Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
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during the novitiate, and I cried all the way through. As he was not only president, but the first Catholic president, most sisters were sad and prayed for the repose of his soul, whatever they thought of his politics. In fact, most had few thoughts of politics. For me it was different, given my history campaigning for his election and for the New Frontier program. I was not to speak or think of such things during my novitiate, but I couldn’t help it. I cherished the moment when I met him. They could not take it away from me. John XXIII also died that year and we mourned him, too, even as the congregation evaded the call for renewal that he issued. Together these two Johns had presided over the transformations of Church and state that inspired us so strongly in these years of transition.
While it was possible to leave the novitiate for brief medical appointments, we could not go into the hospital or stay anywhere overnight. For a time, I woke up each morning in excruciating abdominal pain. The superiors decided I needed exploratory surgery, but to avoid breaking my canonical year, I was operated on in the mother house infirmary. They opened my abdomen, but never told me what they found or did. We were forbidden to demand to know anything other than what we were told. Ever since, whenever asked about my medical history, I have had to say I had a mysterious abdominal operation when I was nineteen. I healed from the surgery, but the pains continued. To this day I don’t know what was wrong, but the stress of my situation must have been at least a major contributory cause.
I persevered through the novitiate, although it was a severe struggle. I was totally alone in my battle with its contradictions and with my own irrepressible urge to rebel. I couldn’t control my rebellion, either of my mind or my body. The questions wouldn’t go away, nor the floods of tears at night, nor the crippling pains in the morning. I could not reconcile myself to the constant negation of what I felt so deeply should be affirmed. I could not bow to the persistent pressure to separate my soul from my mind or body. Nevertheless, there were moments of exhilaration. I remember singing the Requiem Mass in the novitiate choir after a nun in the order had died. It seemed as if the world came together and everything was in its place. There were many simple pleasures, too. My companions in the postulate and novitiate, even if they often irked me, were decent, earnest young women, who could even occasionally be fun. Despite all the privations of convent life, the food was better and more varied than what I had grown up eating.
At the end of the canonical year, we were sent down to Cape May to clean the retreat house for the sisters who would be staying in the summer. It was invigorating to leave the mother house and meditate with a view of the ocean. Nature was rarely so inspiring. We then moved back to the postulate for education studies and preparation for our first mission. During this time, Greg came to visit me. I hadn’t seen him for four years. He had recently been ordained, although there was no question of my being allowed to attend his ordination or first mass. However, to receive a visit and the blessing of a newly ordained priest was considered to be a special and sacred thing. I was overjoyed to see him. I spoke to him more honestly and intimately than I had ever spoken to anyone. He listened. He prayed with me in a fresh and relevant way. He looked into my eyes. He touched my face and held my hands. He told me what was going on in the Church and in other religious orders that were not resisting change and renewal. He conveyed the searching, the liberation, the joy of it. He summarized the latest books and debates. He told me of new experiments among other orders: consultation about what studies and work to pursue, freedom to form relationships of all sorts, even intimacies between priests and nuns. My mind was soaring. My heart was thumping. It went on for hours. After he left, I was chastised by my superior for spending so much time with him, even if he was a priest. She threatened me with dismissal, saying I was critical and disobedient, that I had no idea what religious life meant. The rebuke stung, but I was not sorry. If she had known what actually transpired, she would have hit the roof. I told no one, not all of it, anyway. I did discuss some of the ideas and debates with other sisters; some were sympathetic and excited, while others were shocked and afraid.
Most religious orders were then caught between an old guard clinging to traditions and a new, questioning breed seeking change and renewal. Most priests and nuns could be placed along a spectrum between these two extremes. In my circle, I was at the one extreme, while the order as a whole was dominated by those closer to the other side. The new thought emerging in the Church affirmed my loneliest thoughts, which fed my growing confidence that I was not wrong—and that I was not alone. It was a healthier, more positive attitude, not as preoccupied with crippling negation. It supported the questioning mind and responsible commitment over unquestioning faith and blind obedience. That kept me going.
After two years, the time had come for us to leave Chestnut Hill and embark on our first missions. The mistress of novices read out our assignments. Except for the college graduate Joanne, who was assigned to high school, we would all be sent to teach grades one through five. I was hoping for fifth grade in an inner-city school. Finally, I heard: “Sister Helen Eugenie, Corpus Christi, 5G.” I got fifth grade in an inner-city school, but it was a disappointment in that it was one of the few schools that divided classes into boys and girls, and I had the girls.
I arrived at Corpus Christi with two other sisters. The convent at 27th and Allegheny in North Philadelphia consisted of three ordinary row houses merged into one. Most sisters had rooms of their own, except for the youngest four of us, who shared one room. Much about a mission, especially the atmosphere in the convent, was determined by the superior. I hoped for someone open to renewal, not resisting it. My superior was neither. She was of the old guard, though she was not resisting renewal, because she had no clue about it. I turned this into an advantage. The first thing I did was acquire the book I most wanted to read: The Nun in the World by Cardinal Suenens. I had to ask my superior’s permission to accept and to read any book. Suenens’s text was hugely controversial and causing a major stir in religious orders, but she had no idea. It was by a cardinal, so why should she object? I went on in this way and received and read books by Hans Kung, Andrew Greeley, Karl Rahner, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. My superior’s laxity allowed me to send uncensored letters to Greg and others, where I spoke of my feelings and problems with a directness I could never express in letters submitted to a superior-censor.
I threw myself into my teaching. I made tasteful and progressive decorations for my classroom. I prepared my lessons with great care. I liked being out of the cloister and mixing with people in the wider world again: the pupils, their parents, the parishioners. I volunteered for a job supervising the putting out and putting away of folding chairs for weekend functions with the eighth-grade boys. I liked the banter with the boys. During the week, I stayed after class, so the girls could come talk to me if they wanted. Soon the eighth-grade boys started coming, too, along with stray kids from other classes. This brought resentment from other sisters, particularly the one who taught the eighth-grade boys. A few accused me of courting popularity and trying to show up other teachers. The superior admonished me to stop singling myself out and doing whatever stirred up such resentment. I remembered the instruction given to Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story to fail her examinations because another nun felt humiliated by her academic achievement. My situation wasn’t as drastic, but it came from a similar place.
Further problems arose from the racial tension then wracking the parish. Riots had broken out in North Philadelphia in August 1964. It was difficult to deal with the racism of the white working-class parishioners, who feared that their livelihoods and modest properties were threatened by the arrival of black families in the area. It was even more painful to discover the racism of the pastor and principal, who wanted to impose a “legitimacy rule” to keep black kids out of the school. More than a righteous support for civil rights, it was a strong attachment to the school’s black students that fired me. Sometimes they would come crying to my classroom and everything in me wanted to pull their faces toward me and caress them reassuringly. The pastor was as backward as the superior. He conducted the liturgy tediously, and saw no reason to change anything from the way it had always been done. Vatican II might as well have happened on another planet. I felt that I had to do everything in my power to bring renewal to the parish, starting with my own classroom. I was critical of the syllabus. I followed the basic structure, but tried to infuse it with vitality and meaning, moving away from rote learning and toward active engagement.
By then the election of 1964 was underway, and I was passionately for Johnson and against Goldwater. (Nuns were discouraged