Stories from the Sisters
By Brendan Keating (BA '01, JD '04)
At the end of last semester, emotions ran high as 21 students gathered in a room in Wright Hall, a building where few Loyola students ever set foot. In their arms they carried paintings, poems, and sheets of music. In their hearts they carried the words and memories of the sisters whom they’d come to know and respect over months of interviews, storytelling, and reflection.
Many of Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly referred to as "BVMs," were in attendace, waiting for their lives to be shared on stage. Each student stood at the front of the room for five minutes and presented a piece of artwork meant to represent a moment in the life of a BVM. One student teared up during her speech and thanked her BVM partner for lending her courage during a difficult semester.
The symposium was the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of planning and the capstone of two philosophy courses, both taught by Dan Vaillancourt, professor of philosophy. Vaillancourt and his wife, Kathy, along with graduate student Hilary Bussell, worked to help students preserve the BVM legacy through memoir writing.
In 1973, Vaillancourt was hired to teach at Mundelein College, a BVM school, when he was only 23. “I started out brash, abrasive, and self-centered,” he says. “I ended my tenure with the BVMs in 1991 as a completely different person. I was more caring and sensitive; I had taken justice issues into my heart.” When the sister who originally hired him recently left Wright Hall to enter the assisted care facility at the BVM motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa, he was struck with the sense that something was being lost, and began plotting a strategy to preserve it.
Working with Christopher Skrable in the Center for Experiential Learning, the Vaillancourts organized two intensive and innovative classes. Students would study the theory and art of memoir writing, interview a BVM over the course of a few months, and then write a memoir about a part of that BVM’s life.
Getting the course up and running presented many challenges, not least of which was persuading many reluctant BVMs, whose mission is to serve quietly and gently, to participate in the project. The Vaillancourts also recruited and selected only the most dedicated students due to the class’s rigorous workload.
The first meetings between student and sister were a little anxious, until the interviewers and subjects became more comfortable with each other. “I was surprised,” says Elena Tinaglia, a senior philosophy major, about her first encounter with Sister Mary Joe Keane. “I had some preconceptions about how the sisters would dress and act from my parents’ stories of Catholic school in the ’50s. Talking to Sister Keane was eye-opening.”
Rachel Gabelman, a sophomore philosophy and ceramics major, had a similar experience: “When we first started we didn’t know how it was going to go,” she says. “But Sister Kelliher opened up very quickly. She shared so many things with me—all the good things as well as the struggles.”
The students weren’t the only ones changed by the experience. Sister Ann Harrington, professor of history and the director of Asian Studies at Loyola, was surprised by some of her student’s questions. “The first time we talked, it was just to get a general overview of my whole life, but then she started to zero in,” Sister Harrington says. “It was an unusual experience. She would ask me questions like, ‘What was the weather like that day?’ or ‘What did the trees look like?’ It got me thinking, maybe I should pay more attention to the world.”
After meeting many times with the BVMs, the students got to work composing their memoirs, which they wrote as the BVM in first-person voice. This unusual technique, says Vaillancourt, encouraged the students to really explore the interior life of the person they had interviewed. The students also crafted a work of art to represent the BVM.
The students presented their artworks at the symposium held in Wright Hall. “It was an absolutely wonderful experience,” says Sister Harrington. “I was immensely impressed by the creativity of the students—in artwork, photography, dance, playing the piano, poetry—it was very moving.”
As part of the agreement with the participating BVMs, the content generated by the course—memoirs, notes, and artworks—will be kept private. After some final editing, they will be stored in both the Gannon Center archives and the general BVM archives in Dubuque. These materials, while important, may not be the greatest outcome of these unique courses. As Vaillancourt says, “The great theologian Martin Marty has a saying, ‘If you want to find God, tell stories about human beings.’ We lived that saying the last four months."