Our Life of Prayer

Sister Aline Marie, 81, is laughing and pushing buttons wildly in the dark. She and three other Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet are scrunched together in L.A.’s oldest home elevator--a tiny, iron-gated affair--in which the heavy doors have just clicked shut and the single overhead light has just blown out.

Ordinarily, the sisters take the stairs. But things are rarely ordinary at the three-story Doheny mansion on the downtown campus of Mount St. Mary’s College.

The 12,000-square-foot house (once the family home of oil baron Edward Doheny) was built in 1898, donated to the Catholic church in 1958 and then to the college. It has served as a convent, social hall and Doheny memorial ever since. This bit of real estate history is possibly unknown to actors Sandra Bullock and Liam Neeson and the huge film crew from Meat-hook Productions who are occupying the building’s ornate, marble-laden main floor, which boasts a ballroom with a Tiffany glass ceiling.

They are making a movie, tentatively called “Gun-Shy,” and require absolute silence on the set--which is why the sisters cannot even tiptoe through the house and up the stairs.

The irony of having Hollywood film crews, father-daughter luncheons and chamber music concerts on the main floor of their convent does not escape the family of eight sisters who reside primarily on the more spartan second and third floors. This is the ‘90s, after all, and these sisters have seen it all.

They’ve probably survived more than they will ever publicly discuss. They have lived through the tough years, before Vatican II, when their choices of what to wear, where to work and how to arrange their lives were totally out of their control, decided by church superiors. That was the life they chose as very young women, and now--half a century later for some--you might think they’d have had some second thoughts.

But watch them stride in from work any night, ready for prayer and dinner, and you’ll sense how refreshed and energized they are by their various holy missions.

They are an oddly glamorous, sophisticated and high-spirited group, even without benefit of youth, cosmetics or trendy clothes--and despite an aggregate age that soon could rival Methuselah’s 969 years. The oldest sister is 89, drives half an hour to her job every day and shows no signs of losing her racer’s edge.

A communal sense of the absurd is apparent in the whoops and banter that emanate from the big round dinner table in the campus cafeteria, where the sisters meet after evening prayer for their nightly meals. There they share the days’ events, the oddities of earthly life and the joys of being sisters in an ancient holy order (founded in 1650) who pray, play, live, laugh and cry together, sharing a bond that they say certainly meets anyone’s definition of “family.”

Some wear the traditional black-and-white nun’s habit. Others wear a short, slim, modern version, with or without veil. Still others wear street clothes and no identifiable sign that they are women religious.

“We’re all so different, which is maybe why we get along so well,” says sister Aline Marie.

Each has a fascinating job in a different ministry, she says, which is part of what makes them so interesting to each other. And it doesn’t hurt that they all have separate bedrooms, she adds.

Perhaps equally uniting is the knowledge that all are remnants of a thinning rank of women once willing to take the lifelong vows that are now so antithetical to modern life. Poverty, chastity and obedience, once considered admirable, are viewed as vestigial virtues by many young women steeped in the opposite values of today: earn good money, find sexual fulfillment, exercise your hard-won women’s rights to an autonomous life.

So you might call this clan rebels of a sort. (Don’t call them nuns, although some refer to themselves that way. That term usually is reserved for women who live in cloistered communities.)

Father Gregory Coiro, spokesperson for the Archdiocesan Catholic Center, calls them “countercultural. In a materialistic society like ours, where pursuit of money and possessions is so important, where there is an obsession with sex, where everyone focuses on individual autonomy,” the vows run “totally counter to the culture of our times.”

Which perhaps explains why fewer Catholic women are taking them these days. Sister Faith Clarke, vicar of women religious of the archdiocese, says there were 81,372 women religious in the U.S. in 1995, compared with 92,015 only 10 years before. The median age was 68 in 1995: It was 63 in 1985.

“We were at our peak numbers somewhere in the 1940s, after World War II, when women aspired to reach out and help others,” she says. And if a woman wanted to work in the church, she needed to become a religious.

“In those years, women didn’t have too many options in society,” Coiro adds. “Marriage was it--and joining a religious community was a very viable alternative for women who had greater visions for themselves than being June Cleaver. The Catholic church was in the forefront of giving women opportunities. We had women presidents of colleges, women heads of hospitals, and the movement was growing solidly.”

The Rules Have Changed

Most of the sisters at the Doheny mansion joined the religious life during that time.

Since then, both the rules of social convention and the rules of the church have changed. Nowadays, women can marry and work in many areas of the church, Clarke says. After Vatican II, women who had not taken the vows could work in the parish, take charge of religious education, youth ministry, direct the liturgy committee or the outreach programs. They could read at Mass, take communion to the sick, and so on.

Laypeople started entering most spheres of church life, in fact. And some of the sisters at Doheny believe that’s a very good thing.

