Sister Francesca

Nowadays, I think many Catholic nuns use their real names. When I was a child going to Catholic grammar school, all the nuns, at least in the order at my school, chose new names when they became nuns. Many of them chose the names of male saints, like Sister Mary David or Sister Jerome Marie. They liked to honor the Blessed Virgin, I guess, but also liked the chops of a male saint's name.

Sister Francesca was my older brother's second grade teacher. I had little interaction with her. I believe most of the nuns were aware of me because starting in the second grade, all the way through eighth grade, I stayed after school every day to clean, then prepare the altar for the next day's masses.  When I became tall enough, I also helped lay out the vestments for each priest who would be saying a mass the next day. The vestments had to be laid out in an elaborately precise way, placed with the last thing the priest would put on on the bottom and the first things he put on on top. They had to look beautiful and the beautiful layout gave me a sense of reverence. Sister Mary David explained to me that all the vestments had been blessed so I should treat them as blessed things. I learned the names and meaning of the ritual vestments under the robes people see at mass. Cords, belts, strings, layers. I don't remember any of the official names now. At  the time, I treated each item with the reverence due things that were not only blessed but used by priests. Near as I could tell, all the nuns revered all the priests.  Everybody I knew revered the priests.  Everyone I knew was Catholic and, for the most part, of Irish descent.

Sidebar:  my gay baby brother also grew up going to Catholic school, and was an altar boy, as all my brothers were.  Now Dave gets a good laugh when he remarks that he was a twink from the day he was born, around priests daily when he was an altar boy and no priest ever hit on him. Not one. Then he laughs his radiant, light-up-the-world laugh. And if you hear him say this, you laugh too. And you think, or, rather, I think, "I am so glad no pervie priest got my baby brother." 

For a few summers, when my mom was bullying me to become a nun and she had told the nuns at school I was going to be a nun, mom actually made me go to summer mass every day of summer vacation that I was in Chicago. During the summer, there was only one daily mass, at 7:30. And typically, only the nuns, who all went to mass together at the 7:30 mass, with weekday masses being quickies compared to Sunday. No sermon on weekdays.  The nuns invited me sit with them,  so I had to, being too shy to say no, especially to nuns. The nuns were supporting my vocation.

The whole parish knew about my putative vocation. Sometimes at Sunday mass, my vocation would be one of the things everyone at mass would be asked to pray for.  I hated the attention because I knew I did not want to be a nun but my mom kept pushing. I'd sit there dying on the inside, praying feverishly for God to get me out of this nun thing.  It was such a large parish that only my actual friends and actual teachers knew me, plus nuns, so the request felt anonymous. I cringed anyway.

Our parish was huge. Our church was quite large and it filled every seat for three or four masses every Sunday. Additionally, the parish had built,  so they could build the huge church, a church in the basement of the school. That basement church always had a couple services on Sunday. The crowds that packed my parish's Sunday masses still amaze me. I believe my childhood parish no longer is nearly as big. The school, on itsww website, only had one class per grade. It had three classes per grade when I attended. It was the Post-War Baby Boom and a time of prosperity for the middle class.

Yet Sister Francesca was aware of me. I was like the mascot for the nuns of our parish.

Mom often said "My mother gave one of her children to God, so I am giving you to God." I would think, but did not say, "Why do you have to give me away? You have four boys, give one of them away."  Mom's baby sister, my Aunt Jody, Sister Ignatius, or maybe it was Sister Ignata, when she was a nun, was the child my grandmother had given to God.  I rarely saw Jody. I loved her from afar, for she was my godmother. She took her final vows the day after my baptism. Both my baptism and her marriage to God took place in Chicago, where I grew up.

I also hated Jody, blaming her for my predicament.

When I was in grammar school, the nuns still wore black robes resonant, now,  to me, of burqas. By the time I was in college, nuns wore regular clothes.

One summer in college, I took a couple college classes as a nearby Catholic college to use some of my Illinois grant money. I went to college in WI so I could not use the grant money. Each summer, I would take classes for free, and take classes I never would have taken at my 'real' college.  The summer I went to St. Xavier College, near my dad's home, I took a pottery class, throwing clay into lumpy pots all summer. I never would have used up credits at my 'real' college for pottery class. Altho why not, I don't recall.

I took two classes, clay in the morning and Judaism in the afternoon. Judiasm I took because my choices were few.  And I wanted to use as much of my state grant as possible.

