20 June 2010 - 11:21Nun Find

Catholic University School of Library Science, graduating class of 1949

A few nights ago, I spent part of the evening sitting on the love seat with a book in my lap, a magnifying glass in one hand, and a black-and-white photograph in another.  The photograph, taken in 1949, is of my mother’s graduating library school class at Catholic University.  The book was Thomas P. McCarthy’s Guide to Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States, or as I like to call it, The Field Guide to the Identification of Nuns.  Having been published in 1958, it was perfect for the task I had set for myself: to identify every order of nun that appeared in the photograph, or fall asleep trying.  When I was done, I had fourteen different names of orders scribbled down, from the Sisters of St. Ann to the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

As I sat next to the couch where my husband was doing a Sudoku puzzle, I thought about how similar my activity was to his, except mine was more like those word find puzzles where you try to find the words hidden in what looks like a matrix of random letters.  But this was harder, because my puzzle didn’t tell me what nuns were there to be found; I had to take the visual clues I had in the photograph and match them up with what was in the book.

The task also resembled another of my pastimes, bird watching.  Nuns, in the era of my mother’s graduation (not to mention the early years I spent in Catholic elementary school), were at least as consistent in their habits (manner of dress) as birds are with their plumage.  If I could match the headdress, robes, and other accouterments from a nun in the photograph to one in the book, I had a certain identification.

Daughters of Charity, St. Catherine Laboure School, cira 1960

The arrangement of a field guide to birds is much more friendly to the bird watcher than this book was to a nun watcher.  Guides to birds are arranged by species, which means that birds that are similar in size, shape, and color are grouped together.  Not so with my field guide to nuns; it contains approximately 300 different orders of nuns and sisters arranged alphabetically, which has nothing to do with how they look.  Sometimes, I had to flip through the entire book two or three times to find,for example, the nun with the black veil with white lining, black robe with the white collar, and the silver cross around her neck (Sisters of the Precious Blood).

I was surprised that none of the nuns in Mom’s graduating class were of the same order that taught me for the first eight years of my education.  I would not have needed McCarthy’s book to identify one of them.  Even if I hadn’t known what the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul looked like, their habit is so distinctive that it would be hard to confuse it with any other.  As McCarthy put it, “…the white cornette and blue gown of the Sister of Charity is easily identified, even in a convention hall crowded with a thousand nuns of various orders.”

Catholic University School of Library Science, graduating class of 1949 (with annotations)

I spent about an hour this past Saturday morning updating a digital copy of the photograph, adding the name of the sisterhood and an arrow pointing to one of the nuns who belonged to it.  I don’t know why I felt compelled to create this image.  I guess it’s because nuns are part of my past, but I’ve never fully figured out why someone would want to be one.  Why would a person feel that in order to serve God, they had to separate themselves from the rest of the world physically and socially, if not withdraw completely from it.  I am aware that nuns have always worked in schools and hospitals and even libraries, but I never understood the need to dress like 17th century French peasant women.  But I feel drawn to these old nuns in a way that seems almost spooky to me.  They were the authority figures of my youth, and I never felt that I fully measured up to their expectations.  I might have stayed a Catholic if I felt that they (and the priests) were more human, and less idealized.  I would also have liked them to be more feminist in their theology, but that is just wishful thinking on my part.