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The long, hard birthing of an Appalachian mission

by by Jeanne McDonald

For American Catholic girls graduating from high school in the 1940s, the most compelling image for becoming “a religious” (a nun or sister) was a recruiting photograph of a young woman in nun’s attire. The hook was that she was driving a tractor! Monica Appleby, drawn to the “energy and unconventionality of the new order,” was one of the first to make a commitment to the Glenmary Sisters, an order in Glendale, Ohio, founded in 1941 by Father William Howard Bishop, who envisioned a group of nuns who would work for the extension of the Catholic faith in rural American communities. Appleby “liked the idea of riding a tractor and being a missionary, and Glenmary was closer to home than China.”

But when the girls, most around the age of 18, entered the order, they found they would not be farming or doing missionary work. Instead, they were assigned to housekeeping and bookkeeping for Glenmary priests and brothers. After several years of conflict with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in their attempts to go out into the field, the Sisters were placed under the instruction of the Dominican Sisters, whose supervision included forced silences and periods of humiliation designed to erase the women’s sense of self. One Superior’s favorite punishment was the venia, which required a Sister to lie prostrate on the floor to elicit pardons or indulgences for “insignificant” sins.

It was not until 1947 that Glenmary began sending female missionaries to the central Appalachian coal fields in Wise and Scott Counties, Va. “[W]e lived in the back of the church in Appalachia,” Geraldine Peterson recalled, in a community where one family “lived in a cave where they built a room onto the front....” and where the sisters visited a family whose children worked naked while they harvested corn. These were the sorts of wretched conditions the women hoped to change, but their long black-and-gray habits presented a barrier to communication. Ann Leibig recalled walking up a muddy road in her full regalia, and the family she had come to visit thought she was a witch. Yet, when the Sisters asked for “civilian” clothes, the male hierarchy of the Church felt threatened. Only after years of pleading were they allowed to wear a less-constrictive outfit—a shorter skirt and a loose jacket.

By 1960, the postulants had moved to Fayetteville, Ohio, where a new breed of women entered the order. They had a different set of values and a more liberal outlook. In fact, they laughed at the word “obedience.” In 1966, the Sisters charted a new statement of purpose and policies that described the need “to develop structures of religious life which will allow us the freedom to carry out the purpose and plans described,” interpreting poverty as “sharing with all our human and material resources;” chastity as “caring for others in their need;” and obedience as “bearing responsibility for the self, religious community [and] the non-Catholic community.” When the Church responded by appointing a Franciscan priest to guide their community, 44 members left the order.

No longer nuns, the women reorganized as a secular organization dedicated to work in the mountains as well as the cities where Appalachian migrants had settled. Their new group would be called Federation of Communities in Service (FOCIS). Their independence, though heady, meant working without financial assistance from the church, but the women found jobs and discovered ways to relate their talents to the community. Margaret Gregg, who lived first in Knoxville and now resides in an 1869 grist mill in Limestone, Va., was sent to art school and then used her skills to teach local citizens. Mountain women, uneducated and impoverished, were talented seamstresses, and Gregg involved them in artistic sewing that became an income-producing business. She is still involved in community work, currently with a project assessing how children are affected by toxic waste. “A lot more ecumenical work is going on now,” she says.

The Sisters were also able to give up the habit and wear clothing that helped them integrate into the community. In a sense, shedding the restrictions of the habit seemed akin to emerging from a chrysalis, lending wings to the Sisters to do the work they had always dreamed of without having impediments to communication.

The two years following the break with the Glenmary Sisters were exciting and full of change. “Obedience went first, then chastity, and then poverty,” said one of the women. Marriage was not an original option in FOCIS, but members soon retracted that limitation. Many of them were already dating, and when some married, the group was opened to men and non-Catholics. Although she was not the first to be wed, Monica Appleby, as FOCIS leader, was instrumental in changing the group dynamics when she left to get married. “There was no guilt involved,” she says. “In December of 1968, the FOCIS Board made the decision that. . . members could marry and that we would include men and women in our membership. The men involved have for the most part been partners of the women who became involved first. I would say it is still a woman-led organization.”

Marie Cirillo, who favored keeping the vows of chastity, is still working and teaching others in community service. Last week, having just returned from Cincinnati to her home in Clearfork Valley, Campbell County, Tenn., she was training students from Notre Dame, and on the weekend she would be working in West Virginia. Citing the problems of a “failing America,” Cirillo says, “we are dealing with the breakdown of all the institutions we counted on.”

There is still much to be done, but these women have changed the lives and futures of thousands of Appalachians, and today many are still involved in community and international projects. As Glenmary Sisters and FOCIS members, they established schools, ministries, occupational training programs, centers for seniors and the handicapped, arts, crafts, and music centers, legal and social services, health fairs, and farm and food co-ops.

Now two women–Appleby, who became a Glenmary Sister in 1955, and Helen Lewis, a founding member of the Appalachian Studies Association–have recorded the women’s history in Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia (The University Press of Kentucky). The authors and many of the former Sisters will be at the Knox County Public Library on Church Street on Sunday, March 21, at 2 p.m. for a reading and book signing, coincident with the annual weekend meeting of FOCIS.

Although this book explores the autonomy of the church, the war on poverty, and social and cultural changes from the 1940s through the ’60s, it is, above all, the story of a strong group of women who left the security of a religious order and freed countless Appalachians from poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance. In November 1990, Marie Cirillo wrote: “I have to believe that my total life is a prayer and that community is my church. I have to believe that God is here, with us and among us, because this is where my spirit finds nurture, and who but God is giver of all gifts.”