Were the Sisters of St. Antoninus Female?

As a boy at St. Antoninus Catholic Elementary School, I, along with most of my classmates, often wondered whether or not the Dominican sisters that taught us were actually female. Of course, we knew in some abstract sense they were; after all, they were called “sisters,” and the pronouns “she” and “her” were used to refer to one or another of them. Still, judging by the measures that we knew, we were uncertain. The flowing, ankle-length white tunic, gave no indication of body shape, and the square veil covering the head right down to the eyebrows cabined their hair. They wore shapeless, thick-heeled black shoes. Their faces were unlipsticked, unblushed, uncosmeticed. The features of those faces seemed uniformly angular, as if formed from sheet metal. Several of the sisters had moustaches or a chin whisker or two.

As far as we could ascertain, the sisters bore no resemblance to our most familiar models of the female gender: our moms. They did not wear Capri pants and espadrilles, did not wear makeup, did not use Clairol, did not buy Elvis Presley 45s, did not moon over the muscled arms of Cincinnati Reds first-baseman Ted Kluzewski, did not smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails, did not play canasta with “the girls,” did not shop with what my dad considered ferocious abandon at Shilitoes Department Store, did not use slang, did not read “Peyton Place” or watch “General Hospital,” did not freely dispense loving caresses, and did not smile with both mouth and eyes when speaking to us. And while all the sisters wore a plain gold wedding band, we were given to understand that it symbolized their marriage to Jesus Christ, a state of wedlock that, even in our prepubescent naiveté, we knew was nothing like the one that united our moms and dads.

Some of us, the proto-Darwinians, I suppose, speculated that the sisters might be a subset of the female gender, evolved specifically for the ascetic religious life of the Dominican order. Others of us, the proto-Lamarckians influenced by the science-fiction movies we flocked to see, held that the sisters had once been fully gendered females but had undergone a transformation upon being consecrated to sisterhood, had been unsexed, degendered, unwomaned—an opinion that spawned a related debate: whether that transformation occurred immediately or over time. A few of us, perhaps the proto-post-gender acolytes, argued they were special creations of God, unique beings who exuded a compressed, muscular authority, lean and mirthless, aerobicized, symphonic, designed to inculcate the Baltimore Catechism and discipline whatever impulse-imbued desire we sought to gratify with a jacketing moral responsibility. If religious instruction were tennis, the sisters played a power-baseline game. But, whatever the reason for it, we unanimously agreed that the sisters were an alien and other gender, at best, only tenuously female.

And so I would have blithely continued indentured to this idea had I not one day been sent on an errand to the sisters’ convent, an ominous building to our young imaginations, an impenetrable abyss of unlit mystery. Still, I considered it an honor to be chosen for this mission, a testament, so I thought, to my flawless performance as an altar boy and charter member of the Knights of the Altar. I knocked on the door and explained to the answering Sister Norita that I had been sent by Sister Mary Joseph to fetch her reading glasses. Sister Norita ushered me into the foyer and told me to wait. I watched her departing figure until she disappeared down the shadowed hallway and then, beset by curiosity, took a few steps forward and glanced to my left into what was obviously a living room.

Now, I suppose I expected something approaching a monastic cell, a spartanly furnished room, devoid of personality, lit by rows of votive candles and featuring crucifixes hanging on the otherwise bare walls. I was surprised, therefore, at how strikingly ordinary it seemed: bright white walls with pictures of The Sacred Heart, The Good Shepherd, and the Blessed Virgin Mary crushing the head of a serpent; a couch and several arms chairs; swagged drapes and valances; an end table upon which lay a crucifix, a missal, several hymn books, and a coffee cup; a cabinet stereo, some potted plants; and a card table upon which rested a partially completed jigsaw puzzle. With a minor change here and there and the addition of a television set, it could have been the living room in any of my friends’ houses. It could have been the living room in my house—with one neoned exception.