“For 400 years, there was a sense that all sorts of things could be left to the priests and sisters,” says Sister Thomas Bernard, a Doheny resident who is director of the Spirituality Center for the archdiocese. “Now that we don’t have so many priests and sisters, the laity are picking up a lot of the things we used to do. . . . I think it brings a new kind of vibrancy to church life, and I personally think it’s a much healthier situation.”

She recently celebrated 50 years in religious life, the last 14 of them lived at the Doheny mansion. And, she says, at 72, she still rejoices daily that she committed herself to God.

“There have been bumps along the way, of course,” she says. “But through it all, there has always been that really strong sense of being exactly where I should be. In fact, I was just saying to my brother that if I had it to do all over again, I would do exactly the same thing.”

On the day of the elevator blackout, Sister Mary Esther, 89, president emeritus of the Daniel Freeman Hospital, arose at 7 a.m. After prayer, she drove her usual half-hour route to Inglewood, where she worked a full day as director of the hospital’s charitable foundation. That night, back at Doheny, where she has lived for 14 years, she tried to explain the exuberance and energy so obvious in her demeanor.

“I’m a people person,” she says. “I love my work at the hospital and life at the house, which to us is a convent. Here, it’s a family. Sometimes I laugh and feel like a teenager. But mostly, we pray together and support each other. Today, for example, I got word about the worsening condition of my niece, who has cancer. So you ask the sisters to please remember her in their prayers. We know about each other’s families, all their names,

and we care about them. Some of us take vacations together, go to a play, watch Channel 28 or make popcorn in the kitchen. We’re all hard workers, very independent, yet we are together.”

On that same day, Sister Julia Mary, 72, was up at 5:30 a.m., attended Mass, drove to her job as director of the Good Shepherd Center for the Homeless in Los Angeles and came home 12 hours later carrying a briefcase with “little odds and ends of work” yet to be done.

“It’s a great life, but it’s not easy,” she says with a chuckle. “Some people think nuns just coast along and everything is taken care of for them. Homeless women I work with often ask about becoming a nun, because they see such a peacefulness and tranquillity.” They think that comes from being taken care of, she adds. But, she explains, it comes from helping take care of others and from one’s relationship with God.

She has been at the Doheny house for three years but says she feels as if she’s lived there forever.

“I come home to my community at night, and we have prayer and spend time talking about the day,” she says. “This is truly my family. We share, support and encourage each other. If someone’s had a hard day, or family problems, we are there for each other.

“So many people are alone in this society, and that is totally devastating. I feel like the richest person in the world. Ask me what I would like, and I’ll tell you I have everything anyone could want or need.

“Offer me $1 million for the homeless, and I’ll take it.”

Most sisters in the group have advanced university degrees. Sister Aline Marie, for example, has a bachelor’s degree from USC, a master’s from Berkeley and a doctorate from UCLA. She taught romance languages at both the downtown and Brentwood campuses of Mount St. Mary’s until she was appointed manager of the mansion, where she has lived for 35 years and still gives private lessons to students.

She guides a guest through the labyrinthine basement, past huge stone rooms that are really Mosler safes (built to protect the Doheny valuables), with heavy metal doors and combination locks instead of doorknobs.

In this house, she chuckles, the butler’s basement bathroom is made of imported peach marble, with enough linen-closet space to towel-dry an army. She knows every nook and cranny after all these years. But like her colleagues, Sister Aline Marie says she feels no attachment to the physical place or to anything material.

“I could live anywhere,” she says.

The sisters’ bedrooms are unadorned by personal items of any kind. Their closets are almost empty. Their vehicles belong to the church. But instead of projecting poverty, they exude a sense of being free, an incredible lightness of being--detached from the debris of a material world.

“We have what we need, and we share all God’s gifts,” Sister Mercia Louise says. “It’s true Communism,” she adds with a chuckle. A former educational psychologist for the church, with a master’s degree from UCLA, she now drives a hefty distance every day from home to the Brentwood campus, where she’s the archivist.

Sister Elizabeth Anne, who teaches computer sciences and has lived at the Doheny mansion for 27 years, left on Nov. 5 for Jerusalem, on a tour led by Sister Thomas Bernard. Sister Patricia Rose arrived at the downtown campus in 1986 to get her master’s degree in theology and decided to stay. She is now secretary of the graduate division and says she is the next-to-youngest in the group (though, like many of the sisters, she doesn’t want to give her age). The newest and youngest is Sister Flavie, forced to flee the religious community she had joined in Vietnam. She works as a teacher’s aide in St. Vincent’s elementary school in Los Angeles.

“One basis for a life together is the ability to see goodness in everyone,” Sister Thomas Bernard says. “Though we may disagree in certain areas, to know that underneath there is so much good--not only in the sisters I live with, but really in every person.”