We were not entirely oblivious to the fact that changes had begun to take place in the “upper sanctum.” There, we later learned, the thought creeping forward in some minds was: Imagine not being a nun.
During that pivotal summer of 1967, while we wondered whether Sister Mary Pauline or Sister Mary Judith would be our eighth-grade homeroom teacher (there were two classes for each grade) both Sisters left Holy Rosary. Presumably, they had been transferred to other schools served by their order, the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When school started that September, we found that our seventh-grade homeroom teacher, Sister Mary Laboure, had moved up a grade to fill one of those vacant spots. For unexplained reasons, she would now be known as Sister Mary. Sister Mary Eymard, who had taught seventh grade for generations, remained a seventh-grade homeroom teacher but would now be called Sister Mary Ellen. Sister Joan, new to the school, filled the other seventh-grade vacancy, and Sister Dorothy arrived to become our eighth-grade teacher.
Because of her obvious youth—apparent even to us 13-year-olds—and because of the simpler habit she wore, some thought Sister Dorothy was a novice; that is, a nun who was not yet fully professed. But that was not the case. Sister Dorothy wore what would later be known as a modified habit. This included the same ankle-length black dress the others wore—complete with the belt from which hung a set of keys and yards and yards of rosary beads—but with a small white collar in place of the rigid breastplate. Instead of white wrappings that enclosed the forehead and most of the head, Sister Dorothy wore a simple white headband to hold the waist-length black veil that did not shroud the shoulders but fell in gentle folds down her back. The headband could barely contain her cloud of wavy golden hair that kept inching its way out.
One Sunday in May, Sister Dorothy arrived at the 9:00 Mass dressed in a business suit of royal blue and a short black veil that grazed her shoulders. Boys as well as girls crowded around her to gawk. Never did any of us expect to see a nun outfitted this way. It was as inexplicable as the name change at the beginning of the school year. The other nuns soon followed her lead, and on graduation day, June 22, all were dressed in business-suit habits—some black, others in various shades of blue—and short black veils.
To us the changes we observed in our Sisters that school year of 1967-1968 were monumental. But they were only the first steps of what was to come. By the following year, when we as high school freshmen returned for a visit to our favorite teacher, we learned that several of the nuns had left the order entirely. The few that continued to hang on to their religious vocation eventually discarded the habit altogether.
Something was going on behind the scenes. But what that was, we did not know.
© Barbara Cole 2020. All Rights Reserved.