In between classes, I would hang out in the student union. One day, sitting on a sofa, with a middle aged woman on a sofa nearby whom I ignored, the woman spoke to me. She asked me if I was a Fitzpatrick and if I had gone to St. Gall's. I was astonished. How did she know I was a Fitzpatrick?  She said "You still look exactly the same and all of you looked alike. I spotted you the first day of summer school."

I was astonished, truly, because I had  believed I had moved invisibly through my childhood, that no adults ever noticed me. True, I was also known for my vocation. I imagine lots of folks knew who I was, especially all the nuns, but when I was a kid, it didn't really grok for me that other than the cringe-inducing moments at Sunday mass when the packed church was asked to pray for my vocation, I had no awareness that anyone paid attention to me. Plus it was a huge parish and a huge school, with three packed classrooms per grade. In the post war baby room, Catholics had tons of babies. The school is much smaller now. And mostly Latino. I had white blonde hair then, blue eyes and a sweet demeanor. All the kids in my family, except for my dark-haired older brother, had blonde hair,  and blue eyes. Well, Dave got green ones. The black and white lawyer in me has to clarify the color of Dave's eyes, eh?Plus I did not dare be anything but angelic around nuns and nuns were all over that school.  I had never quite realized anyone, ever, had noticed me.

Sister Francesca had.  I had no idea, when my life revolved around that parish that anyone but my family and best girlfriends noticed me. And Patrick Snooks, Bucky Cywinski and Frankie Vacco, boys who live on my block that I knew before I started school.  Bucky's real name was Richard. All the nuns called him Richard and no child dared to call him Bucky at school. Bucky, however, said he liked Bucky and hated Richard. Bucky had the full buck teeth any human has ever had. As we grew older, all the kids on my block, and there were quite a lot of kids on our block full of no-birth-control Catholics, debated why Bucky's parents did not get him braces. Both his parents worked, unusual in our world. He was a late-in-life surprise baby, with a much older brother. It seemed to me that, like me, no adult paid much attention to Bucky. He was a sweet, gentle boy. I asked him more than once if he was sure it was okay to call him Bucky because I liked him and I did not want to hurt his feelings. I didn't ask too many times, because maybe asking again and again would hurt him. I took him at his word. It was hard to buck the ride of his nickname. Come to think of it, Bucky had that nickname before he had buck teeth.

Sister Francesca was leaving the convent, she told me. She was finishing college, which she had not done before she had taken her final vows and started teaching. Her order had always promised to give her a college degree so they were making good on that promise.  When I was a kid, Catholic schools did not have to hire licensed teachers. I think this is still true for most private schools in most states.  Sister Francesca shared a few vaguely pleasant memories of my family. We nodded to one another throughout that summer session but never really talked again.

Once you feel that duty to behave well around nuns, it doesn't go away.  As I listened to Sister Francesca reminisce about me and my family, I did not tell her what I remembered about her. She was seen as a holy terror. All the kids were frightened of her. All first graders would pray, as the time came to be told our assignments for the following year, that we wouldn't get Sister Francesca.  Instead, I told it it was fascinating to see what she looked like without the veil and the nun outfit.  I also told her that although I had not recognized her as a nun I had once known, I had spotted immediately that she was a nun.

She glanced around at herself as best she could and said "How could you tell? What do you see that signals I was a nun?"

"I don't know, Sister,"  I said.  "I just knew the moment I spotted you here that you were a nun. Even though you are an ex-nun, you still give off the nun vibe."

She asked me how she might dress differently to stop giving off the nun vibe. I shrugged and said nothing, acting dumb and being polite to a nun, as I had been trained.  Laughing, trying to make my words sound light, I said "Maybe once a nun, always a nun."

I was about 19 then. When I was in my early forties, I got another graduate degree. I took one class with an ex-priest. We hit it off. I had spotted the fact that he was a priest right away. He had been going to the school, he said, for three years, for he was working on a doctorate, and no one had spotted his religious history. How could I tell?

By then, I had lost some of the shackles of respecting nuns and priests, just a little. I said "I don't know what I saw but I knew the first instant you spoke to me that you either were a priest or had been one."

He was a bit upset for he had been hiding his background. He asked me not to tell other students and I didn't. He was nice about it. He got a nice laugh, actually, being 'seen'.  He was a brother, and still a brother. Not exactly a priest, but basically the same thing.

How did I know that these people had been in Catholic religious orders? Vibration. My empath ability. I feel things vibrationally and I think I felt their religious order vibration.  I guess.

Like I told that brother I met in grad school, I don't know how I knew these people in street clothes were a nun and a priest. I just knew. I felt it.  I knew.