TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ on ‘A Station Wagon Filled With Nuns')

[Involved in a minor, non-injury traffic accident, Archie, seized with visions of a sizable settlement, suddenly develops an aching back. Then, with the opposing attorneys in the case in his living room, matters take an unexpected turn.]

Clarence V. Marshall [played by Richard Stahl]: “Now, according to our witnesses...”

Solomon Rabinowitz [played by Salem Ludwig]: “Witnesses? You said nothing to me about witnesses, Mr. Bunker.”

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “Oh, the kids, the kids, y'know.”

Rabinowitz: “Oh, yes, the little children in the playground. Hardly admissible.”

Marshall: “Yes, but I'm referring to a station wagon filled with nuns.”

Rabinowitz: “Your witnesses?”

Marshall: “A station wagon filled with nuns.”

[Archie’s face collapses.]

Marshall: “Now, according to them, you were coming out of the parking lot when it happened. Now, do you recall in what direction you were traveling?”

Rabinowitz: “His vehicle was headed north, I believe.”

Marshall: “Yes, but he was traveling south.”

Archie: “Well, I was backing up. Now, what difference could that make?”

Marshall [smiling]: “Well, if you were backing up, you were going the wrong way in a one-way alley.”

Archie [looking helplessly up at Rabinowitz]: “Well, I must have been going forward.”

Marshall: “Not according to our witnesses.”

Rabinowitz [dourly]: “A station wagon filled with nuns.”

Marshall [reading from statement]: “Yes, Sister Maria Yolanda, Sister Catherine, Sister Jeremy, Sister Rosemary, Sister…”

Archie: “All right, all right, all right! Everybody knows they go around in a mob.” [Looks to door, where Rabinowitz is getting his coat.] “Hey, Mr. Rabinowitz, where you goin’? Hey, don’t leave, Mr. Rabinowitz. Listen, don’t be a-scared of this guy. I mean, alongside of you, he’s like a green kid. I mean, you’re a mensch! Get after him!”

Rabinowitz: “There’s an old, old rule of law, Mr. Bunker. They say it dates back before the turn of the century: In a court of law, you can’t beat a station wagon filled with nuns.” —All in the Family, Season 1, Episode 3, “Archie’s Aching Back,” original air date Jan 26, 1971, teleplay by Norman Lear, Stanley Ralph Ross, and Johnny Speight, directed by John Rich 

Photo of the Day: Civil War Nurses Memorial, DC

You can’t read about the Civil War without considering the casualties: more than a million combined on both sides, including more than 600,000 dead. This week marks the 150^th anniversary of one of the most staggeringly bloody, useless battles in the conflict: Cold Harbor. While the entire engagement lasted two weeks, the most important sequence in it, the Union frontal assault, occurred on June 3, 1864.

How bad was it? To say that approximately 6,000 Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in less than an hour hardly conveys the horror of it. Ulysses Grant’s comment on it in his Personal Memoirs is terse and telling: he had “always regretted that the…assault was ever made.” The Lincoln administration had to squelch the full extent of the losses. Just imagine similar killing fields, spread out over four years.

Clara Barton is the best-known nurse in the conflict, but a memorial in Washington honors a group of other "angels of the battlefield" who have fallen into comparative obscurity. This past November, I came across the Civil War Nurses Memorial on my way to another landmark: St. Matthew’s Cathedral, site of the funeral of John F. Kennedy. Most visitors think of this spot, I would bet, by another name: The Nuns of the Battlefield.

At best before the outbreak of the Civil War, many Protestants had regarded nuns in their black habits as exotic creatures, objects of curiosity; at worst, they were seen as part of an immigrant Catholic vanguard that would overthrow hard-won institutions of freedom. Many American Catholics could not have felt that matters had improved appreciably by 1924, when the Ladies Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians dedicated this tribute “To the memory and in honor of the various orders of Sisters who gave their services as nurses on battlefields and hospitals during the Civil War.” 

This, after all, was not only the year when the rural base of the Democratic Party had battled for more than 100 ballots to deny Al Smith the nomination of the Democratic National convention, but when many politicians openly courted the Ku Klux Klan.

It takes an indomitable will to surmount such a wall of hate. The nearly 600 Roman Catholic nuns who served in military hospitals in the Civil War—roughly one out of six of all female nurses during the war—possessed that in abundance.

One remarkable example of that was Mother Augustine MacKenna of the Sisters of Mercy. Those who encountered her for the first time were astonished by an ease of command so natural that she thought nothing of ordering from rough-and-ready Union officers all manner of equipment to help deal with the wounded and dying. If you didn’t guess she was tough after reading her long list of requested supplies, then you would surely do so after learning she had been educated in Ireland’s outdoor, secret “hedge schools,” or that this tall woman was, as she put it, “the daughter of an Irish giant.”

Mother MacKenna was lucky to have the support of the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. George A. Hammond. In turn, Hammond was, crucially, backed by his boss, President Abraham Lincoln, who would later recall:

“Of all the forms of charity and benevolence seen in the crowded wards of the hospitals, those of some Catholic sisters were among the most efficient….As they went from cot to cot, distributing the medicines prescribed, or administering the cooling, strengthening draughts as directed, they were veritable angels of mercy.” 

Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America, by John F. Fialka, devotes a chapter of his fine history to these remarkable women. But I also urge you, if you can, not only to read his account but to seek out the Civil War Nurses Memorial on M St and Rhode Island Ave. The bronze statue by Jerome Connor is not larger than life, but then again, it didn’t have to be: the determination and self-sacrifice of these women were remarkable in and of themselves.

(Thanks to my friend Peggy, who lent me Fialka’s history of Catholic nuns in America—and, in that way, illuminated for me this astonishing Civil War tale.)

