Welcome to Off the Page. I'm Stephen Copeland. Today's guest is Dr. Elizabeth Booker-Barkley,
known by her loved ones and students as Buffy. Buffy is an English professor and chair of
the Department of Liberal Arts at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She
has her PhD in English and is also the author of four books and numerous articles for the
St. Anthony Messenger. Buffy has an especially personal connection to the staff at the St.
Anthony Messenger as she taught our editorial director, Chris Heffron, and our executive
editor, Susan Heinz-Brigger. The focus of this conversation and many of Buffy's articles
is the impact and legacy of religious sisters and how they have helped to show us the way.
In this conversation, we discuss Buffy's interview with Sister Helen Perjean for her
January 2025 cover story and what it looks like to speak truth to power and fight for
justice. Sister Helen, as you probably know, is the author of the 1993 bestseller Dead
Man Walking, which two years later was turned into a film that was nominated for four Academy
Awards. Buffy and I also discuss her March feature story about the Sisters of Charity
and the vital role of contemplative dialogue in both reform and activism. This story was
especially close to Buffy's heart as she is a former Sister of Charity herself. I just
absolutely love interviewing our writers at the St. Anthony Messenger. A lot goes into
each story that does not always come out on the page. And one of the things I love about
feature writing personally is the impact on your own heart as you let a story take you
in, as you let listening really be your guide and curiosity to lead the way deeper and deeper
into the story itself. So that really comes out in this conversation and the impact all
these sisters have had on Buffy's spiritual journey. One quick final thing with Sister
Helen's ministry and accompanying people who are on death row. At one point, Buffy and
I began talking about the difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration
in their approach to capital punishment. I spouted off something I had read, but was
actually not very informed about. In this case, I happened to be right, but it was a
lucky guess. And I wanted to say that upfront because, well, one, I don't really like that
I did that. In our age of polarization and outrage, I think it's important for, yes,
young podcast hosts to seek a journalistic standard in their conversations. And at the
same time, I recognize that the nature of having a free flowing conversation that's
animated by listening is to kind of work things out in real time through a dialogical process.
So pretty much everything I write or create is anchored in interviewing, but I'm learning
that podcasting is a different beast. It requires both careful speech, a journalistic kind of
direction and groundedness, but also the grace and freedom to work things out in a dialogical
way in real time. So all that to say, thanks for your patience with me as I learn and grow.
And I'm excited to share this interview with you. If you do want to learn more about the
recent developments in capital punishment, I recommend Sister Helen's recent story, Joe
Biden's act of advent mercy in America magazine, or a recent story by the Catholic news agency
titled Trump signs pro death penalty order calls capital punishment an essential tool.
If you're curious what the Catholic Church teaches on this moral issue, I've dropped
the link to the new revision of number 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in
the description of this episode. So without further ado, here is Dr. Elizabeth Booker
Barclay. Elizabeth Booker Barclay, welcome to Off the Page. Thank you, Stephen. So you
have two really wonderful feature stories. You have the January cover story and the St.
Anthony messenger, and then you have a really beautiful feature in our March issue as well.
So I'd like to first get into your cover story. But before we do that, can you tell our listeners
a little bit about your background and your writing background as well? Yeah. And they
might notice on my screen that my name says Buffy Barclay. And that's my nickname that
I got at birth. And everybody wants to associate me with the vampire sire, but I do not say
vampires. You don't that's why you're on this podcast. Gosh dang it. That's my next my next
dig. So anyhow, I was born in Pittsburgh. I'm one of six daughters from Wally and Catherine
Booker. I found something quite interesting. Just last year, everybody always wanted to
know why my nickname was Buffy. And my mother named me after her Girl Scout leader who was
Elizabeth that she admired very much. And her nickname was Buffy. And I have known other
people with that combination. There's a lawyer in Cincinnati who named Elizabeth and her
nickname is Buffy. But one of my sisters was reading a biography of the great Queen Elizabeth,
not the one that recently died and found out that Buffy was her nickname. So I think there's
like something royal about my heritage, my background that's coming with the name Buffy.
So most of my friends, all my friends, and a lot of my students call me Buffy. Some of
the students don't feel very comfortable. They call me Dr. Buffy or Miss Buffy or something.
I like the ring of Dr. Buffy. So we moved from Pittsburgh to Springfield, Ohio, when
I was in second grade. And that was my first contact with the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati,
who by the way, are the sponsors of Mount St. Joseph University, where I teach and their
mother houses a walk down the road. So I have a great devotion and admiration for the Sisters
of Charity. They taught me in grade school and in high school. And then I came to Mount
St. Joseph and I had Sisters of Charity here. And I happened to also join the Sisters of
Charity right after high school. So I was a member of the Sisters of Charity for about
11 and a half years. So I have a very deep admiration for the sisters who are still alive.