Sitting on an ottoman was Sister Bernadette, one of the younger nuns, combing through obviously just-washed chestnut-brown hair that reached more than halfway down her back. That hair: it was clean and good. It shone. She combed deliberately, unhurriedly. I stood transfixed. There was no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, about Sister Bernadette’s gender. And as I gazed at her, as I regarded her, as I considered her in that simple act, I suddenly realized that she, and all the sisters, were characters in their own stories, not just mine or my friends’. I imagined her, wholly, and realized that she, and all the sisters, was like my mom and all my friends’ moms. They had been young girls, lived young girl’s lives, lives with tea sets and dolls, lives with dreams and secret crushes, lives with skinned knees and silly jokes, lives with best friends and irritating brothers, lives with movies and fan magazines and diaries. Just like my mom and my friends’ moms, except that one group exchanged marriage vows, devoting their lives to their husbands and children, and one group exchanged religious vows, devoting their lives to God and His children. Two different consecrations, but the same ultimate purposes.

Sister Nortia had stolen up alongside me as I stood there. “Sister Bernadette has lovely hair, doesn’t she,” Sister Norita whispered. “Yes,” I whispered back. “It is her glorification of God,” Sister Norita said; “God has given her beautiful hair, and she takes care of it and keeps it beautiful to honor his gift to her. Do you understand?” “Yes, sister,” I replied, but I really didn’t, not then. But later, when I learned about purpose and obligation, about perspective taking and humility, about empathetic concern and commitment to something larger and more durable than myself, I understood that, however meager they may be, my gifts, like rivulets of wax cordoroying a candle, flow from the candle’s hollow only if the wick is trimmed and set aflame.

The Sisters of St. Antoninus

I was born, raised, and educated in the bosom of the Catholic Church, which, of course, makes me wonder, not without a twinge of guilt, why I used the word “bosom.” My Catholic education began at St. Antoninus Elementary School. Antoninus was a Dominican who in the 15th century served as the bishop of Florence. “Antoninus” means “little Antony,” likely an affectionate reference to his making himself small through inordinate humility. The Dominican sisters who taught at St. Antoninus were, to those of us in their charge, anything but small. They were wholly other figures, talismanic and imposing, their power welded to the authority of the Church and consecrated by the gold wedding band emblemizing their marriage to Jesus, possessing, so we thought, a bionic capacity for inducing in us the humility characteristic of the school’s namesake.

We were certain the sisters conspired nightly in their convent to devise the means necessary to liberate our natural inclinations to reduce all things to the small, tight circle of our prepubescent egos. The evidence of a conspiracy was irrefutable.
· Every sister carried a ruler, at all times and in all places, for the sole purpose of bestowing quick, hard raps on hands that misheld a pencil, on heads that peered out the window instead of at a sheet of long-division problems, on rear ends that moved too fast or too slow in the myriad lines that formed our mode of travel to lunch, or the playground, or Mass, or the gymnasium for polio shots. The ruler measured our misbehaviors which, like the devil it was meant to expel, were legion.
· Every sister utilized the “claw,” a technique whereby, after a stealth approach from behind while we were daydreaming or conversing with a neighbor, she would bury her fingers, up to the first knuckle it seemed, in our shoulder’s trapezius muscle. I made the mistake of describing this technique, and its effectiveness, to my mother, who promptly adopted it. Thank goodness I kept silent about the ruler.
· Every sister sent miscreants to an indeterminate sentence of kneeling on the hard linoleum, back to the class, in a corner at the front of the room, an unrivalled method of penitence, symbolically mimicking the postural humility of Mass but without the comfort of the padded kneelers. Many years later, reading Agamemnon, I understood completely Aeschylus’s comment about “the pain of pain remembered.”
· Every sister warned us about Elvis and the blasphemous hips that threatened the legacy of natural moral law stretching back to St. Thomas Aquinas. I discounted this warning, however; my mother was an Elvis fan and bought all his records. I simply could not see my mother as a barbarian at the gate of Church teaching. Besides, my father preferred the sister-approved Perry Como and Bing Crosby, and to my mind that defused whatever anti-foundational potential my mother’s affection for Elvis harbored.

