Past, current nuns mark 150 years

They will be returning here from Florida, Virginia and Arizona, not as the Catholic nuns they once were, but as laypeople — teachers, counselors, mothers and grandmothers.

At one time, all were members of the Sisters of Providence, a Roman Catholic order that is celebrating its 150th anniversary in the West with a reunion between sisters who left and those who stayed. An estimated 175 women are expected to attend the event next weekend in Issaquah at the site of a former convent.

It is one of two local events next weekend marking the anniversary, and one of several planned throughout the state this year.

Today, on Easter Sunday, as they join millions worldwide in celebrating the day Christians believe Jesus was resurrected, the order's members and former members find Easter's message of life, death and resurrection especially relevant.

Since Mother Joseph and four Providence sisters arrived in Washington Territory in 1856 to house and feed the poor, the order itself has gone through many incarnations, building a vast health-care system from humble beginnings. The events this week will celebrate those accomplishments while also offering the women a chance to reminisce and to heal old wounds.

Before and even up through the liberalizing changes of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, some who left religious communities were told to go quietly — sometimes without a chance to say goodbye to their fellow sisters.

"It was a very painful separation — not only for the person leaving but for the people who stayed," said Sister Mary Wilson, the reunion organizer. "You've lost a friend you're used to talking to, sharing with."

The reunion, she said, is intended to be "a welcoming experience, to celebrate being together, appreciating where we've been, where we are and where we're hoping to go."

Health-care ministry

When Mother Joseph and her four Providence sisters arrived in the Northwest in 1856, they had to go on "begging tours" by horseback and riverboat to ask for donations from miners and lumberjacks.

Yet within a year, they founded Providence Academy in Vancouver, Wash., the first permanent school in the Pacific Northwest. A year later, they opened St. Joseph Hospital in Vancouver, Wash., the first permanent hospital in the Northwest.

It was Mother Joseph, who had learned carpentry and design skills from her coach-maker father, who is credited, in part, with designing Seattle's Providence Hospital, built on Fifth Avenue and Madison Street.

"She's regarded in some respects as one of the territory's first architects," said local historian Walt Crowley.

Although the sisters teach, minister to the poor and elderly, and operate ministries in low-income housing, the order's most visible ministry is health care. Swedish Medical Center acquired Providence Seattle Medical Center in 2000. By that time, Providence Health System-Washington had become the state's largest health-care system.

Desire to serve

It was this continual mission of caring for the sick, the poor and the vulnerable that attracted so many young women to the order.

"In those days, if you were a Catholic and wanted to serve the Lord, you became a nun," said Carol Simon, 68, of Issaquah, who entered the order at 17 and left it two years later.

At Wilson's sunny West Seattle apartment, Simon and two others who had left got together recently with three sisters who stayed.

Wilson, 68, wearing a colorful shirt over black leggings, spoke often, interrupting her own energetic spiels with frequent hoots of laughter.

"I met the Sisters of Providence when I was younger than 5. I was selling turkey chances!" she recalled of helping her mother sell Thanksgiving raffle tickets at a Catholic fundraiser.

When Simon, Wilson and the others entered Mount St. Vincent convent in West Seattle in the 1950s and early 1960s, nuns wore wimples and habits and spent much of their time in contemplative silence. They rose at around 5:30 a.m. to pray and go to Mass; they had meals, recreation and evening prayers together.

Then the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962, brought significant changes intended to open the church and update its rituals. Mass could be celebrated in languages other than Latin, and nuns no longer had to live in convents or wear habits. Some didn't like the loss of structure. "That wasn't what I wanted," said Jeanne O'Dea, 65, who entered the order in 1959. "I felt it was too easy to slough off."

O'Dea was assigned to teach in Anchorage and shared a house with sisters from three different orders. "The time was just eaten up by all the activities of the day," she said.

She wrestled for a long time before deciding to leave the order around 1968. "I came to find out I was a real people person," said O'Dea, who married and had two children. "I needed a human spouse."

Healing the hurt

For others, life in an order was just not a good fit, regardless of the changes brought about by Vatican II.

Simon, who married and had four children, is now a Christian counselor. "I was a freer spirit than what the convent was: structured."

The women say they are grateful for their years in the convent, where they found a greater understanding of God, learned self-discipline and matured. "We bonded, we shared our lives. That's been a foundation undergirding all my life," said Simon, who treasures her convent years, even though she now belongs to a Foursquare denomination church. "We're all sisters in God."

Still, some harbor old hurts, especially about the way departing nuns were often secreted out the door.

"It was a total cut-off," acknowledged Sister Charlotte Van Dyke, 73. "We didn't know they were leaving. When they left, it left an empty chair."

How the women departed was up to the mother superior of each convent, though "the farther back you go, the less the chance to say goodbye," Van Dyke said. "I guess they didn't want other people to be influenced by people leaving."

Patricia Gergen, 68, who spent 10 years in the order, remembers fellow sisters just disappearing — "They would just be gone. ... I used to feel that if I'd been friendlier to them, they would've stayed. I felt it was my fault a lot that they were leaving."

Other wounds need healing, too, Wilson said.

She remembers her terminally ill mother being turned away one Sunday when she came to visit because it wasn't the once-a-month visiting Sunday.

And she acknowledges that the convent structure at the time didn't "quite get the adolescent part," she said. "We did not have a sense that it was OK to have feelings."

She hopes the reunion will ease such hurts while also offering those who've stayed away a chance to reconnect.

Perhaps it was providential after all, she says, that some women left the sisterhood. Many are now lay leaders in parishes, "seeding the church with compassion," she says.

"And I hope those people who've had the same kinds of pain we've had in separation will understand they aren't alone in it. And I hope they will see our pride in them, in how they have seeded the church."

More changes

Vast changes are once again under way both in the order and in the larger church.

The number of nuns in the U.S. has plummeted in recent decades, from almost 180,000 in the mid-1960s to less than half that number last year — about 69,000.

In the Providence sisters' Mother Joseph Province, made up mainly of the western states, the number of sisters has declined from a peak of about 760 in the 1960s to about 185 now.

Fewer women are entering the order, and those who do are often from different cultures. The Providence sisters now frequently combine forces with other orders.

That the reunion and local celebration are being held close to Easter is "so significant to me because it really symbolizes the life, death and resurrection — the new life of the Sisters of Providence," Wilson said.

"The death was letting go of some of the old structures, the old way of life. We've had to mourn that, grieve that. And then we can celebrate the resurrected life of what is here now."

Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published April 16, 2006, was corrected April 25, 2006. Swedish Medical Center acquired Providence Seattle Medical Center in 2000. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Providence Health System-Washington merged with Swedish Medical Center.