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By Root 1043 0

Shannon played her guitar and sang at Saturday’s folk Mass. On a bookshelf in her room she kept a collection of nun dolls, each half a foot tall and dressed for a different religious order and historical period. I always found them creepy, with their Kewpie-doll faces and smothering garb, but to Shannon each represented a saint. For example, the doll in the white habit and black mantle, a Dominican nun, was Catherine of Siena. And the female Friar Tuck, dressed in the brown robes of a Carmelite sister, was Thérèse of Lisieux. Shannon also read The Lives of the Saints and developed a profound admiration for Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystic. She took Saint Teresa’s name when she was confirmed in eighth grade and also sought out copies of her books, which was unusual in itself. Unlike Ellen or me, Shannon wasn’t much of a reader. In Teresa’s life story, though, Shannon perhaps saw glimpses of herself. “I had one brother almost of my own age. It was he whom I most loved,” Teresa wrote in her autobiography. She continued:

We used to read the lives of the saints together; and, when I read of the martyrdoms suffered by saintly women for God’s sake, I had a keen desire to die as they had done. . . . I used to discuss with this brother of mine how we could become martyrs. We agreed to go off to the country of the Moors, so that they might behead us there. Even at so tender an age, I believe that our Lord had given us sufficient courage for this, but our greatest hindrance seemed to be that we had a father and a mother. . . .

When I saw that it was impossible for me to go to any place where they would put me to death for God’s sake, we decided to become hermits, and we used to build hermitages, as well as we could, in an orchard which we had at home. . . .

By rights, Shannon should’ve replaced me as the family acolyte, but the Catholic Church forbade girls from service. This ban was not reversed until 1983, and even then it was left to individual bishops to decide whether to integrate. The church provided no role for a girl like Shannon, except to sing in the choir. And that was a new privilege in terms of church canon, only first allowed in the early 1900s. In the preceding seven centuries, with rare exceptions, no woman could wear a choir robe. She could sing from the pews but, because the choir sang sacred liturgical texts, only men were permitted. A legacy of Leviticus 15, this and many other anti-woman prohibitions officially entered church law under the Corpus Iuris Canonici (1234 to 1916).

Pope after pope would reiterate that, because women bled and were hence unclean and impure, they threatened the holiness of the church. It goes without saying that, if they couldn’t sing in an official capacity, women couldn’t become ordained, distribute Communion, or serve as lectors. Nor could they touch the chalice, the sacred vestments, or the altar linen upon which the Eucharist was placed, even, I would suppose, to clean them. As for whether a girl or woman in her period could receive Communion, interpretation varied. In its strictest form, she would have to forfeit taking the sacrament, her abstention effectively announcing her menses to the entire congregation.

It was within this hostile environment that women such as Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) and Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) fought to create a role for themselves in the church. I can see now why Shannon was attracted to them. Beyond their saintly virtues, these were smart, articulate, confident women, who suffered greatly yet drew upon superhuman strength. In 1970, when Shannon was twelve, they became the first two women to be named Doctors of the Church, so honored for their extraordinary writings. In the same way that a teenage boy might live vicariously through comic-book characters, Shannon drew inspiration from these female saints.

Saint Catherine was bold. She spoke her mind. She led a life filled with adventure. Her impassioned voice can still be heard in her published letters and the celebrated mystical work The Dialogue of Saint