S1: Ep 6 - The Third Floor

Hey, everyone, I want to let you know that we talk about suicide in this episode. There are some links to resources in the episode description if you need them.

I loved everything about my life, and then I joined this convent to follow God, thinking in my mind that everyone was gonna love everyone and it was gonna be double what I had at home, and it was completely different. I said, meet me up on the third floor, and then she came up and I just was crying and saying, I just I can't do this anymore. So I sent her can you. I don't know how to get out, like how do I get out.

From a cocoa punch? And iHeartRadio. This is the Turning. I'm Erica Lance, Part six, the third Floor.

I'm Sue Weber. Do you want like that little brief bio blah blah or just the whole bio? Okay? So I'm Sue Weber and who are you? I'm Joan Worcester And how do you two know each other? We're sisters.

So let me clarify. Joan and Sue are former sisters with the Missionaries of Charity, but they're also sisters, like actual real life sisters.

And we're the same age for thirteen days.

Joan and Sue live in Pennsylvania. They huddle over a computer at Jones's house to video chat with me, squeezing together so they can both fit in the frame.

I'm I'm far more stubborn than you are. Wouldn't you say, Oh, you're pretty star. We're all stubborn. It's a family trade in a posit way.

Yeah.

I don't take a lot of things personally at all. I'm more sensitive. Yeah, she's much more sensitive. You're super protective too for people who get hurt.

I seek for justice a lot. That's a commonality, and I think that has to do with the convent. But I've come to seek justice and truth in everything that I do and say.

Joan, the younger sister, has a certain gentleness. Sometimes she goes for a while without saying anything. She just listens. Joan says her intimate relationship with God drives everything she does.

I was the type of person that was always trying to please God, and then I realize that he loves us unconditionally, and he loves us no matter where we are in life.

Sue, the older sister, is bold and open, short haircut, big personality. Says it like it is.

I'm out there, I'm like it up for anything.

Joan and Sue both joined the MCS andi. Like every sister, they followed the vow of obedience. The vow commits sisters to the power structure in the MCS You vow to obey God. By obeying your superior promptly and without question, you become a pencil in God's hand, as Mother Teresa said, or as a former sister put it, a tool without will or opinion of your own. That didn't work for Sue and Joan. Their story shows how power works in the order who has power, what happens as a result,

I started reading some books about her and I'm like, oh, my word, she has it.

While Joan was thinking about switching to the Missionaries of Charity, Sue beat her to it. She joined the MCS herself. Sue was twenty and she says the life suited her, especially helping the poor. When I asked her to tell me about some of the moments she found beautiful, she didn't know where to start.

Thousands, literally, there are thousands of incredible, incredible beauty working among the poor, potentially making a difference in their lives.

Six months in, Sue got some news. Her mistress told her that Joan was joining the MCS. She was leaving the Franciscans and coming to the same convent as Sue. The mistress cautioned Sue, remember no preferential love, even for family. When Joan joined, she learned the MCS had a different approach for starters, no psychological test. The Franciscans required aspiring nuns to take one.

I actually think it's super important because I think what happens is you're getting women who have mental issues, right. And mother would just say, just love the sisters no matter what. But we had to live with.

Them daily life was different too. The MCS were much more regimented, and she noticed that the MCS didn't hug each other.

Well.

The Franciscans she'd been with hugged all the time.

Nobody looks at anybody, nobody talks to anybody. It's grand silence.

And Joan felt the MCS did poverty right.

The poverty was, in my estimation, sensational, like everything we owned fit in a bucket. I love the simplicity.

Since Joan was new, it was nice to see a familiar face.

But my sister was rooted into the Missionaries of Charity way of life, right, So when there was complete silence, you know, I'd walk by her and kind of wink and do the things that I would do because I was just beginning. I'd nod or smile, and you know, she did do that when it was just her and I.

But when she was in the group.

She would pass me and not look at me, and I'd be like.

Oh, because I was following the rules.

She was a good nun.

Oh, no, justin in the beginning.

A year later, though, when they'd both be in a convent in San Francisco, they'd be more flexible.

And then the vishit we did sneak off a lot of times on the really third floor. On the third floor, well, my mom would send care packages, like of cookies, and especially around the holidays.

