![]() ![]() Attending to William’s emotional needs, she writes, had consumed more and more of her time and focus, competing with “the single-heartedness” that is the essence of her vocation. Then came a nascent feminist awakening, as she examined the meaning of celibacy beyond biology. Bounding out of the family station wagon on the day she joined the convent, she announced, “I’m here! I’m here to become a bride of Christ!’”Īnd she was wildly competitive, once practicing the down-turned gaze meant to indicate modesty so zealously that she knocked down another nun. She was a scrappy, mouthy novitiate, often in trouble. Joseph’s, an order begun in France in 1650 with a particular mission for the education of girls. She was 18 when she joined the Sisters of St. She was curious about romantic love, but had ambitions outside of marriage and children. In eighth grade, she declared she would grow up either to be pope or president. On family trips, the family of five said three rosaries a day, as Sister Helen writes, “surefire Catholic Prozac for three squabbling kids in the back seat.” They loved language, drawing on both Roget’s Thesaurus and Groucho Marx - and the Virgin Mary. Her father was a lawyer her mother, a nurse. Sister Helen grew up in an affectionate Catholic family. I love to quote what Tim Robbins said: ‘The nun was in over her head.’ Back then I didn’t know anything.” I didn’t know anything about the criminal justice system. When I walked out of that execution chamber, all this was new to me. “The big annunciation” - she nodded at her Fra Angelico print - “was writing a man on death row and witnessing his execution. “Here’s the spark at the heart of all this,” she said. In the bathroom, there was a quiz deck of landmark American Civil Liberties Union cases. ![]() Nonetheless, the jury returned a death sentence. “I presented him as human being,” she said. The prosecution had fought hard to keep her off the stand, and attacked her testimony as being biased. In 2015, after meeting with him five times at his lawyers’ request, Sister Helen testified on his behalf. What’s more counterculture, Sister Helen said, than joining a convent? “It’s going to take a while.”īut being a nun has always been a radical act. In it, Sister Helen, who was raised in Baton Rouge and is of French Cajun descent, tells how a precocious Catholic girl turned nun shed her cocoon of privilege long after the social revolutions of the 1960s and the attendant reformations and renovations of Vatican II transformed many sisters into social justice activists. 13, a memoir of her life up until the moment she began to correspond with Mr. On a recent July day she was in a white polo shirt printed with sprigs of flowers, khaki-green denim pants and wedge sandals, greeting a reporter to discuss her new book, “River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey,” out on Aug. What would the nun wear? was big news at the time, Sister Helen recalled. Sister Helen, who had shed the habit in the late 1960s (as many nuns did post-Vatican II the ecumenical council began in the early ’60s to modernize church practices), wore a black top and a long flowered skirt she borrowed from a friend. ![]()
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