In 1970, the year the world learnt that the Beatles would split, Sister Carole decided to join the Daughters of Charity. It was like a love affair, she tells me as we meet over Zoom, a day after a statewide COVID-19 lockdown had been announced. Carole’s love affair was less dramatic compared to one of the most famous love affairs at the time — the romance between John Lennon and Yoko Ono (who married the year before) — but for Carole, it would be her lifelong love.
“I always had a deep calling to work with people in need,” says Carole as the sun streams through the window behind her. While many different orders were trying to entice her to join, it was the Daughters of Charity to which she was most attracted: an order founded by St. Vincent De Paul and Louise de Marillac to serve the poor in 17th century France. “An attraction to an order is the same as an attraction to a partner,” Carole says. “How can someone explain why they chose the person they married out of all the others that could have selected? You just know.”
Carole speaks vivaciously about St. Vincent, a man who she believes always understood that the voices of women need to be heard within the Church. “If we want to be an authentic Church, we must listen to the voice of the female,” Carole says. “If you go back to the time of Jesus, it was the women who supported him all the way through: they walked the journey with Him, were beneath the Cross. All the men nicked off as they were frightened. Women were the faithful ones though no one wrote about them as they were considered to be second-class citizens.” Carole pauses to adjust the volume on her computer. Behind her, through the open window, the streets are empty, silenced by the lockdown.
Born in 1946 in Newcastle, New South Wales, to Anglican parents, Carole is the eldest daughter of her father’s second marriage. His first wife died in childbirth. At the age of 12, when a teacher asked Carole what she wanted to do when she left school, she replied definitively: “I want to be a nun and a missionary.” Carole admits that she had no idea where this desire comes from especially given her family were Anglican. But she felt it strongly. Years passed and when she became a teenager, the idea dissipated. Boys became more interesting. At the age of 15, she left school to work in a department store in women’s fashion. A couple of years later, she trained as a nurse. “At this stage, I thought I would get married,” Carole says smiling. “I was not dissatisfied with the life of having a boyfriend….but underneath all that, in my subconscious, I felt I was being called to something else.”
This nagging feeling of being called elsewhere became stronger when she began working at a hospital and aged-care facility with Daughters of Charity sisters. It was around this time, when she was 18, that she decided to become a Catholic. When Carole’s mother found out about her decision, she said, “Get away from those nuns!” In 1967, at the age of 21, Carole travelled to Western Australia to work with a Catholic lay missionary organisation. “I worked at a crèche taking care of children whose parents had leprosy,” Carole says. But after 12 months, she contracted hepatitis and was sent home. Three years later, at the age of 24, Carole entered a Daughters of Charity convent in Sydney. When I ask why she made this decision, she says, “It was because I wanted to devote my life to service of the poor and live with others in community. As Daughters of Charity, we never take final vows. Rather, we renew our vows each year for the rest of our life. So each year, we are required to reflect on our decision and commitment to being a sister.”
A few years after entering the convent, Carole experienced serious doubt. Her relationship with God had become silent. She could no longer pray — the fundamental tool she uses to communicate with God. Months passed, and still she could not utter a single prayer. “I used to walk like a mad dog through these trees near the convent, anguished I could not feel any relationship with God,” Carole says. Unable to console her, the sisters sent for Carole’s dad. After Carole described how she was feeling to her dad, he said to her: “The trouble with you, Carole, is that you are up in the clouds, and you need to come down to Earth as the poor you have been asked to serve are down here, not up there.” That was all Carole needed to hear. “When I told the sisters what my dad said, they replied ‘Thank God for your father.’ It was the only time I had doubts; after that I knew that whenever I experienced a difficult time, God was there.”
Over the years, Carole has served the community in a multitude of ways: as a nurse in hospitals, aged-care facilities and residential homes for people living with severe disability and working in remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia and NSW. After Carole completed training in art therapy, she worked as a therapist in NSW and more recently at the Hutt Street Centre in SA — a homelessness service established by Daughters of Charity in 1954.
As an art therapist, Carole practices Jungian-based sand play therapy — a method developed by a Swiss Jungian analysist (and student of Carl Jung, Dora Kalff). Sand play therapy involves a tray filled with sand and a variety of miniatures that can be placed in the trays to create a three-dimensional scene or image. Carole, who uses this technique with clients who have experienced significant trauma, explains that sand trays allow a means of expressing and processing experiences and feelings that bypass the thinking, analytical brain and access the unconscious. As Carl Jung put it some decades ago: “Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain.”
Carole has recently left the Hutt Street Centre in SA to return to Sydney. She has retired from fulltime work, though plans on doing some form of creative work — through art therapy or music — with elderly residents of an aged-care facility close to her new home. Carole’s departure means it is the first time since the Hutt Street Centre’s doors opened in 1954 that there are no Catholic sisters at the service, signalling the massive decline in women entering the convent. In Australia, the youngest Daughter of Charity is in her 50s.
As someone who has worked in secular and nonsecular settings, Carole brings a conscious presence to her identity as a sister: “At the Hutt Street Centre, perhaps because it was established by the Daughters of Charity, clients would ask for the sister. So, I was known as Carole.” However, when Carole was working as a therapist at a clinic in Sydney, she was worried that clients may be put off by the fact that she was a nun. “I was worried that if clients knew I was a sister, they may not feel comfortable swearing in the therapeutic space, for example, if that is something they wanted to do. So, I did not talk much about being a nun. The question is always ‘What is best for the people I serve? It is never what is best for me [in terms of how I dress].’”
