Sisters Still Standing Up; Speaking Out

On a bright afternoon earlier this week, two Roman Catholic sisters sat on the stoop of their assisted-living quarters near downtown Los Angeles with spirits as bold as the day they entered religious life -- one of them more than half a century ago.

As Sister Virginia Fabilli, 84, held a poster protesting the possibility of war in Iraq, Sister Christa Salinas, 62, rang a bell as passersby honked and waved.

When a Vietnam veteran stopped to show them his battle scar and voice opposition to war, Salinas clanged her bell noisily and yelled, “You’re right! No war! God bless you!”

In other parts of Los Angeles, their fellow Sister Diane Donoghue is pressing for more low-income housing. Sister Maribeth Larkin is organizing neighborhoods of mostly poor immigrants to speak up for their rights. Sister Theresa Marie Chen is arguing on behalf of her mentally ill clients in jails, courts and federal bureaucracies.

In Sacramento, Sister Simone Campbell is directing the first political lobbying organization ever established by a group of California women religious: Jericho, an interfaith coalition that advocates for the needs of the poor in housing, health care and other fields.

More than 75 years after establishing themselves in Los Angeles, the good Sisters of Social Service are still raising Cain.

Today , the sisters will mark the end of their yearlong 75th jubilee celebration with a Mass of Thanksgiving at Our Lady of Grace Church in Encino. A reception will follow at the nearby Holy Spirit Retreat Center, which the sisters operate as a place of spiritual repose that welcomes 12,000 people a year of all faith backgrounds.

Their social and political activism distinguishes the sisters from many of the 125 institutes representing 1,800 women religious in the Los Angeles Archdiocese. But it reflects the bold, reformist vision of their founder, Sister Margaret Slachta, the first woman elected to the Hungarian Parliament.

In 1923, Slachta and a few others split from another religious group and formally established the Sisters of Social Service. At a time when most women religious were cloistered behind convent walls or clustered in hospitals or schools, Slachta’s desire to walk the streets to care for the alienated and poor represented a radical notion -- one that has remained the community’s driving mission.

“When we see a problem, for better or worse, we tend to jump on it and do something about it,” said Sister Deborah Lorentz, 62, a licensed acupuncturist who aims to offer effective but more cost-efficient Eastern medical therapies to the poor. “We tend to attract people willing to stand up and speak out.”

Over the years, the sisters pressed for reforms in prison conditions, labor practices and what they saw as other social injustices. During World War II, according to a written history of the group, the sisters sheltered thousands of Jews from the Nazis by dressing them in religious clothing and helping them cross the Hungarian border with Vatican credentials. One of their members, Sister Sara, was killed by the Nazis.

In 1926, Sister Frederica Horvath traveled to Los Angeles to establish the U.S. branch of the organization, which now counts 100 members in the United States, the Philippines, Mexico and Taiwan.

“They are right in the forefront of doing the social work of the church,” Sister M. Faith Clarke, archdiocesan vicar for women religious, said of the sisters. “From the very beginning, they’ve mingled right with the people.”

Maria Rivas, 42, is one of countless numbers of people touched by the sisters’ work. On a crisp morning this week, the Mexican immigrant picked up two bags of groceries at the Regis House, a community center run by the sisters near UCLA. With that gift of food, three generations of her family -- including daughter Nancy, 20, and her 4-month-old granddaughter Thaily -- will be able to eat for the next week. Rivas, a naturalized U.S. citizen, said she has been looking for work for months to no avail; her husband, who is in Mexico awaiting documents to immigrate, sends money only intermittently, usually $20 or $50 at a time.

“The sisters here are very, very good,” Rivas said. “I see them give socks and pants to homeless men and boiled eggs to people on the streets.”

The stories of the sisters are as varied as the people they serve. Chen, for instance, is a native of Taiwan whose decision to enter the religious life was prompted by a powerful spiritual moment: Reading the Gospel of John one day, in which Jesus tells Peter to feed his sheep and follow him, Chen said she burst into uncontrollable tears and felt God calling her into service. A mental health specialist, Chen helps her patients, who suffer maladies ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder, with what she calls “life management.”

