hard to take, she said, commenting with a laugh, “That Vatican (the second Vatican council in 1962) really stirred things up.”
Has the financial crisis nuns are now facing ever made her angry? “No, not angry,” she said. “I got mad at ‘em. Of course, I think we were fools, too. But I think our life--if a sister goes in, all she thinks about is dedication. Now our sisters take time for leisure. We didn’t know what leisure was, but now I think I’ve learned how to relax. Now I don’t do anything. No, I have never regretted it. Through the grace of God I never felt that way.”
SISTER BEATRICE JOHNSON
‘I was told to raise $2.5 million (for a hospital building campaign). In religion, those were the days when you did what you were told to do.’
Sister Beatrice Johnson walks with a cane, her legs swollen with arthritis. Clearly, she is not a complainer: “I’m better off than a lot of people.” Now 83, she entered the convent in 1927 at age 21, after getting her R.N. degree in nursing at St. Vincent’s Hospital School of Nursing.
“I nursed from 1924 to 1982,” she said, and in between assignments in Arizona and Washington, she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Minnesota.
“I went back to Tucson in 1943. It was the middle of the war and I joined the American Red Cross. I’m a Red Cross nurse,” she said, smiling and pointing to the Red Cross lapel pin she still wears.
She directed the congregation’s school of nursing in Tucson, she said, until she was called back to Los Angeles and put in charge of the Daniel Freeman Hospital building campaign.
“I was told to raise $2.5 million. In religion, those were the days when you did what you were told to do. We had a professional campaign runner from New York, but that was very expensive and we couldn’t keep him. So I took over. I ran three hospital campaigns, the capital fund, door-to-door, and the benefits.”
They met their goal and opened the doors in 1954. By then she had had a severe heart attack, she said, her hand flying involuntarily to her heart, then mouth. “It was in 1953. Oh yes, I think it was because of the campaign, the pressure,” she said, hesitating, not wanting to sound like she was blaming anyone.
Mission accomplished and her heart on the mend, she was sent went to San Francisco where she spent the next 27 years as a school nurse at Star of the Sea high school and elementary school and ran the library on the side, although she didn’t like that: “I’m a nurse and that’s that.”
“By 1982, I knew it was time. I had a lot of arthritis. I came here to retire. I’m just a lazy person now. I’m not doing anything to bring money into the community. I visit the sisters who are bedridden. And, I can say right now, I have a little duty. We have a little dog, a Dachshund. I love dogs anyway. I can say I do a lot of baby-sitting, dog-sitting I guess.”
Although she dutifully raised $2.5 million, of her years in the convent she can say without guile, “I didn’t know what money was. If I needed anything, I’d go to the superior and say, ‘I need a pair of shoes,’ and she’d say, ‘All right, Sister, go buy a pair of shoes.’ Now we’re on a budget. I budget myself for $50 a month. I get by all right with it, but I don’t know where it comes from.”
SISTER MARY TERESA CONNOLLY
She has been at Carondelet since 1979, at first leading a prayer group for women from St. Martin of Tours parish and now helping that parish by instructing converts.
Sister Mary Teresa Connolly is 85 and confined by arthritis to a wheelchair. Born in Oakland in 1903, she entered the convent in 1924, and “received the habit on May 19, 1925,” a habit she no longer wears, favoring instead simple skirts and blouses. She had always wanted to be a nun, she says, but she took a business course after high school and did office work because her father had died and she thought she should help out with her younger sisters.
Once in the convent, she taught in San Francisco before moving to Los Angeles to work for 12 years as treasurer and registrar of Mount St. Mary’s College. Then there was more administrative work, first as secretary to the provincial of the order, then representing the diocese at the generalate in St. Louis, North American headquarters for the order.
She finished out her working years back in the schools, as a teacher and then principal of Cathedral Girls High School in San Diego, finally calling it quits at Star of the Sea in San Francisco in 1979.
“I became ill with a famous disease--arthritis,” she quipped. She had stopped teaching but, until 1979, was running three groups on the use of Scripture in prayer between bouts of illness.
Confined to a wheelchair, except for short distances with a walker, she has been at Carondelet ever since, at first leading a similar prayer group for women from St. Martin of Tours parish and now helping that parish by instructing converts.
Because of her administrative work, there was a time when she was one of the few sisters aware of the finances.
“We were very often strapped. When I was principal of the parochial school, our salaries were very little--just one check for all of us. We were in the red for two or three months. I knew we weren’t overspending. I spoke to the provincial and asked if I could speak to the pastor for an increase.
“That’s how it was in those days,” she said. “She gave me permission, and then the pastor in turn had to speak to the bishop. The bishop said, immediately, ‘Oh yes, we’ll give an increase,’ and all convents got the increase, not just us. That took care of the problem.”
