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	The Church I Knew By Yvonne Abraham Boston Globe April 18, 2010 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/04/18/the_church_i_knew/ NEWTON — If nuns ran the Catholic Church, I might still be in it. I spent 12 years in schools run by the Australian Sisters of St. Joseph, and I loved them. Well, not Sister Anastasia, who would hit my knuckles so hard with her pencil that I couldn't feel the piano keys for a good minute. Or Sister Joanne, whose giant wooden ruler struck fear into my 10-year-old-heart, and welts into my palms. But Sisters Berenice and Mary Ellen were a different story. Every girl at our Sydney high school could be anything she wanted, they constantly told us, ensuring the thinning of their own ranks. It was the early '80s, and they were full of energy and optimism and post-Vatican II progressivism. The church I knew through them was an open, welcoming place. Day after day, the nuns pushed us to confront the injustices around us. Politics, poverty, world affairs, crime — they were all our business as Catholics. I don't remember them ever talking about abortion or homosexuality. Most of us had more important things to worry about, anyway. We were the children of struggling immigrants and messed-up families, trying to transcend. But a few years after I left high school, all of that changed. The new pope, John Paul II, had busied himself with putting a lid on Vatican II. Sexual morality had risen to the top of his agenda — for the laity, at least. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was his main enforcer. He went after liberation theologians with a ruthlessness he clearly was unable to muster when it came to priests who raped children. This was not my Catholic Church. And so I left. Lately, as new waves in the sexual abuse crisis wash across the globe, I've been thinking about the nuns who stayed. How do the women who taught me to demand justice make sense of this? And how do they live in a church led by men who have launched two investigations into their American sisters, prompted by concerns that a "secularist mentality" and a "feminist spirit" have taken hold in convents? Mary Jane Sullivan, a retired Sister of the Sacred Heart, is a lot like the nuns who helped raise me. She rejoiced when Vatican II blew through the church, transforming her life, and her mission. "We became aware of a world that we had been sheltered from," she says. "We discovered Jesus Christ in the faces of people who are poor. Social justice is such a big part of us now." The things this gentle, blue-eyed, 76-year-old believes would curl the pope's toes: that priests should be able to marry; that women should be ordained; that church rhetoric on homosexuality is "sinful." She protested at the height of the Boston sexual abuse crisis in 2002. And yet she doesn't hesitate when I ask why she sticks around. "I am not part of the church that is doing those things," she says. "They think they're the church? The hierarchy is one thing. The church is masses of people around the world." She still has work to do — there is a woman in prison in Framingham whose family she must tend to, for example. And she still gets daily nourishment from her community at Our Lady's in Newton. "I don't want to put my energy into opposing the people who are in power now," she says. "Because what kind of power is that, compared to God's power, and the power I have to do what I can for people?" Besides, she is sure change is coming to the Catholic Church. "God is more powerful than they are," she says. "When God is ready, He'll send someone to blow the top off the place." I wish I had her faith.
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