If Nuns Ruled the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

conversations around her at the dinner table centered on how to transform the lack of fairness and justice in the world, how to eliminate discrimination.
    At fifteen, Megan was away at a summer camp in Maine run by the Diocese of Portland when the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
    â€œThey told us this terrible bomb had been exploded,” Sister Megan told me, recalling that her mother learned of the bombing from reading the New York Daily News as she emerged from the 116th Street subway station in Manhattan. “Atom Bomb Dropped on Japan,” the headline read.
    â€œI had an ominous feeling that it was awful and horrible,” Sister Megan said.
    By then she knew that she wanted to be a nun, mainly because she wanted to be of service to the world. At the time, in the 1940s, her options were limited. There was no Peace Corps yet, no NGO she could work for.
    At St. Walburga’s Academy on 140th Street and Riverside Drive, Megan was taught by a woman by the name of Sister Mary Laurentina Dalton, one of the pioneering nuns who had volunteered to teach children in Nigeria at the time. Sister Mary was the Latin teacher but injected tales of her time in Nigeria into nearly every lesson.
    â€œBy the time I was a senior, I really wanted to get there as quickly as I could and get to Africa,” Sister Megan said about joining Sister Mary’s order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, at age eighteen. “They were sending sisters to help begin the education of women in West Africa and so I was very much attracted to that, especially because of the incidents of discrimination. Teachers were needed there more than they were needed in the United States, and I thought perhaps I could fill that gap.”
    But first Megan received a bachelor’s degree in secondary school biology from Villanova University and then a master’s from Boston College. Once in Africa, her first station was very rural, in an area where they had never had a school, let alone a school for girls. Megan and her fellow sisters opened the first school for girls in 1962. With no housing for miles, at night they slept in the classroom without electricity or running water.
    She continued her work as a science teacher in Nigeria on and off for the next twenty years. During a civil war in 1963, Sister Megan was briefly evacuated to Cameroon. To flee the country, she perched on top of a boat with twelve other sisters wearing their full formal habits, long skirts flapping in the breeze as they rode the swell of the waves amidst the treble of gunfire.
    In the 1970s, Sister Megan was given the opportunity to study scripture in Sinai.
    â€œIn Palestine we walked two miles every day up and down the Mount of Olives. It was quite an up-and-down, let me tell you,” she said, remembering the acropolis of the ancient Judean kingdom and the place where Jesus is believed to have ascended to heaven. She also did pastoral studies in Kenya, where she integrated Bible study with courses on justice, death, and dying.
    Everything changed when she returned to Manhattan in the 1980s and started attending anti-nuclear protests. Living at the Catholic Worker house in Harlem, near her mother, who was by then living on her own after the passing of her father, Sister Megan found a home in the activist movement. When she was feeling up to it, her mother would accompany her to anti-nuclear protests. In 1998, Sister Megan was arrested for the first time while protesting at the School of the Americas, an Army school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where generations of Latin American soldiers were taught to fight leftist insurgencies. She was sentenced to six months in prison. Sister Megan arrived at the Muskogee County Jail in Oklahoma at five in the evening. The prisoners were ready for her after seeing a local news segment about a nun arriving at their facility. They were so excited to be made a little bit famous. A group came and hugged her when she walked