The Sisters of Ephesus
by Anthony Esolen - January 1, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
"You must go visit the good sisters in Starrucca," said my friend, Father Check. So there I was with my wife and son in the car, sliding along a slippery highway in rural Pennsylvania, wondering what I would find when I arrived. I'd been told by the mother prioress, Sister Therese, that if we got there before ten in the morning, the sisters would be enjoying their hour of recreation, and since the snow was a foot deep, that meant sledding.
That I had to see, and if I cut a few curves along the way, I trust my eagerness will be forgiven. For I'd grown up with nuns, as you also may have done. We Catholics have too long indulged the jests at their expense: stories of their knuckle-rapping and ruler-wielding, their military drills in grammar and catechesis; the warm glow of their cheeks as they advised us about hell and what to expect in the probable case that we found ourselves there, and their pallor as, more rarely, they talked about the chill delights of paradise.
Those jests were ever one part truth and nine parts calumny and ingratitude. I knew good nuns and poor; sisters who were a part of my purging here on earth, and sisters, more of them, for whom I provided the same service. Some, no doubt, were sour and lonely people, whose veil might have served them as a salutary reminder of their frailty. But many were joyful, even if they concealed that joy behind their authority, lest we unruly children see too much of it and take advantage of their good nature. I remember one Sister Carmine in particular—but you too remember, reader. Nor should we forget to pray for their repose, or to ask for their intercession. Even in this life, after all, the bond between teacher and pupil never entirely fades away.
But we know what happened. The orders caught a virulent strain of the mod; they thought they were bucking the culture, when all along they were passively washing up on the crest of a tsunami that would batter every institution in its wake. The newish sisters may have smiled, for a while, and strummed guitars, but the songs were hollow. "Dominique-nique-nique s'en allait tout pauvrement," sang Soeur Sourir in her harmlessly silly three-chord hit, and a generation of Catholics took for the rose of dawn what was really a glow from the smithy in another quarter. In a few years the orders would fall apart, Soeur Sourir would be "Soeur" no more, and soon would sing no more, and the schools would begin to close.
What if, though, the Lord could grace us, His ungrateful and wayward flock, with sisters as faithful to the Church and to Christ as those of old were—or more faithful, since more conscious of their being a sign of contradiction to the world? And what if those same sisters were filled with the cheerfulness and joy that their elders once sought in the wrong places, and never found? How would that be?
I soon discovered how that would be.