And every sister told us a version of the following story: “Boys and girls, one Sunday morning two boys decided to ship Mass and go fishing. Well, while standing to pull in a fish, their rowboat flipped over. Both boys drowned and went to Hell for all eternity because they committed a mortal sin. Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls? Well, imagine that the Earth is a steel ball and every ten thousand years a bird flies by and brushes the ball with its wing. When that ball is worn down to the size of a BB, that’s only the beginning of eternity.” At first, aghast and dumfounded, we were silent; then, as the sheer enormity of what the sister had told us began to slip-stream into our imaginations, we cried. We wailed with a ballistic ferocity that undoubtedly rivaled that of the Enfield, Connecticut, congregants who listened with mounting horror to Jonathan Edwards’ description of sinners in the hands of an angry God being dangled over the gaping mouth of hell. The sister’s story was a subtle as molten lava, but it achieved its purpose. In an economy of saving souls, a glimpse of sin’s dark energy often pays the bills.

It occurs to me now that perhaps that glimpse was underpriced. To say the sisters were flinty disciplinarians compliments both flint and discipline. We did not fear them necessarily nor consider them inhumane; after all, they were married to Jesus, who, to our minds, would not countenance gratuitous cruelty in his spouses. No, grievances did not fester. Discontent did not simmer. Rather, we considered them obstacles, stalwart in their effort to bring order to the architecture of our id-addled prepubescent beings. They issued a summons to a beyondness, to a beckoning world that did not take our impatient desire for instant gratification as its measure, that did not operate on the principle that each of our impulses should be nanoseconds from satisfaction. We were children, not yet ready to put away childish ways. We did not understand, had no context for understanding, that they hurled themselves against the rock-hard obduracy of kid nature. Living healthily on a steady diet of frappes and kettle corn would have carried a higher probability of success. Only later, as adults, seeing other adults who had not put away childish ways, did the necessity of their Thermopylaen labor become apparent. Only later did I see that the management of desire they attempted to foster through stricture gave us an immanent apprehension of ethics, the principles of deportment, self-command, and a realization of consequences, by which social relations are regulated. Only later, when I was ready for it, was the sisters’ lesson learned.

One winter day, like Shakespeare’s schoolboy with my “satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail” from the bus drop off to school, I noticed a “snow sister” in the yard in front of the sisters’ convent. It was a bust, actually, and everything about it was exquisitely sharp and detailed—every fold in the hood and scapula, every bead in the rosary hung from the neck, the crucifix in place directly over the heart—everything except the face. It was a nonface, really, a vague gesture toward a face, a non-individuated abstraction meant only to embody the garments that signified the sisters’s consecration to what they took to be who they were and what they did. Even I, for whom the Hardy Boys books constituted the height of aesthetic achievement, recognized the loving application of artistic skill the bust exhibited. Only years later, however, living in a culture of undiluted self-absorption, did I tag it with meaning. It was a self unselfed to assume the larger self of sisterhood, or, perhaps better, a self reselfed as icon but not symbol, for that bust did not represent something else, it was the something else, the totalizing experience of being a Dominican sister, the continual reverence and humility that emblemizes their mindfulness of their lives’ moral context, of their living before the face of God. In his book Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber describes such a context as “something before which surrender and devotion and submission and gratitude are the only appropriate responses.” All Dominican religious have the initials O.P. after their name, an abbreviation for Order of Preachers. “What see’st thou else,” Prospero asks Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The “else” I now see is that the snow bust the sisters of St. Antoninus sculpted preached. I’ve grown up, put away childish ways, fallen away from the Catholic Church. Still, though, the sisters of St. Antoninus are imposing, large in having made themselves small.

Times change. Religious callings have diminished. The Dominican sisters no longer teach at St. Antoninus, replaced by lay teachers. Many of the sisters no longer wear habits. They live in apartments rather than convents. But last winter, after a snowfall, I suddenly wondered if a group of sisters somewhere made a snow sister. And, if they did, did it have a face a habit? Did it have a face?