CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE SCOPE OF S.C.O.P.E. II—THE NUNS [Sat, 2-26-22]

[The 2^nd in a 4 part series for Black History Month. Be warned—it’s twice as long as usual.]

 

[Sisters Alma Louise Mescher and Mary Jean Mark in Albany, GA in the summer of 1965]

I met Sister Mary Jean Mark first. She taught history at the Catholic girls’ college, St. Mary of the Woods [SMW], a few miles west of Terre Haute. It was the time of Pope John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council, which he had called in order “to throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through.” To do that on the Terre Haute level, Sister MJ was tasked with providing an evening of ecumenicity for her colleague teaching nuns and their students. Since I was the new Methodist campus minister at Indiana State U and Rose Poly Institute [now Rose-Hulman U], she invited me to speak to the assemblage, to provide them with the perspective on the church and world for all of Protestantism. It took me about twenty minutes. But the Sisters of Providence became our friends personally, and our colleagues in higher ed ministry and social justice professionally.

In a note much later, Sister Alma Louise said, “Since I have gotten to know you, I understand why Sister MJ treasures your friendship.” That was delightful to hear, because MJ and I were buddies, despite the great differences in our ages and theologies. I think it was helped early on by then three-year-old Mary Beth, who answered the phone one day when I was indisposed and Helen was gone. To my dismay, I heard her saying, “Now you just wait a minute. He’s on the potty, but you just wait…” By the time I got to the phone, I heard this hysterical laughter coming out of the mouthpiece. It was Sister Mary Jean. She was the first nun I ever met, and I was probably the first Methodist minister she had met, and, yes, we did treasure each other. 

When the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] asked for help for the 1965 “Freedom Summer,” to register black folks to vote, we had both Wesley Foundation students and SMW students and nuns who wanted to be part of it. Sisters Mary Jean and Alma Louise, went, along with our Wesley Foundation kids, headed by Bob Mullins, an IN State U journalism student from Hammond.

Nuns were not respected outside their own precincts in those days. They were women. They wore funny clothes and didn’t have sex and weren’t allowed to drive cars. How could they know anything about the world?  Also, they were old, especially in the radical slogan of the day, “Trust no one over thirty,” and SNCC was a youth movement.

Mary Jean was in her 60s and Alma Louise was 49. Two highly competent women, old enough to be mother or grandmother to Bob Mullins, but not even allowed to ride in a car with him, or any other man, including Sister Mary Jean’s brother, unless there was a chaperone.

MJ and AL were college professors. Sister Alma Louise [nee Marjorie Anne] had a PhD from Notre Dame and was a research biologist who had mosquitoes bite her own arm so that she could study the effects. But they didn’t count for credibility, because they were just women, and the most out-of-it women of all, nuns!

So Bob Mullins, age 21, was the head of the group, renting a headquarters [229 &1/2 S. Jackson] and sleeping rooms, and managing the budget and shopping, and getting chased and shot at. He was the escort and body guard for the nuns and the girl students. It didn’t strike me as unusual at the time. I was doing that sort of thing at 21, except for getting shot at. Now I realize how remarkable Bob was. And how remarkable those nuns were.

Nuns were always in full habit in those days. Later Sister Mary Jean was much distraught when they “came out of the habit.” It wasn’t really “out” at all, but it seemed so to Sister MJ. The St. Mary of the Woods Sisters of Providence got full habits in dark blue and light blue as well as black. That was their idea of “modernizing.” Sister MJ said, “It’s just so hard. Every morning I have to decide which color to wear.”

Sisters Mary Jean and Alma Louise told me in a letter how the local “Negro” undertaker had asked them to take food to their grandson in jail. He and a dozen or so of his friends had been arrested for picketing a super market. Those arrests were usually of the “blocking the sidewalk” type. The undertaker, Mrs. Barnum, was sure they were not being fed in the jail. When the nuns went to the jail, they found out that she was right. Her grandson was eleven years old!

They returned to the jail with food. Not even the sheriff was foolish enough to turn those habits away. Yeah, those nuns were fragile, wouldn’t even last two weeks, the SNCC folks said.

They were the only nuns to participate in SCOPE. “Look” magazine did a five-page spread on them.

Many years later, when nuns were out of the habit, I was at some conference and spied a woman across the room. She was wearing a nice dress and high heels. And a neck cross.  I went up to her and said, “You’re a Sister of Providence, aren’t you?” “Yes,” she said. “How in the world did you know?” “That cross,” I said. “Only SPs wear one like that. Also, you don’t look like someone to underestimate.”

John Robert McFarland

Thanks to good friend and Emeritus IU professor Dr. Anthony Mescher for research on Sister Alma Louise Mescher.