Looking at Carole now, through the Zoom screen, dressed in a black and white shirt and black rimmed glasses, nothing in her appearance suggests that she is a nun. As the sun falls on her short white hair, Carole tells me it has been a long time since she wore a habit. Up until 1964, the traditional habit of the Daughters of Charity included a large, starched Cornette on the head. The changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council has radically changed the way nuns dress. The Second Vatican Council also ushered in many other changes: religious communities were directed to take a fresh look at the spirit and charism of their founders, to get rid of outdated practices and traditions, to rewrite constitutions and common rules, and to simplify their attire. Thus, the Daughters of Charity’s Constitutions, Common Rules, and Book of Customs were extensively rewritten and updated. And, according to the Daughters of Charity Provincial Archives, it was in the 1960s that Louise de Marillac’s contributions as a cofounder of the Daughters of Charity first received greater attention and recognition.
Over the past half a century, the Daughters of Charity Order, the Church and the world has undergone radical changes. Carole has witnessed all of them as she herself matured from a young idealistic novice to a sister committed to renewing her vows each year — something she has now done over 50 times. Right now, the Church is in a difficult stage of its journey, Carole tells me, referring to the sexual abuse crisis. As Carole sighs, her shoulders slump. “How can people do that to an innocent child?” Carole tells me she has been in a place (offering no further details) where a priest was accused of abusing a child: “The priest denied it for a long time but eventually owned up to it. I saw a caring side to this man; for example, I saw how caring he was with the elderly. He was very friendly. It is hard to add up that these two sides of the same person exist. Was he stunted in his development, especially in adolescence? There are others [priests] that I have known, I won’t mention names. One priest I know is in jail. How can you take the innocence of a child when you are in the standing that you are in, when you are a trusted person in the community?”
Carole falls silent. I look out the window of my study and watch the sunlight, turned golden by the late afternoon, filter through the hundred-year-old elm trees. A sulphur crested cockatoo, separated from its flock, sits alone at the top of the elm tree; its white feathers are just visible within the branches. “The Church has not handled the sexual abuse crisis well,” Carole continues. “These priests should not have been in ministry. I think, historically, the priests [entered the seminary] too young. Over the years, I have had many arguments with people in formation about this; the priests need to be older when they enter — they need time to experience relationships, the work force, their sexuality. They just need time to reach a mature decision about entering the Church. When I entered the convent, I had psychological testing that lasted two days.”
When I ask about the future of the Church, Carole feels hopeful that the Church — “a complex, slow-moving institution” — can find new ways to adapt to the modern world. “We need to move beyond the Second Vatican Council,” Carole says, “the world has changed since the 1960s when the Second Vatican Council was held.” Despite feeling hopeful, Carole does have some concerns: she is troubled by those who desire a more conservative Church. “I see some priests who are entering the seminary now going back to more traditional ways, the ways before the Second Vatican Council. I also see this among some younger sisters. But Jesus did not walk backwards, He kept moving forward. We are in a new place of being now, in the modern world. I cannot go back to being a 20-year-old living in a convent. The world is a different place now and we need to change with it.”
“Why do you think these younger priests and nuns — who were born after the Second Vatican Council — are more conservative?” I ask.
“Is it coming from their parents or their parish priests? I don't know. The Second Vatican Council was supposed to get us away from the old conservative ways. But now I see younger priests wearing the collar. What does it mean to have a collar? Is the dress defining who you are? Does the dress allow the individual to hide behind it? When you are not wearing the dress, you are more exposed, more vulnerable. The dress means we don't know who they are. I can see that the congregation feels uneasy as we seem to be going backwards.”
I ask her views on priests being allowed to marry. “St Peter, Jesus’ disciple, was married. Up until the 12th century, priests could marry. It is just men making these rules,” Carole laughs, referring to their fluctuating nature. Celibacy should be a choice, Carole argues, rather than a mandatory requirement for becoming a priest. She has witnessed “great priests” who made a valuable contribution to the church disrobe as they could not live a life of celibacy. “Why is the Church so fearful of married priests?” Carole asks rhetorically. “Maybe these rules made sense in the past, but we don't have to hold on so fast to these laws now…they can change in accordance with the needs of society,” she says referring to the declining number of men entering the priesthood. While Carole acknowledges that it is hard to step into the unknown, and people are afraid of change, “even the congregation,” she is adamant the Church needs to do so to adapt to the modern world. Though Carole admits she has no desire to ordain as a priest, she thinks it should be an option that is available to women: “I know some women who would love to become priests. We have great Women Doctors of the Church [such as Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila]. Women have offered so much to our belief system.”
Five decades on (and twenty odd years into a new century), Carole is as in love now as she was when she first joined the Daughters of Charity in 1970. Whether the romance between Yoko Ono and John Lennon would have lasted, had circumstances been different, no one knows. During the 1960s, when Carole was deciding what she would do with her life, women working in the public service and in many private companies were forced to resign from their jobs when they got married. In that era, Carole decided that she wanted to build a life based on service: to travel where she was called to go in order to serve others. When Carole speaks of her vocation, which she believes has given her freedom, it is with a smile on her lips: “I am not the great saviour helping the poor. Rather, I am a Daughter of Charity who accompanies others and in doing so my love of God, my understanding of humanity, grows.”