They had to turn any packages over to the superior. From there it was usually given to the poor or shared with the whole convent. But sometimes Sue would say to herself.

Oh, these are my favorites, these are Joan's favorites. So then I would like hide them and then I would see Joan in the I'd be like, meet me up on the third floor. And then we would sit up on these stacks of mattresses and eat the cookies.

And enjoyed every moment, be worth any penance that.

We never got caught. No we didn't. We're good.

You guys have both referred to penance, and I was just wondering, when you say penance, are you thinking of the discipline. Change that kind of thing.

You can go first, good, Okay, So I only share with very intimate people, which is like my fellow sisters who left. I don't know if Mom even knows that she.

I think she does.

She does, Okay, well she saw you change. It's a question, she's true.

Questions.

So I didn't the bracelet. But here's the thing, and I will make my full confession right here, right now, that I was not faithful to my penances because I thought they were It's crazy.

Joan's group of aspirants learned about the discipline a few months in.

So then they said, you can go to the bathroom. But I go into this stall and I just I couldn't do it. And I heard the sister next to me, who was totally independences, and she was beating herself. I could hear her. I'm thinking, dear God, i'd be yelling ow, you know, And I thought, okay, I gotta do something because they're probably listening to me as I'm listening to them.

I believe that.

Soon Joan took the discipline every day. Then she got the spiked arm chain, which she wore during mass.

So I put it on, and you're supposed to fold your hands because then it digs into your arm, and I felt Christ. I felt him as I've never felt I mean, I felt him.

I think the injustice came when rules were different for different people. So for example, one of the rules was you can't go home because we have to live a life of poverty. But then a regional superior who really liked another sister, she got to go home for her parents funeral. Everybody's at the mercy of whoever has power.

They become the voice of God for you. That's all they keep saying. I'm the voice of God for you at this moment, under your valive obedience, right, no matter what it is, and they use God as the weapon.

Joan felt that weapon, and this is where her story diverged from sus in New York.

I got something in my stomach where I was really, really sick.

She was in so much pain she had to crawl down the stairs. Her mistress didn't offer support.

I would go to her and said, I'm really sick, and she would say, just you know, give it to Jesus, offer it up, you'll be fine.

One day, a volunteer saw Joan and the condition she was in.

And she said, this little child needs to go to the doctor.

But Joan's mistress said no, it was the superior's decision to make and the superior was away.

So I just continued on every day crawling down the stairs. She'd maybe come down to church no matter what, whether I was sick or not, I had to come in to try to work, which I couldn't.

When the volunteer came back, she decided to take charge.

She said, sister, go get your shoes. You're going to die. You have to go.

Joan found out she had pancreatitis. Left untreated, it can be really serious.

So that's how it started.

Joan stayed in the hospital for a week. When she returned to the convent, she says something change with her mistress. She targeted Joan, and she was relentless. First she accused Joan of being too friendly with a man, a seminarian who had prayed with her while she was in the hospital. Then of trying to seduce the men coming into the soup kitchen for meals.

I was like shocked. I was shocked that she was saying it. I'd never even thought it. I'm not going after anyone. So she accused me of that and so much more.

Joan says it was impossible to please her, Like the time her mistress told her to teach English to some sistress from South America. Joan didn't know any Spanish. She says. She did her best to teach them, but every time one of the sisters made a mistake in English, the mistress made Joan do penance.

So I used to tell them to not speak. I said, can you please not just speak and save me from my penances.

Sometimes her mistress made her kneel in silence beside the refectory table while everyone else ate and talked. These humiliations, the accusations, the little dig they all piled up.

She would tell me I wasn't holy, tell me I was prideful. Tell me that Jesus knows you're a fake and a phony, and all these kinds of things. She would say to me, right, So.

That must have been really hard to hear.

It was very hard.

Joan began to question her vocation. Is this really what God wanted for her? After six months, she was sent to a convent in Chicago for postulancy with a new mistress.

I've thought I died and went to heaven. She was wonderful, beautiful.

Free from the belittling mistress in New York, Joe could focus on the parts of religious life that fueled her visiting shut ins, working at the soup kitchens and shelters. But then words spread that the mistress in New York might be transferred to Chicago. Panic set in.

