me was one of independence and strength, because even though they weren't so friendly to my independence and strength, they were remarkable women themselves.
There are great stories to be written about these nuns - about how their various orders were formed, and how these orders often fought with the male hierarchy of the church to gain the freedom to minister directly to the people, at times when the hierarchy wanted to put these sisters in cloisters and keep them out of the active world.
The brilliant historian Diarmaid McCulloch writes a good deal about this in his huge and comprehensive work, The Reformation. And no doubt there are many other books written, and to be written. Recently, the author Kenneth Briggs published a book called Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns. But Mr. Briggs' work covers a period of church history after Vatican II, and a time when I was estranged from the church, and a long way from the period I'm describing here.
As a child, I wasn't aware of the battles the great mother superiors had fought in past centuries; or of the strange tension that existed between powerful nuns and male clergy.
I wasn't aware of the tension that had sometimes existed between great female saints and male clergy - except, of course, for the tragic story of Joan of Arc. The interplay of nuns and priests appeared seamless to me in my childhood, a world shared by male and female religious. And one cannot exag-gerate the striking power of the nuns of those years.
In this realm in which I'd been brought up, being a nun or a priest was deemed to be much better than being married or being single. It was understood that a dedicated, and celibate, nun or priest could come to understand things mystically that no nonvirginal person could aspire to grasp.
We were privileged to have two aunts that were nuns, and we were keenly aware of it. Sister Mary Immaculate, Aunt Anna Mae, was my father's sister, and she was a nurse. In fact, I believe that she was the superintendent of nurses at Mercy Hospital for many years. We saw her often because she lived all her life in New Orleans, and she died in Mercy Hospital in the 1970s. Only after her death did I hear that she had gone blind when she was a child, and had promised to become a nun if her sight was restored. After the restoration she made good on her promise. She had an especially beautiful smile, this aunt, and that's perhaps why I still connect the basket of flowers with her name.
Our older aunt, Sister Mary Liguori, Aunt Helen, was my grandmother's sister, and the last of thirteen children.
Her field was education and she spent most of her life in Bethesda, Maryland. When Aunt Helen came to town, we were bathed, dressed up, and sent to visit her, and I remember being much in awe of her, of her seriousness and her directness. She lived until the 1990s, and died in her sleep, during noon Mass, in the infirmary of Mercy Hospital. That my young son, Christopher, born in 1978, had come to know Aunt Helen, even briefly, was a great joy to me.
As children, we were proud, too, of the fact that my father had received his exceptional education in the Redemptorist Seminary at Kirkwood, Missouri, because he had wanted to become a priest. As far as I know, no one ever criticized my father for his decision not to become a priest, and he was a deeply devoted Catholic all his life. He belonged to an organization called the Holy Name Men, one of many such organizations in the parish, and he went out on Sundays with our uncle Cecil Murphy to visit the elderly and care for the needy of the parish. Over the years, my father told me several different stories as to why he didn't become a priest. One thing is certain: his education by the Redemptorist Fathers changed the entire course of his life. He was one of nine children who had grown up in one half of a double house one block from the river and its noisy railroad tracks. And he came home from the seminary a well-spoken, well-educated man.
Both priests and nuns were the guardian angels of my Catholic childhood. And they were, in the main, gentle with the girls, as I've indicated, though we did now and then glimpse them being quite