Books in Brief: Changing Habits

Changing Habits: A Memoir of the Society of the Sacred Heart, by VV Harrison (Doubleday, 320 pp., $18.95)

In the 1930s, Monica Baldwin, a Catholic nun and niece of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, caused a major scandal by publishing I Leaped over the Wall, a book about her escape from the convent. Today, ex-nuns are commonplace, as are nuns in mufti. How some of them got from there to here is the subject of this extensively researched book about what has happened to one teaching order, the Society of the Sacred Heart, over the past twenty years. It is not that these nuns leaped over their walls but that the insulating walls were torn down by a Vatican II directive that religious orders could be cloistered, or apostolic, but not mixed. Within a few years, the uncloistered Sacred Heart order, which had educated the daughters of the American Catholic elite for half a century, was in disarray, closing down or selling off its schools and colleges. What this dark night of the soul meant not only to the nuns but to the “children of the Sacred Heart,” the former students, is what VV Harrison probes in Changing Habits. Miss Harrison, an unlikely child of the Sacred Heart, was rebellious, outraged, and confirmed in her nascent anti-Catholicism, when her parents entered her in the Sacred Heart convent at Eden Rock, Pennsylvania, her third boarding school in as many years. Initially she hated it. The nuns must have been forced to take their vows by some act of “unspeakable treachery or tragedy,” thought the 15-year-old VV. But when, years later, she re-meets the now cigarette-smoking, Scotch-drinking, liberated, call-me-Peggy Mother Daley, she comments wryly: “My high-school dream had come true. Mother Daley was in the world with me, and I didn’t like it one bit.” VV Harrison is tough-minded in her appraisal of where the Society erred, where its failure to move with the times left the nuns vulnerable to temptation once the rules and routines of their daily lives were breached. It is her sensitive handling of what happened to the Mothers Tobin and Daley and Coakley and Forden, of the frailties and the strengths of these remarkable women, that mark this book with special grace. Attending Mass recently at Kenwood, once the order’s novitiate, now a home for superannuated nuns, evokes bittersweet memories of Eden Rock: “I think of the long, black line, the familiar faces in fluted bonnets, the uplifted hands, the downcast eyes, the graceful, studied walk. That image now lives only in the hearts of those who experienced it.” Miss Harrison goes a long way toward explaining for those who never experienced it why the Mothers of the Sacred Heart left such an indelible mark on generations of Catholic girls.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Changing Habits: A Memoir of the Society of the Sacred Heart, by VV Harrison (Doubleday, 320 pp., $18.95)

In the 1930s, Monica Baldwin, a Catholic nun and niece of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, caused a major scandal by publishing I Leaped over the Wall, a book about her escape from the convent. Today, ex-nuns are commonplace, as are nuns in mufti. How some of them got from there to here is the subject of this extensively researched book about what has happened to one teaching order, the Society of the Sacred Heart, over the past twenty years. It is not that these nuns leaped over their walls but that the insulating walls were torn down by a Vatican II directive that religious orders could be cloistered, or apostolic, but not mixed. Within a few years, the uncloistered Sacred Heart order, which had educated the daughters of the American Catholic elite for half a century, was in disarray, closing down or selling off its schools and colleges. What this dark night of the soul meant not only to the nuns but to the “children of the Sacred Heart,” the former students, is what VV Harrison probes in Changing Habits. Miss Harrison, an unlikely child of the Sacred Heart, was rebellious, outraged, and confirmed in her nascent anti-Catholicism, when her parents entered her in the Sacred Heart convent at Eden Rock, Pennsylvania, her third boarding school in as many years. Initially she hated it. The nuns must have been forced to take their vows by some act of “unspeakable treachery or tragedy,” thought the 15-year-old VV. But when, years later, she re-meets the now cigarette-smoking, Scotch-drinking, liberated, call-me-Peggy Mother Daley, she comments wryly: “My high-school dream had come true. Mother Daley was in the world with me, and I didn’t like it one bit.” VV Harrison is tough-minded in her appraisal of where the Society erred, where its failure to move with the times left the nuns vulnerable to temptation once the rules and routines of their daily lives were breached. It is her sensitive handling of what happened to the Mothers Tobin and Daley and Coakley and Forden, of the frailties and the strengths of these remarkable women, that mark this book with special grace. Attending Mass recently at Kenwood, once the order’s novitiate, now a home for superannuated nuns, evokes bittersweet memories of Eden Rock: “I think of the long, black line, the familiar faces in fluted bonnets, the uplifted hands, the downcast eyes, the graceful, studied walk. That image now lives only in the hearts of those who experienced it.” Miss Harrison goes a long way toward explaining for those who never experienced it why the Mothers of the Sacred Heart left such an indelible mark on generations of Catholic girls.