One sister in my group she took an iron and burnt her leg as penance.

Penance so the mistress wouldn't be assigned to Chicago.

That's how much people did not like her.

But the penance was in vain. The mistress transferred to Chicago, and Joan says she started right in again.

She would call me in and she would scream at me and tell me that I'm very irresponsible, and she would yell at me and say, you're stupid.

There were times when Joan had no idea what she'd done wrong. She cried in the chapel and prayed, why.

Is this happening? Why are you allowing this to happen to me? I only wanted to come and serve you. I was angry and hurt and sad, and I was all of those.

Finally, Joan spoke with her superior, the nun above her mistress. She tried to explain it all, but the superior told Joan to forgive her mistress.

She said, can you try and love her? I said, okay, I'll try.

But there was only so much Joan could take. She was at a breaking point, so she turned to the one person she thought could change things, Mother Teresa. When Mother Teresa visited, Joan had a one on one meeting with her. She says. She told Mother Teresa everything that happened with her mistress.

And I was crying and sobbing, and I said, I don't I don't think Jesus wants to hear. Mother. I don't know what to do, And she said, Sister Maria Fatima be only all for Jesus. And of course in my head, I'm thinking, really, that's all you got. That's what you're going to tell me. You're not going to take this evil woman away from me. You're not going to stop this abuse. You're not going to do anything about it. You're just going to let me continue to suffer.

I just skip quiet.

I just accepted it.

By now, Joan had been in the order for a year, it was time to become a novice, which for her meant to transfer to San Francisco, the same convent as Sue. Before she left, she had a meeting with her mistress.

And she said, I know that I've been very very hard on you. I wanted to break your spirit. I wanted you to become humble because I know you're going to be something great in this community. And I said to her, and I'm going to tell you something. You as a mistress have the power to make or break a vocation, and you have broken mine and.

You live with that. In California, Sue had no idea what her younger sister was going through. Even now that they were in the same convent, they couldn't really talk about it. Joan hung on, but she was fragile. And then she got a package from her mom. It was full of family photos.

Pictures of our family reunion. And I think because I was struggling so much there at that moment, that when she sent those pictures, it was a trigger for me.

So that day Joan found her big sister and told her to go to their spot.

I said, meet me up on the third floor. And then she came up and I just was crying and saying, I just I can't do this anymore.

I know me too, because we're both going to be crying right here.

And so I said to her, can you I don't know how to get out, Like, how do I get out?

You could tell that she was suffering, like you could just physically tell she was suffering, and I was super clear if she stayed, it would have been so massively unhealthy.

And she said, the only way you can get out is if you say that you can't live the celibate life, because every other way they would talk you into staying. So I went down to the sister and I said, I can't live the celibate life, like every time I go on a tram car look at guys.

It was all lies. It wasn't true.

But I told her that, and she said, if you would have said anything else, I would have asked you to stay. But because you said you can't live the celibate life, I understand that that's a gift from God. And from there it was kind of quick, like call your parents and I said to meet me and that I was getting on this flight. And then it was all like kinda quietly done, like hush, hush, go down

She truly felt called. And then there was no healthy soil for that call to grow.

The saddest part for me was that my soul didn't want to leave because I loved the work and I loved the prayer. I loved the whole life. But mentally I was losing jone. And then I went into the chapel and my name was sister Maria Fatima, and everybody there was singing this Our Lady of Fatima's song, and I was kneeling and I was crying. It was like I was having an out of body experience. When I walked out the door, I left my soul in the chapel.

And it was so painful to watch. And then for me the fear of like is that going to happen to me?

Like?

Am I going to lose myself?

Even though Joan left, Sue stayed. She progressed through the ranks of the order, took her first vows, took her final vows, She became a superior, and she stayed in the MC's for over a decade, working all over the country in women's shelters and soup kitchens. Sue says her outspoken nature helped and she knew how to navigate the system, Like the time Mother Teresa visited the EMC house in Baton Rouge, where Sue was running a summer camp.

She'd be like, how's it going, And I basically lied, I basically said, oh, it's just really hard because I knew she went transfer me. Wow. But if I would have went in and said, oh I love it here, and I probably would have got transferred.