I lost a lot of dear friends who aged out beyond me. And I periodically walk over just
to visit their graves at the mother house, but they were wonderful women. I have a great
devotion to Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, who was the founder of the Sisters of Charity.
In fact, my late husband and I named our second daughter Elizabeth Ann after Elizabeth Ann
Seton. And in fact, we really met. He was a TV journalist and I was a Sister of Charity
working on communications. We met when he and the reporter were going to do a special
about the canonization of Elizabeth Seton. So I think Elizabeth has a very special part
in my life. So in fact, one issue of Saint Anthony Messenger, last year or the year before,
I wrote a feature called Dear Elizabeth Ann Seton, where I talked about what she meant
to me. So I've been a teacher for many years. I taught high school English until 1978. And
then I went to work three years for the Catholic Telegraph newspaper, which I think is still
the oldest existing Catholic newspaper in the country. So I got great, great training
under the editor, Jim Shea, who interestingly had worked as a police reporter in Philadelphia
before he came to be editor. But he was quite a gentleman. He just knew so much about journalism.
He could not call me Buffy though. One time he called me Buffy and said, there I've said
it, that is no name for a grown woman. But he did say it. So I worked for there for the
Telegraph and then I was pregnant and had my first daughter in 1981 and thought I'd
take a year off. But I really felt committed to being more with her than without her and
ended up having three daughters. And I was able to teach part time at Mount St. Joseph.
So that got me into the teaching and writing field at the same time. And I love teaching.
I could have retired several times, but I just think there's so much energy in being
with young people. And this is a wonderful, generous generation of students and they just
bring me great joy. I was in my office, it had been painted and I had been in a different
room for a while. So I had boxes in my office and one of my students stopped in to say something
and she said, wait, what are those boxes? Are you packing? And he said, no, no, I'm
still here. Don't worry about it. So teaching, it's interesting because a couple of times
I've used students in my article. I did one feature story about what makes Catholic universities
so special and it's their mission. And I talked about a student there in my lead and then
later on I did one on aging and growing old. And I used Sister Helen Prejean in the opening
of that. And then for this article on Sister Helen, I used my students at the beginning.
So they get a lot of lines for me in the St. Anthony messenger, which is good.
Yeah. Yeah. Before we get into your cover story in the January, 2025 issue, tell me
a little bit, I can tell just how much you love to teach and I would be curious what's
beneath that. Like why do you love teaching so much? What is it about teaching that brings
you so much life?
I think it's being with younger people. And some of my friends had said that they said
when they retired, they were around young people. Like one of them was a junior high
teacher and she said, I was kind of depressed for a couple of years because just that energy.
And I also, I know I can teach them. I'm especially good at teaching writing. I also teach literature
and like one of my favorite courses I'm teaching this semester is African-American writers,
but I'm also teaching feature writing, which is great because that's my genre that when
I write. I have done news writing, but not feature writing is where I like, but I love
seeing them grow. I love seeing them have this aha moment when something clicks. This
is a particularly sharp class of feature writers this semester. There's 17 students. I've taught
most of them and some of them are going to be high school English teachers. Some of them
want to go into editing or creative writing and the conversations have been so rich because
I've given them so many really, really good feature articles to read and they talk about
them. Why are they good? What about this sentence? What about the structure? And they, you know,
we're only in the third week and they're really getting it. So I can't wait to read their
first stories because I think it'll be great. I also gosh, for maybe 30 years have been
the advisor to the student newspaper. And that makes me happy because I can get them
into print and you know, Steven, it's a thrill to see your work in print and I want them
to have that joy and they're very excited when they get a byline. So that's some of
the joy of teaching.
Yeah. I remember my journalism teachers, particularly my high school journalism teacher, she managed
our school newspaper and so many of the lessons I learned go back to her and in her giving
us permission to take a risk on a story or, you know, take that risk and fail. Doing the
story and learning from it. So yeah, and one thing I personally just love about feature
writing is every feature story for me, at least it's kind of like a puzzle, you know,
and here's something, it's something that I don't think AI will ever be able to do because
you are bringing together all the information, interviews that you have done and you're trying
to figure out how to fit it together and tell it in a compelling way that gets the reader
on board. Do you have anything to add there? I personally just love feature writing.
And I think that that's something that people don't think about and when younger writers,
when you talk to them about structure, they don't understand how important it is to have
a structure. But these students I'm taking now, because they also have done fiction and
poetry that some of them are creative writing minors and they get the idea of structure.
