My Three Aunts

Whenever people rant in my earshot about Roman Catholicism, I am more apt than not to pipe up: "I have three aunts who are nuns."

Technically they are Great Aunts -- sisters of my father's father -- and two of them are now passed on into Beloved Memory. But growing up with them, being the recipient of their showers of love and affection, and watching them move in and out of cloisters, teaching positions, nursing jobs, and the changing dress-codes for their habits certainly gave me a different perspective on being Religious.

Of the three, I felt closest to Sister Ann Constance, SSJ, former principal of Bethlehem Catholic High School, also known in the family as "Aunt Iz."

(It was a novice at her convent that swept me from my mother's arms at the tender age of six weeks, placing me on the altar for a blessing that Mom always reminded me of whenever the story of Isaac's willingness to sacrifice Jacob came up in a reading or discussion.)

Sister survived breast cancer only to fall prey to a brain disease that left her increasingly immobile and in dementia for almost ten years. At her funeral, my father humbly (or perhaps fearfully?) passed his assignment of reading the Intercessions to me, and I trembled on the altar in front of hundreds of devout Catholics, many of them in religious orders, to dare to invoke "Let us Pray to the Lord."

Devotion to G-D and the Blessed Mother I have. Dogmatic adherence to the precepts of Roman Catholicism or weekly attendance at Mass I do not, probably logging a total of 50 Masses in the last FIVE years (rather than one), ash on my forehead at Lent and friendliness with the campus Newman Association(s) notwithstanding.

Her sister in the Order, Elizabeth Immaculate, passed on less than six months later. She was one of the sweetest, most innocent women I have ever known. Childlike in her way of seeing the world, and beautifully modest about expressing her faith and her opinions. But I also heard she was a tough math teacher. And at her funeral, listening to the work of her teaching career, I realized that my vocation in education was not an anomaly in the family.

Aunt Nancy joined the convent first, at eighteen, directly out of high school. But Aunt Clare held out through her twenties, carried on a vibrant social calendar, and exercised her spending power with a career in nursing. She became a Sister of Mercy. And they were among the first order, from what I recall, to discard the medieval habits for modern costume.

I used to love summers at the Jersey shore. Or more precisely, the two weeks of every year, usually August, that the clan would gather in Sea Isle City. And the nuns would doff their headdresses, and run their fingers through their graying close cropped curls, and laugh at themselves. The older women wore bright tanks with skirts; their brother, my Poppop, always had an underwear shirt covering his chest. It was before most people used sunblock. And we would fly kites, jump the waves, and build castles made of sand and seaweed and clamshells.