You kind of learned the code to continue doing what you wanted, because I've definitely heard from other people, you know, expressing a lot of enthusiasm for something and then getting pulled off to that job, like, oh, she's enjoying that too much.

Yes, I think that happened a lot. And I'm super intuitive in that way, so as soon as I know the code, I'm in.

Sue had been an EMC for about ten years. When she became a superior, she was transferred to the MC eight's hospice in San Francisco. It was a three story wooden house. The sisters lived on the first floor.

So when I first got there, there were six of us total, and there were three that I would say could function and carry out duties well, and there were three that were really struggling.

First, she had to learn to manage the house with no training. So you kind of go in blind.

You don't kind of go in blind. You go in blind. Just pray and you'll get the grace to do what needs to be done.

So she relied on her intuition. In the hospice, it was rewarding to care for these men with aides who were dying.

Most of these men were rejected from their families. Like when we tried to reach their families, they didn't want anything to do with it. I mean that was the early nineties. The stigma was still there. This one young man, Lamont, and he was young, beautiful, funny. We contacted his family. I mean at this time, he couldn't get up, he couldn't sit up. I mean, he was completely bedridden. And so I said to him, hey, I have a surprise

As a superior, Sue is now technically the direct voice of God because she never thought of it that way. Now she could make her own rules, She could eat what she wanted, even for relationships outside the convent. Having power for the first time in years let her to act in ways she didn't expect.

When you are in an organization that suppresses the human spirit in the ways that it had done, you always think, you know, if I was superior, I would never act like that. I would be kind, I would listen. And what you realized is the second you became superior, you had a lot of freedom and power that was suppressed for many, many years.

One time a nun under Sue's supervision told her she was sick.

She would say, I can't do X whatever, But I remember going, yes, you can. You're not that sick, and I had the power to make her do those things.

One night, while the sisters slept, Sue snuck out to the chapel, just sat alone in the quiet.

And all of a sudden, there was this moment of my God, you are being exactly you were doing and being exactly the things you said you weren't going to be or do. What is wrong with you? You know you're wielding power, the whole infamous absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That you've had absolute power.

In that microcosmo absolutely, and then I shifted completely.

Sue decided to change her whole approach. She'd listen, not reprimand not humiliate. She'd start with kindness. But she was about to learn that her absolute power wasn't really absolute. One day, Sue got a call from Mother Teresa about a tree answer A knew Nune was coming to work at the hospice.

And she said, I'm sending you sister so and so. She's a gift from Jesus and you just need to love her. I mean the standing joke as superiorors, where if you get a phone call from Mother or a regional superior and they say, oh, we have a gift for you we're going to send a sister to your house. That was a big red flag because that was like, oh, we're getting somebody who's they're struggling somewhere else and they're moving them. So it was a standing joke. We're like, eh,

And Sue wakes up. She smells something, maybe smoke, so she hops off her.

Cot I'm like throwing on my sorry, and I fly past the chapel and out of the corner of my eye I catch flames.

She rushes into the chapel. The new sister is inside.

The sister had taken all the trash and put it under the altar and lit it on fire and was just kneeling there, staring into the fire. And I don't know why I didn't panic, but I didn't, And so I went next to her and I was like, sister, do you know that there's there's a fire under the altar? And she turned to me and she took me right in the eye and she goes, do you know I am possessed? And I said, I don't know about that, but I know I have to put that fire.

Out next morning. The sister tells Sue she has no memory of the fire, but then she does it again.

Soon.

Sue says, this sister is setting fires every few days. Of course, Susa wreck she's losing sleep. She doesn't know what to do. She calls her regional superior, who says, just talk to her, but that doesn't help, so she calls mother, Teresa. Sue suggests sending the sister to a psychotherapist.

And I said, I'm really struggling, and mother said, just give her time, sister, and just keep loving her. And when I hung up, I had great clarity, There's no way that I'm going to be able to manage this.

While all of this was happening with Sue, Joan had to make a new life when she left the MC's Joan did the only thing she could do with no money and no practical work experience and really no sense of what was possible. She went home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but her mistress's words followed her. She says they were like tapes, these memories of every terrible thing her mistress said, playing over and over.

Jesus knows you're a fake and a phony. You're stupid, serves you right.

Joan still felt called to be a nun. She went to church, but now she felt like an impostor.