And I always feel nervous about taking on a feature story because I research and I interview
that I have like piles like of stuff that I have. And I think once I figure out the
arc of the story, where this is going, how I'm going to get into it, I'm so relieved.
The writing is nothing. It's just trying to figure out, it is like a puzzle. Like what
pieces can I get rid of? There's so much left over. My first editor at The Telegraph said
you should use about a third of what you have when writing a story. And I think that's a
good gauge. So I like that you said that because structuring and setting up the pace of the
story is very important to me. Yeah. And it's always interesting asking yourself the question
in the process, like, okay, I've conducted all these interviews, but what's the heart
of the story? Because there's many different stories you can tell when you have that much
information, when you have tens of thousands of words of transcripts, but what's the heart
of it? And that's the journalistic piece where it's not just about telling a compelling story.
It's about getting to the truth of the story as well. Once I did the Sister Helen interview,
I knew what the thread was going to be. And that was going to be about incarnations. She
had, no, not incarnations, the quote that she was saying that incarnations are rare,
but annunciations are frequent. So I knew that that was going to be the thread. Once
I got that, I thought, I got it. I know where I'm going with this.
Yeah. Well, let's give listeners a little background here. To begin with, you told me
you had a 90 minute interview with Sister Helen Prashan, who is just a legend, and you
had 90 minutes with her. So for starters, though, who is Sister Helen? And then I would
also be curious to learn about what you learned from her in that interview.
Sister Helen Prashan is one of my icons and role models. Just because she speaks truth
to power, she's just so out there saying what she needs to say. And she's 85 years old and
she's still doing it. So she's also a role model for aging, I think. But she grew up
in a rather sheltered Southern family in Louisiana. And she says she had a really good childhood.
She had good school. She had a good family. And she happened to have, they happened to
have house servants who lived in a servant's house. And she treated them well, but she
didn't really, she said she really never knew any people of color or any poor people. She
was quite prayerful and really had this idea that sisters should be praying and doing that
kind of spiritual work and not be involved in social justice issues. So she had a moment
of reckoning when somebody started to talk about all the injustices and what the sisters
should be doing. And she publicly, well, in their forums argued against that. And then
she had this really lightning moment where she began to realize that she didn't know
poor people. She didn't have any connection with social justice. She had been a teacher
of English and decided that was really good, but she felt she had to do something else.
So she and a couple other sisters moved into one of the poorest neighborhoods of New Orleans
among mostly people of color because she wanted to get to know people besides white people.
And it was then that she got to know some very socially active lawyers and people who
worked with prisoners. And at that time it was like so innocent. Somebody asked her if
she could be a pen pal to a prisoner. And she said, well, I can write. Yeah, I can do
that. I'll be a pen pal. And then she ended up going to the prison to visit these people
and realized that she could do more than be a pen pal. She could advocate for, well, I
would say the abolition of the death penalty because eventually she went to death, walked
people to death several times. And the one time she said the first time she did it, she
went outside and threw up because powerful experience. And she felt like she had like
a commission, like to really get the word out about what the death penalty is, what
prisons are like, and to do something to advocate for the abolition. So she's kept that up.
And she's delightful because when she gave our two graduation speakers this year at our
university short, you know, she's done this a lot. She didn't have any notes and they
were both a little bit different. But one of my colleagues who's in the mission office
really wanted to meet her. So I introduced her and they took a picture together. And
Michelle said, I will never forget the time you were here last time you talked about Sneaky
Jesus. And that's one of her things that she threw into her graduation address. Like you
look out because Sneaky Jesus is going to tell you what you have to do and you better
be listening. He'll be sneaking up on you. So that's the kind of person she's just so
down to earth and so real and so much fun. And I think people don't like you're working
on the death penalty and you got a sense of humor and you like the party. And yeah, she
somehow has that work-life balance that she's able to pull off.
Nat, yeah, the title of your January cover story is Dead Man Walking at 30. The fight
continues. Can you tell listeners who perhaps have not seen or read Dead Man Walking? What
was this book and what impact did it have on your life when you read it?
So Dead Man Walking is a memoir of Sister Helen's work with people on death row. And
in it she talks really primarily about one person that she accompanied to death. And
she said she was telling me I never wrote a book before, but I felt like I had to write
a book, but I didn't know how to do it. So I just started writing and one of her friends
had a publisher friend in New York and sent it to a publisher who gave it to another publisher
and said, I think you want to publish this. This is a book you want to publish. But she
said I learned so much from my editors. And she said one thing I learned when they first
read it, they said, you wait too long to tell what happened. What crime did this man commit?
