Looking beyond the habit

Sister, is it all right if I leave my things here?" I heard myself ask then... "That sounded like I was in high school again," the whole class laughed. We were at a seminar given by Sister Dolores Mitch, a Maryknoll nun. Quite a few of us had been classmates way back when Maryknoll was not Miriam. Is there a Filipina who doesn’t have a nun in her life? If we weren’t educated by them, we are related to them. We may have been their wards or part of their mission. Maybe we are customers – buying strawberry jam or oatmeal cookies, seeking advice, taking seminars.

The nuns who educated me were perhaps the most memorable. First the Belgian nuns who taught me how to curtsy and cross-stitch. Half a century later this is what I remember of my Theresian education. We curtsied and cross-stitched in first grade. My mother was a Theresian who thought of educating her only child there but later decided that I should go to a more liberal school. Instead of considering non-sectarian options, I was moved to Maryknoll to be educated by American instead of European nuns.

A liberal education was part of my mother’s drive for independence, a big thing for her. She had led a sheltered life and when the war tragically intervened, she had a difficult time adjusting to her new life as a young widow and orphan. She wanted my education and experience to be completely different from hers. I stayed with the American nuns from the third grade until I graduated high school and indeed history proves that Maryknoll nuns raised generations of feisty, headstrong independent well-educated women. Let’s admit it, Maryknoll became a poor shadow of its former self after the nuns left.

Many of them we loved. A few of them we hated. Most of them we feared at one time or another. Decades after graduation we remember them always with fondness and gratitude. Every time I think of high school I see her rushing out of the cafeteria backdoor to terrorize the Ateneo boys who liked to park by the playground to watch us play softball in our shortened skirts with bloomers underneath. A burly six-foot Texan, Sister would tower over the cowering driver and drawl, "Git outta here and git out fast." The young boys called her Gary Cooper. What a colorful character she was. She introduced banana-with-peanut butter dessert to us.

I remember too that time I was carrying a Sister’s books when a strong wind blew open her breviary. Out flew a magazine clipping titled How to Get Rid of Dark Circles Under the Eyes. When I handed it back to her, she blushed. I realized then that under the habit and the veil of authority were human beings with their own personalities and vanities. They were people. They were not God.

After reading last week’s article a friend called to ask if I had read the 1 April issue of Time Magazine. I was in Palawan then, totally tuned out. "You must read it," he said. He was totally upset by the behavior of the nuns in my neighborhood towards Pedro and wanted to know – weren’t the religious supposed to be the caretakers of the poor? "What’s happening to the church?" he asked rhetorically. "Nuns who are supposed to administer to the disenfranchised, further disenfranchise them; priests who are supposed to make men out of boys molest them." I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t been reading the newspapers or watching the news, so he sent me the issue of Time he was talking about.

Terrible this issue about priests in the United States being accused of child molestation or pedophilia and the deserved furor it has caused. What struck me most was a short statement that said how profoundly violated victims felt because, since the religious have been positioned as representatives of God and Christ on earth, they felt violated by God or Christ.

Maybe because they wear the habit day in day out, the religious forget that their habit marks them as representatives of God and therefore they must take extra care. They used to have all these rules about how we should behave in our uniforms because what we did outside the school reflected on the school. Maybe they have forgotten that. Maybe it’s easy to become insensitive to the impact of your habit when you wear it everyday.

When the nuns in our neighborhood asked the barangay to banish Pedro, causing him loss of home and job, no one dared ask them if they thought this punishment was commensurate to the offense. Everyone assumed that people in habits knew what injustice might be. Many, however, talked to Pedro and asked that he understand that they could not argue against nuns. I guess that’s the representative of God thing. I do not disrespect this but, we are learning, that embracing it totally can lead to injustice. Look at the scandal in the US, the number of suicides, the number of years it went on because people so trusted that habit.

Certainly something is happening in the world that is forcing the Catholic Church to re-examine itself. I think ordinary citizens have a role to play in this too. We have to be clear in our minds that religious habits do not necessarily mean godliness. Those habits can be unfair, can be wrong. Noli Me Tangere was a social satire, meaning it reflected what was going on in society. It was not just another work of fiction.

To all who wrote asking me to defend Pedro, thank you for your support, it is done. To those who whispered their support, thank you too. The lesson I learned was always study the facts and weigh things with care. Do not always listen to reports and completely disregard the clothes or habits people wear.