MARGARET BURKE ARRIVED ON the Framingham campus that September day in 1961 with only a few belongings — sensible shoes, corsets, a Bible. Personal effects were not allowed, but she smuggled in a small stuffed animal: a skunk doused in her favorite perfume, Chanel No. 5.
Her friends from high school had already left for their freshman year of college; Peg, as they called her, was the last to go. Thrilling summers of North Shore sailboat races by day and dance mixers by night were fading from view. Even for a good Irish Catholic girl, the path she’d chosen was cause for some trepidation.
Peg’s mother, an aunt, and a cousin drove her to campus. They took photos until the bell rang and then said tearful goodbyes. After this, they’d be permitted only monthly visits. Peg, then 17, headed to the chapel with about 70 other young women and took her assigned seat. The day had come to begin a lifelong commitment to God and to the Sisters of St. Joseph.
“We spent the first five years at the convent in Framingham,’’ Peg says today. She would soon be given the name Sister Christopher Marie. The young women would train to become teachers — as Peg’s Polish father and Irish mother were — and would get their degrees at Regis College.
They lived in close quarters that first year, with curtains for room partitions, prayers at 5:25 a.m., and mandatory “grand silence” from 9 p.m. until Mass the next morning. In their second year, they became novices, wearing habits of black wool and polyester, only the rounds of their faces exposed.
Over time, the members of that class, as well as the women who arrived in 1962, forged intense bonds, their earnest vocations melding with happenings in the outside world. The times were tumultuous, but also exciting, with war protests in the streets and Freedom Riders battling segregation in the South. Even the Vatican was reexamining its place in the modern world, questioning church doctrine for the first time in a century. For these young Catholic women, the mere whiff of change was so startling that anything seemed possible.
At the convent, the women had animated conversations about poetry and philosophy, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But the slow pace of change inside those walls would eventually make some of them restless. In the summer of 1968, and over several years to follow, a hundred or more would decide to leave.“There was revolution all over the place,” recalls Judy Beatrice, then known to her classmates as Sister Dorothy Francis. “And it was so exciting, because we were going to be a part of it.’’
A tight circle of them would go on to lead extraordinary lives, serving as teachers, principals, and union officials. One became a superior court judge, another a college president. One helped raid draft offices, another was an activist for migrant workers. There’s a hospital executive, a financial adviser, and a midwife who has helped deliver more than 1,400 babies. And all the while, no matter where their lives took them, these ex-sisters were building a lasting sisterhood of their own.
IN JANUARY 1961, THE country’s new charismatic and Catholic president urged Americans to ask themselves what they could do for their country. Regina Quinlan, who grew up in Brighton the middle child of five, already knew what she could do: Become a nun. “I applied when I was in high school,” she says. “It was a vocation to change the world and be holy.”
Anne Walsh felt as if John F. Kennedy were speaking directly to her. She had grown up in Jamaica Plain, not far from where the Sisters of St. Joseph opened their first school for girls in 1873. And now she was eager for adventure, at a time when young women had few alternatives to getting married.
In the convent, they were sometimes torn. On the one hand, Walsh and her friends admired Jackie Kennedy’s hairstyle and flair. On the other, the habit that covered them head to toe felt exotic and commanded respect. The women each had two, one to wear while the other was being washed. They were taught to sew their habits themselves, from six yards of fabric, under the tutelage of Sister Titus. At each washing, they had to unstitch the pleats across the top, then stitch the pleats back in. They would pin up the voluminous dark skirts to play basketball and tennis, go bowling and ice skate.
But Walsh had mixed emotions when elderly men would scramble to give her their seat on a bus. “It was excessive reverence,’’ she says. Over time, for her and others, the habit began to feel like a barrier separating them from the ordinary people they wanted to serve.
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