And the editor said, if you haven't told that by the 10th page, you've lost your reader.
So she was so open to, you know, she had been a writer, she had been an English teacher,
but she was so open to the feedback that really good editors can give. And that's what I think
grabbed people when they read the book because by 10th page she had pictured the murder that
this young man had done, he and a friend had done, took two teenage kids out and murdered
and raped them and left them to die. And that's pretty grisly. But then she goes through,
it talks about the background, it talks about their family and talks about the victims.
She also learned that she was perceived as being more sympathetic to the murderers than
to the victims' families. So she really tried to change that and go to prayer sessions and
help with victims to work through what they had to deal with because of the death.
In the movie, the movie was, how this came about, it was not something she had planned,
but Susan Sarandon, the actress, was on a set with another film and one of her friends
gave her Dead Man Walking and said, don't read this tonight because it's too grim and
you won't want to. But she stayed up all night and read it because she was so moved by it.
And then she was able to meet with Sister Halle and talk to her about what she can do with
this book. Could we make it into a movie? So the husband of, well, he wasn't the husband
and he was a partner of Susan Sarandon, was Tim Robbins, the actor and director. And she
worked for him for nine months. She said, finally she started crying and said, we've
got to make this movie or I'm going to give it to somebody else. So he did. And Susan
Sarandon played Sister Halle and Sean Penn played the convict that she worked with. And
she told me how Tim Robbins did exactly the same thing that her editor had done. He said,
we got to early on get people to understand what happened. And those are hard scenes to
watch. I mean, they're well done, but they're hard to watch. And so she's humble enough
to know that she can learn from other people. These are the people that know what they're
doing and I'm going to put myself in those hands. So the movie came out like the end
of December, 30 years ago. They timed it right so that they could get nominations for the
Academy Awards. So they got best picture, best director, best picture, best director,
best actor, best actress and best song. And the only one that won was Susan Sarandon.
But Helen was telling me in the interview, she said, I don't care how many they got because
every time a nomination was read, they heard dead men walking, dead men walking, dead men
walking, dead men walking. And so she said by the time the Oscars were over, they had
a lot of free publicity about the film. So she was excited about that too.
I saw a quote from Sister Helen. She said, the death penalty is about us. And I think
what she was saying was that capital punishment is a pro-life issue because, and I think your
story indicates that, but it's a pro-life issue because we have put ourselves in charge
of the death penalty. We've taken control of something that is God's ultimately. Am
I reading and understanding that correctly?
Yeah. And I think because there have been so many people put to death who were wrongly
accused. Another person that I admire a lot is Brian Stevenson. He wrote Just Mercy and
he has this Southern work in trying to get people, open up their trials again to show
that they were not well represented, that not enough evidence. And he has been able
to get people off death row. So they both have a saying, I don't know who started it,
but they both say you're always better than the worst thing you've ever done or the worst
thing you ever have done does not define you. And that she believes in God's mercy and she
believes that people are unjustly. And often it's people of color. You rarely find a rich
person on death row because they have the lawyers and they have people they can argue
with. Well, some of the overloaded cases of these public defense attorneys is amazing.
How can they even do the research in order to get a good case? So Helen, I think in the
book, she acknowledges the tension because she found what they did very repulsive. But
in the book and in the movie, a powerful scene is when she talks to the person she's working
with and tries to get him to admit what he had done because he had never admitted it.
He always said he hadn't done it. And at the point in the book and in the movie when he
says, yes, that's what I did. I did that. And she says to him, well, you know, you are
a child of God and God loves you. And he starts crying in the film and says, nobody ever called
me a child of God. And it's a very moving point in the movie. I think what Tim Robbins
and she in her book got right was this balancing act between the families are suffering too.
The families of not only the victims, but the family of the people going to death row.
And that's in the movie. It's a very hard scene to watch because he's trying to say
goodbye before he goes to death. And this whole family is in there. His little brother
is in there kicking a ball around. They don't know what to say because their brother is
going to be executed. The mother wants to hug him and she's not allowed to hug him
before he goes to death because that's the rule in the prison. And I was saying, and
I said this in my note as a contributor, I'm not in the story, that I heard about Sister
Helen Prejean from my oldest daughter who's now 42 when she was a student at McNiglas
High School in Cincinnati, which the Sisters of St. Joseph founded and that's Sister Helen's
order. She came home and talked about this energetic little nun that was saying that
we should abolish the death penalty. And she just was so excited about it. So from then
on I was like, I followed Sister Helen and knew she was on my radar. In fact, one of
my friends in my English department here says, this is the interview you've been building
up to all of your life, isn't it? Kind of, yeah. This was just like a joy for me. It
was such a blessing to be able to have those 90 minutes with her, even if it was on Zoom,
that's fine. It was just-
Yeah. What did you personally take away from that interview?