And then people would come to me and say, you're so holy. I would leave that church and go to another church so that no one would know me, and so I could not be noticed. And that's the worst thing that to this day, I don't want to be noticed.

There is another tape that played in her head, the words of one of her confessors. That's a priest you confess your sins to, or who serves as a spiritual guide.

Father.

Donald McGuire was a Jesuit priest. He was convicted of sexually abusing boys and eventually sentenced in two thousand and nine to twenty five years in prison, but before that he was often assigned as a confessor for mc sisters, including Sue and Joan. Years before he was sentenced, Donald Maguire told Joe some thing that would haunt her.

And he said to us, if you make it to the novitiate and you leave, you'll have handicapped children, you'll get divorced, and bad things will happen to you because God wants you here.

This stuck with Joan because she had made it to the Navisia and left. Once she did, she felt like Father Maguire's warnings started to come true.

I went home in January. Now, mind you, for the last two years, no love, no nothing. I met this man. He said he loved me, went to church with me, the whole nine yards.

Eventually they got married.

I had this huge wedding. Nuns were singing in my wedding. I mean it was huge.

But Joan wasn't happy for long. She says. The relationship bended horribly after three months.

Okay, so now here I am an ex nun and a man leaves me and he said to us, if you leave, you'll get divorce, You'll have handicapped children, and bad things will happen to you. So I thought, okay, I can't be a nun. I can't be married. So I went up to this place we have called Peckwi Pinnacle.

She hiked through the woods up to an overlook on a tall hill near home. She could see water and trees stretched out below. This place was special to Joan. She used to talk to God here. It was where she felt her call to religious life. This time was different.

I was going to jump right kill myself because God bus hate me. So when I went up there, I went to jump, and a snake slithered up in front of me. And I hate snakes, so I was scared to death. So I ran back to my car and got in my car and then went back home. Hi, beauty, Carol, do you want to meet Erica. Let's go meet Erica. Look here, look, look there's Erica. Now.

Joan is a mother and a grandmother. Her daughter, Hannah, has a toddler and they live next door.

I try to live in God's will and let God unfold the will. So right now the will for me is to be a great mom and a grandmother, and I lead a company.

She remarried to a man she calls kind and patient named Tom.

Before we got married, I said, don't marry me because I can never love you the way you deserve to be loved. Because I love God ultimately to the nth degree. God is what I love the most, and that's where I spend most of my time.

But that didn't deter Tom, and he just said, no, I you know I love you. Joan made a life outside the convent. She built a small chapel for prayer in her backyard. She lived her faith in a different way. And then one day someone showed up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a woman in a white sari with blue stripes. It was her sister, Sue. In the years before Suepper returned to Pennsylvania, her time as a superior had brought her a step deeper into the organization. It also gave her a new vantage point.

When I became superior and I had more time to think. That's opened the door to really question a lot of things.

She already had a growing list of concerns about the missionaries of charity, like how sisters were treated and how sisters and leadership roles used their authority.

So you have sisters who were amazing and in my opinion, didn't even wield power, and then you had sisters who wield it to the empth degree. You know, everybody's at the mercy of whoever has power.

There was something else that bothered her. She thinks Mother Teresa founded this order based somewhat worked for Mother Teresa, she got to follow her calling, she founded her own order, she established the rules. The Missionaries of Charity was an extension of her personality and drive. But the way Sue saw it, the sisters inside this order couldn't follow their own calling, just obey, just follow assignments, regardless of feelings. Sue says, this one size fits all doesn't work, especially

Trying to get her to understand that everybody is not the same, Like everybody's coming in, all of us with our baggage, and in her mind, the second you crossed over the threshold to the order, all of that disappears, or it should disappear. And in the utopia of life, that would be lovely winded, like right, everybody just goes in and then we all just love each other.

Instead, Sue saw sisters struggle. They were tired and stressed and grappled with language barriers. Some needed psychological care, and no one seemed to fix the problems.

I realized that the order was wired that you had very little time to think, so you had your mourning prayer and your adoration. I can't speak for anybody else, but all I ever did was worked really hard not to fall asleep during that time.

I've heard that from a number of people, which.