Quote of the Day (‘America’ Magazine, on Nuns and ‘People on the Margins’)

“Working for meager pay (which they passed on to their communities), women religious have taken the lead in working with people on the margins: not only schoolchildren, but indigent patients in hospitals, the imprisoned in jail cells and the homeless in the inner cities. Not satisfied with works of charity at home, they have labored in fields afar; some have paid with their lives. The martyrdoms in Central and Latin America of Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Maryknoll Sisters; Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun; and in Brazil of Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, testify not simply to the Gospel but to a certain kind of woman. These were the women who wholeheartedly embraced the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar decrees by revisiting the founding documents of their orders and throwing themselves into ministry with the poor, all as the church had asked of them.”—“Current Comment: Praise for Sisters,” America Magazine, May 14, 2012

Gaze at this picture and ask yourself: Do these women really look very radical? Yet a decade after the sexual abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican has taken the full measure of the faithful’s discontent and disillusionment, and come up with an entirely logical source: nuns.

On the editorial page of its May 14 issue, the national Catholic weekly America listed the above accomplishments (in the event--now, we must acknowledge, all too likely--that they escaped the notice of the Holy See), then followed it up with another editorial asking pertinent questions related to the origins of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR)  in the United States.

American Catholics should expect answers to those questions to come in the most tardy of fashions. Normally, I groan whenever I hear the word "patriarchal" coming up every time a church policy on, say, abortion, is disputed--it's as if someone at The New York Times thinks that the mere use of the word should all by itself be enough to dispense with any meaningful inquiry into the moral consequences of modern reproductive alternatives. 

Unfortunately, the church's hierarchy has only itself to blame for the use of this cliche in this particular situation. Women religious who are utterly committed to “people on the margins” now find themselves marginalized by the Vatican. And the most maddening aspect of it is that there's no good, sane reason for it.

Too bad. A wildly funny episode from the first season of the great Seventies sitcom All in the Family had a lawyer advising the bigoted Archie Bunker that his case was hopeless, because "In a court of law, you can't beat a station wagon filled with nuns.” Nowadays, you’d be lucky to find enough nuns to fill a station wagon, but their reputation for probity remains as high as it was 40 years ago—certainly higher, dare I say, than that of most bishops and archbishops, most of whom, it has become dismayingly clear in recent years, owe their positions more to blind adherence to every tenet set down by Rome than to any significant merit of their own.

Three reasons are cited by the Congregation for the assessment of the LCWR: 1) past addresses at their assemblies; 2) "policies of corporate dissent," i.e., dissent from Vatican policies on women's ordination and homosexuality; and 3) "radical feminism." 


But where has the confusion by ordinary Catholics come from--certain nuns' views on these matters, or the hierarchy's continuing problems with the fallout from the abuse scandal--problems, one might add, that extend worldwide? (See, for instance, this Huffington Post piece on potential liability from a case in the U.K.) 

One strongly suspects that longtime churchgoers are less likely to be discombobulated by one of the religious speculating on gays or married priests in the Church than on how various bishops, long stressing that theirs is a "universal" church, could push, with a straight face, the novel legal notion that a priest was not an "employee" of said universal church and that, therefore, the hierarchy should not be held accountable for his crimes.

I wish Pope Benedict XVI would re-read America’s brief catalogue of the exemplary work of American nuns—even commit the words to memory, if possible. Maybe then, he’ll stop scandalizing the faithful and making a joke of his institution by getting off the nuns’ backs.

Quote of the Day (Mother Dolores Hart, on Leaving Hollywood for the Convent)

''Monastic life is impossible for most people to understand. People think that it is a life that is shut off, or you're gone from the world, but it's exactly opposite. You are more embedded into the world. It's a way of love that includes everyone that you've ever loved.''—Mother Dolores Hart, quoted in Thom Geier, “Mother Dolores Hart: The Nun Who Kissed Elvis Presley,” Entertainment Weekly, Feb. 11, 2011

This year’s most unlikely Oscar voter--perhaps the most unlikely one in the 80-plus-year history of the Academy--is Mother Dolores Hart. Film fans with very long memories may recall her earlier life as a Hollywood starlet of the late Fifties and early Sixties, when she made 10 films (including Where the Boys Are) before walking away from it all to enter the cloistered Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.

Every year at this time, Hollywood engages in an awards ceremony not only flagrantly self-congratulatory but doubly laughable when you get a load of the vain bimbos and himbos on the red carpet. Though most readers of this blog would find Ms. Hart’s act of worldly renunciation in 1963 astonishing, the Tinseltown veterans who strut and fret their hour upon the stage must view her as something akin to a creature from another planet. (In fact, play Jeff Bridges’ 1984 film Star Man and see if his alien isn’t allowed a greater sense of humanity than most of the nuns depicted onscreen in recent decades.)

What a shame all this is--the men who run Hollywood will never understand the impulse behind Mother Dolores’ remarkable story, a total denial of self and commitment to God and others. Yet all of this comes with a funny bone that remains intact nearly a half century after she changed her life so radically. (In other interviews, when asked what it was like to kiss Elvis Presley onscreen in Loving You, she’s answered puckishly: “I think the limit for a screen kiss back then was something like 15 seconds. That one has lasted 40 years.")

The Entertainment Weekly article is fascinating not only for how Mother Dolores views recent Hollywood fare such as Black Swan, The Hurt Locker and Avatar (which won her vote for Best Picture last year), but also for the life she left behind (including a fiancee who, after their engagement ended, has never married) and the affectionate reminiscences of former co-stars such as Paula Prentiss Benjamin and Robert Wagner.

One hopes that someday, movie moguls will take to heart the true lesson of Mother Dolores' life: the persistent way that love abides, even in its most unexpected form.