Personally took away how kind she was to me. Everybody has written about her all over the
world. And she gave me the time and I had been with her a few times. I hosted her at
our university a couple of times. I got her to be the keynote speaker for this group of
Catholic communicators I'm in called the Salesian Guild. So during that day I got to take her
around to interviews and I got to take her at night after the thing was over to her friend's
house so she could party. But the fact that she gave me her private email, she gave me
her phone number, and she was just like having a conversation with a friend. When we went
to the graduation ceremony, she said, I just want to talk to you about this book I'm writing
because you're a writer too. And she said, I'm writing this book with another guy and
it's about this guy that's on death row and here's how we're going to structure it and
blah, blah, blah. And you know what that's like because you're a writer. I'm thinking,
yeah, me and Helen, writers. I texted her and said it was so enjoyable. And she said,
yeah, I had a good time.
Yeah. Well, it's a beautiful story and a real celebration of the work she's done and continues
to do, which kind of leads to my next question. The death penalty again, capital punishment
has again been in the news the last four weeks, right when your article came out. First with
some of President Biden's final actions and his commuting of several federal sentences.
And then now in wake of the inauguration of Donald Trump, where I believe he signed an
order on the death penalty, basically emphasizing this push to reinstate and facilitate the
process of capital punishment.
He had more death penalties under his one term than any other president. So it's kind
of scary. So I was delighted when I heard, I was driving along on NPR, I heard that he
had commuted 37 sentences of people. He can only do federal. He can't do anything.
President Biden.
Yeah, President Biden. He can't do anything about the people in the state. But he, I was
very thrilled about that. And then in American magazine, just like a day or so after that,
Sister Helen had an article that she wrote and it was titled, Sister Helen Prejean on
Joe Biden's Act of Advent Mercy. And she starts by saying, when the call from the White House
came on December 19th, I was so excited I couldn't sit down. I kept walking around saying,
thank you, God, thank you. And she said, along with other faith leaders, she does not take
all the credit herself. She said, I had pleaded with President Joseph Biden to use the power
of his office to show mercy to the condemned on federal death row. Now here was the heads
up telephone call, assuring me that President Biden would soon announce the greatest tidings
of mercy that people condemned to die ever hoped to hear. And I was kind of confused
by the use of Advent Mercy in the title until I read that it was December 19th, that she
got the news, not that, not when it happened. So I admire her for never giving up. She's
to me, probably like the prophet people get tired of hearing, like, oh, not the death
penalty again, you know, can't you give it up? You know, you're 85, just slow down. But
she's not giving it up. And she's still visiting one person on death row who she thinks she
knows was wrongly accused of a murder. But I was so disheartened to hear that news about
Trump because he's going to make sure that all these people who are on death row and
did you read, Stephen, did you read the actual executive order? I was a little confused about
whether he was ordering the attorney general to get enough supplies just to the people
on the federal level or whether he was saying he should give supplies to the people at the
state level. Yeah, that's a good question. What I read briefly, it seemed like it was
both. However, before this is published, I'm going to go back and double check that. Either
way, the bottom line was that it was a hard stance directly after Biden shows mercy in
this way, to use Sister Helen's words.
Well, and the other thing is many states have delayed executions because they botched them.
And they think that they have the right and certain companies are not giving them the
supplies that the older version of injection use because they don't want what they produce
to be used to kill people. So that's what the issue is that they can't find a safe way
to do this without causing terrible, terrible pain. And I think sometimes they've tried
in certain states and it was so botched, they had to take the person back and try again.
So the suffering, I think some people would say, yeah, well, they caused other people
to suffer. But, you know, I'm with Helen. I'm with who are we to decide who's like to take.
That should be just something that's not in our power. We are not gods. And I don't think
our God, my God, would ever want somebody to die that way. I've always been against
the death penalty, but I really became very committed to it when my first husband was
dying of glioblastoma, a brain cancer. He diagnosed in July and he died in October.
But I remember being in his room when we had to make the call to take him off life support
and people were around him. Daughters were crying. People were crying. We were singing,
do not be afraid. And I left him because his one brother was in Vermont and he really wanted
to spend the night with him because the nurses said it could be several nights, go home and
get rest. And this brother, I think, really wanted to reconcile some things with his brother.
And I remember leaving and thinking, this is what death is like. And I never want to
be a part as a voter, as a US citizen, of saying that I have taken somebody's life that
was not ready to die. So it was very personal to me and I just can't forget the look of
my husband lying there about dying.