Should have been the time where you can think and have your thought process. If you're in a bad relationship, if all your energy is in the bad relationship, you don't have the capacity to look at it through another lens. I could no longer live what I felt I was being called to.

At one point, Sue learned about a letter Mother Teresa wrote.

She was struggling with do I serve this sisters or do I serve the poor? And I will never forget this. She wrote a letter to the pope, and the Pope wrote back, and this is what he said, give necessary care to your sisters and loving care to the poor. And I was like, WTF, seriously, that is insane, Like give like the very people who are carrying out your work. The reality is without her sisters, the order doesn't exist. Women who were willing to dedicate their life to the

That one, because you wanted loving care for the sisters.

Yes, because anybody understands humanity. You can't give what you don't have. So if you have an order of sisters who are not being filled with love, how are they going to be loving? And you see that in houses where we've been accused and rightly so, of mistreating people. And for me, it wasn't about these sisters are bad people. They were empty. They were empty, and you can't live that kind of a life if you're empty.

By nineteen ninety three, Sue felt like she was on the verge of a breakdown, so she asked for a temporary leave. She went back to her parents' house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, still wearing the sarry. She kept her empty rituals. She rose early, she prayed. But something had changed. Maybe she wasn't called to life in the convent anymore, but someone else did feel the call Joan.

I still felt that I was called no matter what, and I don't think it ever changes for me. It never has changed, and I fight that constantly.

So it was hard for her to see Sue back in their parents' house dressed in the blue and white sorry a superior.

When I left the Missionaries of Charity, I kept a lot to myself. Again, I don't share a lot with people. I mean, I'm surprised I'm sharing what I'm sharing with you. I think at one point I felt weak that I couldn't do it, and so I was probably a little jealous of her that she got to stay in and she was doing it. And then also and then also I was a little hurt because I guess I wanted her to sway me to stay when I told her.

I was going to leave.

So for a couple of years, I probably blamed her that she didn't think I had a vocation, but I knew in my soul I did, and so I was kind of hurt by her.

But it was me.

It wasn't her. She wasn't intentionally hurting me, but I felt hurt by that because I felt like she didn't defend my vocation.

That must have been really hard. Have you talked about this before? What is it like to hear that?

Sue? I'm not surprised when it makes sense that she would feel that way for me. It wasn't about saying somebody had a vocation or not. For me, it was more of a protective and you're not going to be who you are if you stay here.

After nine months in Lancaster, the reasons for Sue to leave began to outweigh her desire to stay. She stopped wearing this Harry. She wasn't going back.

I was recognizing that I was no longer true to myself and that I couldn't be true to myself if I stayed in there.

Mother Teresa asked her for a meeting in Harlem, one last attempt to change Sue's mind. Joan drove her there and the two of them walked into the convent together.

There was a woman who made sure nobody saw me, snuck me into a poller, and then when all the sisters had gone to the chapel, she snapped me from the parlor to where mother's room was. Mother had her head down. I knelt down to get her blessing, and she blessed me, and then I sat on the chair and then she immediately was like, you need to come back. This is where God's calling you. Mother Mary wants you

At this point, Sue was yelling Joan could hear it from the next room, And.

Then she kind of sat back, pulled up, and then I really felt like I was being heard.

But by then it didn't matter. Nothing Mother Teresa could say would change Sue's mind. She left. Not long after she left the convent, Sue went on a spiritual retreat to reflect and figure out what to do.

I was doing a three month retreat, silent retreat. I was in this tiny, little, like three hundred square foot cabin in this vast forest and incredible beauty of nature and wood burning stove, so all the wood was stacked outside and it's winter, and I just took a lot of books and all written by priests and stuff, and I started reading this book. There was a section that said, there are I forget how many ten, I think ten

Thanks so much for listening, and stick with us because there's a lot more in the coming weeks.

This is the first time that I have ever encountered any form of sexual violation or abuse in the missionaries of charity. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The Turning is written by Aleen Lance, Lester and Me. Our producers are Allen Lance Luster and Emily Foreman. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal. Andrea Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Special thanks to Amy Gaines, Sarah Olander, Catherine Joyce, Beth Ann Mcaluso, Travis Dunlap, and consulting producer Mary Johnson. Her memoir and Unquenchable Thirst provided