Some Things Should Not Change, The Sad Loss of History at the Academy of Mount Saint Ursula

The end of an era. 

I know. Change is the inevitable. After all, did not Heraclitus say that you cannot step into the same river twice? But this one really rankles and I am not sure I can get over it.

I am a product of Catholicism, pre-Vatican and Post Vatican II. I started school in 1959, in Kindergarten, on the bucolic grounds of the oldest Catholic girls school on the East Coast, Mount Saint Ursula. The Kindergarten building wasn't part of the imposing one above; it was a bit more south, down the grass and apple tree covered hill, past Our Lady, whom we crowned every May. There I learned to read "Dick and Jane" and was introduced to the idea of playing the piano by grandmotherly Mother Anna, an Ursuline. The Ursulines are a teaching order, and she was my first introduction to them. She was probably in her 80s then, and a gentler soul I don't think I have ever met. She stood with me, and my little friends, when I received Holy Communion in the fully wood interior and exterior, "Old Chapel" which was behind the convent building, half of which, the right side in the pictures below, housed the grammar school which I was now attending and from which I would graduate in 1968, before going on to the high school, built in a bland mid-century style, next door. The process of downsizing, a word we hadn't created in 1968, had begun. Mine was the last of the grammar school class. This was an early casualty of the post Vatican II reality. Whatever Vatican II actually was, what got translated to the boon docks of the Bronx, and pretty much to the whole of the United States was chaos. Truth did remain, but those who were in charge of our continuing education and spiritual growth did not purvey it. Even St. Ursula was given the "heave-ho" as she was kicked out of the lexicon of saints.  Apparently she did not exist. I do wonder what happened to that painting. Maybe it is still there. For now.

Even after I was in high school, I'd like to visit the Convent Building. The ceilings were high and ornate and the stairwell was right out of an English novel, wide wood bannisters and stairs. The plentiful windows in the classrooms were from virtually the floor to the ceiling. You needed a special pole to open the top part of window. There was this special corridor, on the second floor. Dark, but not depressing, with a rather dramatic canvas of St. Ursula being chased by the Huns, round some high mountain on the left and doors to the "convent library" containing such tomes as "The Silent Spire Speaks" where we occasionally were led for some lecture, even when we were high schoolers. There I was told that I had become a member of the National Honor Society. There, I believe, is some kind of name placque with my late mother's name, though I realize I never got back to see it. A little further down the hall were two swinging doors that led to the actual convent, where the nuns who taught us, Mother Emmanuel, Mother Ursula, Mother Ignatius, Mother Alphonsus, Mother Carmel, Mother Cornelia, Mother Marie, Mother Florence Marie, lived. Only rarely did we go through those doors, and then very quietly, for fire drills, that would take us to those steps you see in the front, where we'd wait in silence for the word to go back to our classrooms. Also occasionally, when a nun died, we were shepherded to one of the inner parlors where a casket had been placed to pray for the usually quite elderly member of the congregation, rosary and yellowed vows in her crossed hands. In later years, before I moved to California from New York, I visited Mother Alphonsus and Mother Cornelia and Mere Carmel (she was our French teacher) there. It was a mysterious and lovely place. I think perhaps my love for earth tones, dark wood and libraries came from my 12 year formation at the Mount, along with my love of books and of theology. There was such a lot of the "Trouble with Angels" about the locale, and some of the children too. I alas, was not one of the adventurous ones. The nuns were my authority and I wanted their approval, as much nearly as I wanted my mothers. I got theirs more often than I got it from my mother, although there were a couple of blips, as there would be for any normal child. First grade was on the first floor across from the piano studio, a series of small rooms each with a baby grand as I remember it. I would begin lessons there when I was 9. For reasons that remain an enigma to me, when you went to the rest room, then called only the "lavatory" you were not allowed to speak to any other occupant. It was an offense that would lead to your name being placed in a box for a report to your mother. I was washing my hands with that soap that always smelled like ginger to me (for years I hated ginger because of it) while one of my classmates in a stall was chatting amiably. As I protested in came Mother Ursula finding only me talking.  She shooed me out of the room with a missed swat at my rump, and the surprise of a janitor who was mopping the hall way floor. I was now on the list for the box wherein my failure would be reported to my mother, and this was akin to sending me to an execution. Behind whatever book we were reading, I sobbed uncontrollably (In later grades Mother Florence Marie would suggest to my father that I was a crybaby. I was) in utter fear for my near future. After while, I heard something along the lines of "All right, I won't report it to your mother." Reprieve.

In that building, back on the second floor, I think, I took art classes with Mother Ignatius, a female St. Francis, whose two sparrows would fly around with us as we dabbed our oils on canvas. And laughed and enjoyed the hour. It was there I discovered that I did not always have to be quiet and contained. She taught me that. And maybe from her I developed my love of animals, it occurs to me. She could always be found feeding birds near the old chapel. That old chapel was condemned because it was wood and a new chapel was built in 1965, a round modern thing that I never warmed up to, but I see from the notations of alumna of later years was loved greatly.

And now, it will become a community center for the seniors who will live in the renovated convent building, no longer part of the Mt. St. Ursula school complex. For the first time in what, over a century? no chapel will be on the grounds.







Some years ago, I thought there was going to be an effort to preserve this small part of our Catholic History, when alumna were asked to donate for work on the roof. I gave my admittedly small contribution. Maybe I should look to myself a little then for the fact that this historic building with its historic history is not part of the school any longer, even tangentially. Another building near where the old kindergarten was, was long ago converted to housing for the community at large.
Now will this building become a senior space. I have struggled over this. I struggle as I write. This is good, isn't it? We must serve those in need. But something very big is being lost. There are no nuns at the Mount any more. Women don't want to become nuns. Part of me, the modern woman, understands. The religious side of me does not. These teaching nuns are the reason I achieved in my life (my parents too, but in a different way) and their absence from this campus has cost us as Catholics. And now even the vestiges of them, and of a world that had a sense of time and place, is being usurped. What is Mount Saint Ursula without that which was its genesis? Its foundation?

I am glad for the girls of Bedford Park who are getting still a good education at the high school, though I wonder what passes for religion classes these days. By the time I got to high school, it was Jesus Christ Superstar wherein Mary Magdalen was hoping for a little cuddling time. There was no frame. Modern dressed nuns who had been my teachers at the end of the semester, were married or pregnant by the beginning of the next. Without a clarity of faith to assist me during a teenage time of interior battle, I lapsed for over a decade. So I cannot imagine what the students are told now is the essence of Catholicism.



Over the years I have seen some photos on line of the Mount as it once was, but they were few and now harder to come by. If you look up the names of the nuns I mentioned in this piece, there is nothing about them. Maybe there is an archive somewhere. I pray that there is, because that will be all that is left, aside from the fading memory of baby boomers like me.

As I look at the picture just above, I want to cry. At least until the late 1980s I visited there, and I always felt that if I did now, I would find so much tangible to accord with my memory, and the memories of my compatriots who attended there from the late 1890s to the 1960s or so. All of our histories would be there, for the duration of time, at least that is what I thought. But no more. It's gone now. With the news of this latest change, alas, I felt a little bit of life go out of me. It's hard to explain. The piano room is long gone. The children are long gone. The Speech Center where I spent a summer working is long gone. I have no desire ever to go back there.

Of course as Teresa of Avila reminds us, all things are passing. Only God suffices. But I am a flawed human, and this change that is offered as a necessity or a matter of celebration deeply wounds. I ought to be better than that. Maybe one day I will be.