Yeah. The frailty and vulnerability that you're getting at, I mean, yeah, no matter what side
of the aisle listeners are on in this issue, I don't think it's possible to deny the reality
that something like this takes matters into the state's hands. And the state, our systems
often get it wrong, you know? And even if they get it quote unquote right, now we're
into the realm of theology where does God ever hold back mercy for us? Do I want to
be defined by my worst mistake? Who is this person's true self? Who is this person at
the core beyond deeper than their behavior? Not excusing their behavior, but are they,
it goes back to that scene in Dead Man Walking, are they a child of God or not? And depending
on how you answer that question, that leads to policy and how we deal with this particular
issue moving forward. Do you have any thoughts on what I just said there?
Yeah. Well, very few other countries have the death penalty. They'd be eradicated. And
some of that, I can't remember exactly which countries they are, but they are not countries
that we would want to be identified with. Perhaps Iran is one, I'm not sure. And then
if you look at the death penalty in the United States, that primarily the higher number of
death penalty executions correlates mostly with Southern states that were formerly slave
states. And when my husband, I remarried in 2014. So when my husband was reading this
article, he was astounded when he read the death penalty centers reports of deaths by
regions since 1976. The South alone had 1,303, the Midwest 201, the West 90, the Northeast
four, and Texas alone had 589. Wow. So those are mind boggling statistics, how uneven this
is and who's going to want to have that on their heads. And Helen even talks about her,
she's talked about this before, the toll the death penalty takes on the people in the prison
that have to take the steps to do it. Yeah.
Yeah. By law, like their job requiring them to basically step into a divine position and
decide when someone's going to lose their life or how they're going to. Yeah. Well,
do you have anything else you wanted to hit on about your January cover story? I know
we've covered a lot of ground here and I'd love to talk about your March story at some
point.
I would just like to say that one of my favorite parts of this was that Helen lives in this
little house and she was sitting at her desk and you could see the kitchen behind her.
She had to take a break once to go stir what was on the pot on the stove. So I think that's
just her. She's just does not have any of the trappings of celebrity that a lot of people
would think she would. Yeah. Things like that don't always come out in the piece itself.
But it's a personal experience that you have that says a lot about her. And this kind of
leads into your March article where you began this interview by talking about your affinity
for religious life, your past background. How many years were you with Sisters of Charity?
Eleven and a half. Eleven and a half years. Yeah. And your March 2025 feature story, the
story is titled The Nuns Are Okay. What did you explore in this story?
Well, I know that in our university, we are still what's considered a sponsored institution
of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati. They had five sponsored institutions and several
years ago said, we are not equipped to do this because of our numbers and our resources.
I think they made a rather large financial donation to the university to make sure it
was secure. But we are still working with a group to try to find it. And then I'm not
even going to use the language because it's so puzzling because it's so churchy. But we
have to find somebody to be a sponsor. And so just thinking about what this means, because
I have a sister who's a Sister of Charity, and she just turned 80 and their numbers are
not. When I entered in 64, I think we had 1,600 Sisters of Charity around the country
and around the world. And I don't know what the number is. It might be like 180 right
now sisters who are left. So they have to figure out what they're going to do with their
resources. And then there are sisters, young sisters in the Sisters of Charity. And there's
like four or five or six maybe like in the past decade. So they're called the Young Sisters.
And some of them aren't that young, some are 40. So how will they make sure that they have
a viable future? The movement seems to be making a global sisterhood. So these sisters
might be living with and working with people from other countries, but there are still
going to be sisters. A few orders that I know of have come to completion, which means they
have divested of all their property and they have made arrangements for their retired sisters
to be taken care of. The Sisters of Charity are not there, but I think everybody's dealing
with what's the future going to be. So one of the exciting things that happened a couple
years ago, maybe a year and a half ago was the mother house of the Sisters of Charity
sits on a huge plot of land called Bender's Mountain in an Oberloopsie Ohio River. So
they decided that they were going to make a gift up of many of the acres that we stayed
on to this local conservancy who already has property adjacent to this. And that was, I
love the fact that one of our local NPR stations covered that story because I think that's
wonderful in this, like who will take care of this property? Who will know that it's
something sacred and this group will do it. So that's happening all over the country.
People are giving away land, they're giving away buildings. But the emphasis of my story
is that we are not dying. We are reimagining what the future will look like and it will
be very different. It will not be sisters running hospitals or sisters running universities.
Like we have no Sisters of Charity on our faculty or our staff at Mount St. Joseph University.