One moment, Chen said, she’ll be calming a patient suffering from delusions; another moment she might be at the Social Security Administration trying to unravel the red tape regarding a missing payment.

Others say their call to service developed more gradually. Sister Marie Lindemann, for instance, said she was drawn in step by step: first working as a counselor at one of the group’s summer camps, then as an “affiliate” who experienced living with them for six months and finally becoming a novice in 1996, taking courses with other sisters in subjects ranging from liturgy to scripture to the group’s Benedictine spirituality.

A youth minister at St. Columbkille and Church of the Nativity in Los Angeles, Lindemann said she was attracted by the group’s independent, pioneering spirit and balance of “play and pray.” She expects to take her final vows next June. “It’s a miracle of God,” said Lindemann, “that I am a Sister of Social Service.”

For others, such as Sister Rochelle Mitchell of the Holy Spirit Retreat Center, the deep prayer life coupled with the group’s social activism proved a powerful draw. A native of Ventura and daughter of a probation officer, Mitchell said she had always experienced sisters as people who were “pretty much in convents and only came out to teach.”

But the Sisters of Social Service did not wear habits. From their founding, well before the liberal reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the sisters wore simple gray dresses to blend in with the people they served. They also projected what Mitchell called a “freedom of spirit” -- whether working all night on skid row or getting down and dirty in the softball diamond with children during their summer camps.

When she entered the group at age 18 in 1959, Mitchell said she was not sure religious life would be a lifelong vocation. Her parents were not wildly enthusiastic, she said, perhaps fearful that the decision not to marry and raise her own family would destine her to a lonely old age. As it turned out, Mitchell said, she never wavered in her decision, and ultimately her parents were won over. At her 25th anniversary celebration with the sisters in 1987, she said her mother turned to her and said: “I can see you are very loved.”

The question of marriage and children was one that bedeviled women such as Fabilli. The daughter of Italian immigrants, Fabilli said she had always imagined herself with a family of her own before entering the group in 1950. Those dreams have long been replaced by a broader purpose -- from working for desegregation in the 1950s to a still-passionate political advocacy expressed through reams of letters to elected officials on everything from the danger of land mines to human rights in Guatemala and what she regards as obscene levels of U.S. military spending.

“I decided I would prefer the religious life because of a deeper union with Christ and because I felt I could do more good for more people than if I married and could just help my own family,” Fabilli said.

Although their average age has been inching upward -- the median is now estimated to be 63 -- the sisters say younger women are increasingly joining their community, including some from Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria and other nations. And though they don’t envision numbers to ever rival the larger orders -- the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, for instance, have seven times as many members in Los Angeles -- they say they hope that their bold style, creative vision and deep commitment to Christ’s gospel of service to the poor will continue to define and nourish them.

According to Lorentz, Slachta envisioned a pyramid-like structure in which most members would do the work of “drying the tears” -- working in parishes and community centers, feeding the poor, counseling the troubled and educating young people. A smaller number, she believed, should be involved in “movement work,” which these days means organizing for labor rights, anti-abortion policies or better housing.

At the top of the pyramid would be those working in politics and government, Lorentz said. She herself has protested the forcible return of Salvadoran refugees during their country’s tumultuous civil war and was arrested for civil disobedience in protesting the nuclear arms race.

For the sisters in California, 1986 marked their political coming of age when they voted to establish a political lobby to press for issues affecting the poor. Headed by Campbell, the now-interfaith coalition expects to focus on health-care reform in the coming year, pushing especially for universal health coverage.

For the first time, the sisters are launching an “Adopt-a-Legislator” program in which several communities of women religious have signed up to pray for specific legislators and, if the spirit moves them, to contact them.

“We need one sister for each of 121 elected officials, including the governor,” Campbell said, “although everyone tells me the governor needs more than one.”