Celebrating Decades of Unshakeable Faith

In a sparsely furnished chapel in Montebello, five elderly women waited patiently at Mass to renew the vows they first took as long ago as the 1930s. Despite some tumultuous times, they were still very much in love.

Clare Melody, Eileen Tuohy, Gabriel McCauley, Enda Martin and Mary Thornton were celebrating their adoration of God after 50 to 70 years as sisters in the Roman Catholic order called the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary.

Dressed in blouses and turtlenecks, solid-colored blazers and below-the-knee skirts, each woman held a red candle as friends and family listened to them once again commit themselves to lives of devotion and austerity.

As young women, they left their families and homeland of Ireland for New York. They endured homesickness, occasional loneliness and, most recently, a national child abuse sex scandal that has left some of the public questioning the church’s leadership. But at a time when many Catholics are saddened or outraged, no headline can shake these women’s faith.

Sunday marks the 70th time that 89-year-old Mary Thornton has renewed her vows. Some of her family had traveled from Ireland to watch.

“It never crossed my mind that I would see this day,” she said in a soft voice that still has an Irish lilt. “This is infinitely magnificent.”

Thornton said she always knew that her only marriage would be to God. It is a realization she still cannot put into words beyond explaining that she was influenced by religious people as a girl and inexplicably accepted that her life would never include marriage and children.

“I always wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to live that lifestyle,” she said. “My notions weren’t really all that high and mighty.”

The oldest girl in a family of 11 children, she faced great opposition to her chosen path from her parents.

“My father said, ‘Don’t worry. As soon as they give her a bucket and broom, she’ll be back home,’” Thornton said. “If he only knew how many floors I’ve swept in my life.” Becoming a nun “was something I just had to do, but it was like breaking with family, and we’re a very close family.”

Thornton acted as a surrogate mother to her siblings and looked after most of them when her mother couldn’t. She tried to be strict, but most of the time she’d find herself hugging them and spoiling them, she recalled. “Knowing that I wouldn’t have children never really bothered me,” she said. “Maybe I did too much baby-sitting when I was growing up.”

Thornton described her hometown of Foxford in County Mayo as a “little town that you’d miss if you blinked ... a glorified village.” Her niece, Mary Anne Schultz, said Thornton grew up “in a two-room stone house with a thatched roof.” Her aunt’s departure for New York “was one of the ways out of poverty and out of Ireland,” Schultz said.

Seated in her tiny room at the Montebello convent, Thornton showed a visitor a photograph of herself when she was 14 or 15. Her hair is parted on one side, and two long braids, held in place by ribbons, fall at her chest. She wears a pretty knee-length dress with a flower print. Her mother sewed all their clothes.

At 20, Thornton joined the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, an order established in France in 1849 to provide education and job training to the country’s destitute women. She was immediately sent to New York, taking her vows in Tarrytown and quickly adjusting to the religious life.

Her fellow sisters shared household chores. They prayed together and set out to establish schools throughout the country. Thornton began at St. Mary’s School in Queens, when the neighborhood was still mostly Italian and Irish.

In 1945, the church sent her to California, where she began to teach at a Studio City high school in the then-sleepy San Fernando Valley. In those days, the new schools lacked substantial budgets; the nuns served as teachers, painters and janitors, she said.

Dressed in the customary habits, they would drive their station wagon from their convent in Westwood and prepare for the school day. After school, they would clean up and leave it ready for the girls. Then they’d go home and say their prayers.

Thornton, who says she was a very strict teacher, keeps in touch with many of her former students. A picture in a photo album shows her on a 1950s school trip to the beach. In it, she sits casually on the sand, covered from head to toe in a habit and reading a book. Her students, clad in bathing suits, sit near her.

“Teaching gave me the most satisfaction,” Thornton said. “It’s good to know that my efforts weren’t wasted, that somebody benefited somewhere. Those girls gave me life, lots of life.”

Sister Joyce McCauley, who was marking 60 years as a sister, compared her decision to commit her life to the church to the moment when a woman knows she has found her future husband.

“How do you know that man is the right one?” asked McCauley. “It’s one of those intangible things.”

Clare Melody, who was celebrating 50 years, remembered the day her brother Jimmy accidentally shot himself in a hunting accident back home in Ireland. He was dying from his injury, she said, and her mother asked Clare and her other siblings to pray.

“My mother told us that God always hears the prayers of children, and I just started praying and praying and praying,” Melody said. “He lived, and I just felt there was a God watching over us.

“I’ve always felt like I was in the right place and that this was for me,” Melody said. “That will never change, no matter what.”

McCauley remembered the time her older sister Teresa, who eventually married and had nine children, told her she wanted to be a nun.

“I told her, ‘You don’t have to be a nun to serve God!’” she said. And then, recognizing the irony, she smiled.