But the point is that through this new sponsorship form, we should be continuing the work of
the Sisters of Charity and their mission. And I think that's the challenge for a lot
of groups, like how do we continue this? And I know that there are people in my department,
which is the Department of Liberal Arts and it's English, History, Religion and Philosophy.
We are very dedicated to understanding who the Sisters of Charity are. In fact, one of
our or three of our religious studies faculty came up with the idea of doing a book about
particular Sisters of Charity that people should know about. So it's funny because only
one of the three is Catholic. One is, I think, trying to figure out what he is to find a
home and another one was just ordained an Episcopalian priest. And so the main title
is Our Clown of Witnesses and then there's a subtitle. So it was really wonderful to
have people dig into who some of these amazing Sisters of Charity were that preceded us,
whose shoulders we stand on. So I think in one of the people I quoted in this March article,
she said, it's not like our ministers are going away. We're just having a new level
of cooperation with lay people, which we should have been doing all along. And the laity are
the church. And people don't really realize this. I think sometimes they think sisters
are part of the clergy, but they're not. Sisters are laity. So this is just another expression
of the laity. And they're finding these people that are really willing to carry on what the
sisters have been doing. I know it's very hard, but they're doing it in a realistic
way. And the people that have put their heads in the sand are finally realizing we need
some help to figure out where we're going with this. But I think the Sisters of Charity
have been working on this for... They knew this was coming. There was predictions that
about this time there would be a deep decrease because the world is changing. When I injured,
there weren't that many options for women to be engaged and to be in a ministry of any
kind. But now there are many, many options. So it's not that people don't want to be religious
or spiritual or servants, but there are other ways of doing this than joining a religious
order of women.
Yeah. That's what I was going to ask you about next was if you had any particular theory
about why religious life, at least in the United States, is on the decline.
If you look at what's happening to political institutions, government institutions, universities,
we're in a kind of a collapse. It's been predicted and it's happened cyclically. So I'm going
to just read a little bit from a book that I used. Somebody happened to mention it that
I interviewed and she said, you should get that. So I did. I found a copy of it. And
what was kind of neat was I couldn't find the actual book. So one of our librarians
copied the chapter I wanted. He said, I think you're going to want the introduction too.
I didn't even use the chapter. I used the introduction. So good for him. Good librarian.
So in 1984, it's called Shaping the Coming Age of Religious Life. It was written in 1984.
And Marianist Brother Lawrence Cata, I think he's had been with the University of Dayton
near us, but he describes four or five years of this group of scholars meeting, researching
and drawing upon their experiences of renewal and each of their religious communities since
the 1970s. What emerged was quote, an intriguing exploratory hypothesis that religious life
in America was undergoing a major transition, one that had been underway for at least 15
years, and which would take another 15 or 20 years to complete its major movements.
The magnitude of this transition would be major and significant and perhaps would be
viewed in the future as one of the most significant periods in the evolution of religious life.
So he predicted and then he went on to say the transition would effect a deep reorientation
in the way that religious would live in community and the way they would be of service to the
church and the world. And it's just phenomenal that that far back they could say this is
coming and I think sisters have known about this for a while. So it's not like they are
surprised. It's just sending shockwaves through some of the people like of my generation that
lived in the 50s and all they knew was sisters as teachers and sisters as this, but there
aren't those people anymore. And sponsorship of our university demands that certain number
of sisters of charity have to sit on the board. The sisters sitting on the board are in their
80s. The younger ones don't want that stuff. They want to be out with the people doing
their thing, protesting against injustice and doing their work. So they, I'm not going
to sit in a board room. So even that aspect of sponsorship would be difficult to find
the sisters to do that.
Nat, I really enjoyed reading your article because in your article you can sense that
there are all these different kinds of models of renewal for the evolution of, you know,
like the book you just read, the passage, the evolution of religious life. But not just
that, like you broke this open earlier. The age we're navigating right now is one of an
extreme distrust, it seems, of our institutions. So what does renewal look like? And one of
the themes you highlighted in your article was this notion of contemplative dialogue
as a path toward renewal. So can you talk a little bit about contemplative dialogue,
its role in renewal, not only on an institutional level, but this is for us individually and
in our own communities as well?
Well, I'm glad you brought this up because I'm not sure this made it into the article.
But contemplative dialogue is not something that's new, but its premise is you sit in
prayer with one another and you don't speak. But when you do speak, it's a dialogue. It's
not me telling you what to do or pouncing on your ideas. And it's very difficult to
do, but the sisters have been using this process to work through where they're going. And it's
been hard and they've spent many weekends and meetings and Zoom calls trying to work
together on this. And one of the sisters said, as divided as our nation is, as difficult
as it is for people of opposing views to talk to one another, maybe we can model contemplative
dialogue to them and they will take up the challenge of listening in prayer.
Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And I mean, not to get too political here, but I mean, I don't
know if you saw the story today about the Episcopalian bishop. Yeah. That's making the
speaking. Making the rounds. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So we're recording this on January 22nd. And
there was a Episcopal bishop who basically, and she did. A woman, I might say. Yes. Yes.
Yep. Exactly. And she essentially calls out, I don't want to even say calls out because
I can challenge it. Yeah. The way she did it was so gentle. It was so rooted in this
kind of contemplative dialogue, I would say that we're talking about. And this kind of
goes back to Sister Helen, but she was basically just advocating for the new administration
to show mercy for people that often are forgotten, people on the margins. And she exercised her
free speech, you know, and she did it in such a gentle way. And people that's when they
actually watched, they said she was beautiful. She was gentle. I just read the transcript
of it. Yep. Yeah. It was. And she even brilliantly brought integrated Trump story into her invitation
where she said, you just admitted in your inaugural address that, you know, you have
been touched by the providential hand of God, you know. So mercy was shown to you. That's
what you're saying. So like, now you're in this position of power again. What does it
look like for you to show mercy? You know, I mean, it was a very powerful scene. Yeah.
One thing about Helen that I love is that she's 85. And she's, of course, slowing down
a little bit. She's prioritized what she can do. I think we might be one of the last universities
to have her as a keynote speaker because I think she's saved her energy for more important
things. But I really resent the way some people brush off the people who are in their 70s and
80s and 90s because there's so much wisdom and so much experience in that. And she, to
me, is a role model. Some of my sisters, the charity friends, were role models to me. And
they were, one had been my novice director and we became friends. And actually I was
with her the day she died because one of her nieces called me over and said, can you come
over on a break? And I got to say goodbye to her and then she died. So we are missing
a lot, but we have to keep their memories alive of what they have done and how gracious
and how wise and how spiritual all these people are. And they don't have to be a religious
sister or a priest to be that way. But there are some sisters that I really think encapsulate
what I would like to be as I continue to age.
Yeah. Yeah. The last thing I wanted to ask you was, is you delved into this story in
the March issue. Was there anything that you stumbled upon that perhaps you weren't expecting?
Hmm.
And maybe that's not something that jumped out in your interviews, but something rising
up within you from your own personal experience.
I have something up within me. I just felt so privileged to be talking to these people.
They're leaders of like national groups, they're leaders or retired leaders of communities
and they trusted me. I mean, I think people could really botch this story and make it
all about the nuns are dying out, but I didn't take it that way. And I think I said at the
end of the story, I really wanted to honor the people that I interviewed because they
invited me into their Zoom world so I could talk to them. And that's a great trust because
I know as a journalist, every time I interview people, I think you're trusting me. I got
to get it right. I can't take this in the wrong direction and have this in print for
people to read.
Yeah. Yeah. And we began the interview talking about feature writing and you're exactly right.
Every time I go into an interview for a story or even for a podcast, I mean, it's like,
oh wow, what a privilege to be able to sit and listen and learn. I mean, it's not about
taking something and putting it into what I want to say. It's about, I mean, talk about
contemplative dialogue. It is just this open reception and curiosity. I love that about
interviewing. It's curiosity that helps you to get to the heart of the story. And it's
one of the few things in our world that is so bent toward certainty and always having
the right answer that is just completely animated by a posture of deep listening. You know what
I'm saying? Yeah. Well, this has been great, Dr. Buffy.
Thanks Mr. Steve.
Yeah. Is there anything I left out? Anything else you want to hit on?
No, but I just would like to thank St. Anthony Messenger because they have become my publication
of choice. And I love that I get so much freedom. And if I present an idea, the editors review
it and say that this is a good fit. So I feel very special. I have a very special relationship
to this magazine.
Yeah. Well, your stories are always a real joy to read. So thank you for everything that
you do for us. And yeah, I'm excited for our readers this year and listeners of this podcast
to experience your work and to learn something in the process. So thank you again for your
time and for joining off the page.
Thank you, Stephen.
Once again, that was Dr. Elizabeth Booker-Barkley. If you enjoyed this conversation, if there's
anything you agreed with or even disagreed with, please share it with your friends or
family and begin a conversation of your own. If you feel inclined, please consider leaving
a review or subscribing to the St. Anthony Messenger to read articles like Buffy's. You
can also visit the donation link in the show notes. We'd be humbled if you help us to continue
creating content like this. Thanks again to Buffy. And thanks as well to Father Ciprian
Concilio for providing the music for this episode. This is Stephen Copeland signing
off. Peace and all good.