[The Blue Nuns Need an Elevator is a story about an order of Nigerian nuns and their attempt to run a pregnancy center out of a dilapidated hospital in Illinois. The story will be told over the course of several installments through audio and written vignettes.]
PART 1: Meet Sister Theo
On a balmy June day, I drove across my hometown of Freeport, Illinois…
past the junior high and high school buildings where I spent six of my adolescent years (but many a night running the hallways as a child while my dad worked in his classroom),
past the Baptist church my family attended for a handful of years upon arrival in the town,
past my old youth pastor’s house that brings complex and painful memories…
and I turned left onto Walnut Street.
On the right stood a monstrous brick building with seemingly countless windows. I was there to conduct an interview with the leader of the Catholic order that makes their home on this campus. I pulled into the driveway and knocked on a couple of doors to no response. “Perhaps I got the time wrong?” I thought. So I went back into my car to check our email exchange.
As I pulled my phone out, I saw something out of the corner of my eye in the driver’s side window. A blurry, blueish mass moving steadily, slowly growing in size…then another, and another. And then the blue image took shape into a nun’s habit. A long-sleeved top and flared skirt. All the same color blue.
These were the Blue Nuns I had seen growing up. They would arrive at community events in their beautiful blue attire. I had never known any personally, but the “Blue Nuns” were a Freeport, Illinois institution.
One by one their number grew in size as the Sisters made their way to the building at which I was parked. Each of them noticed my car, and the first to approach the building stopped to greet me. I told them I was there to speak with Sister Theo, and they told me she was at the back of the group. These first two greeters then passed along to the others my purpose such that none of the others said anything to me, but each of them smiled at me while walking past my car. Every Sister was so calm, so pleasantly happy…which surprised me as it was very hot and very humid and they were all clearly sweating a great deal. You wouldn’t know it watching this processional walk past my car.
It was a “passing of the peace” in a different kind of way.
The very last Sister approached my car and introduced herself as the woman I was here to meet (Sister Mary Theo), and explained that they were completing their daily morning walk. She then ushered me inside the big building and into her office. There was only a desk and two chairs. There we sat for the next two hours as she told me about their coming to Freeport, their purpose for being there, and their plans for the future.
I was mesmerized by her. I was also new to interviewing, and was swept up in my amazement. As I revisited this audio over the last month, I grumbled at my poor question asking, my interruptions, my “mmms” and “ahhs” that stole attention from Sister Theo’s storytelling. But once I got rid of those distractions, there was a gorgeous tale of human resilience, perseverance, and protest.
Here is part one of this story.
TRANSCRIPT
NARRATION: This is the blue Nuns need an elevator. It's a story in three parts about Nigerian nuns who run a crisis pregnancy center in Illinois. Kind of. They just need an elevator.
The story comes from a conversation I had with their leader in her office. It's a room on the first floor of a hundred-year-old, monstrous, long, neglected building where the sisters of the immaculate heart of Mary, mother of Christ live and do their work.
There was nothing in this room except a desk, two chairs, a recorder between us, and unfortunately at times the hum of a very loud air conditioner.
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Leslie: So maybe could we start with who you are, and what your role is here.
Sister Theo: Um, my name, my full name is Mary Theonilla Chukwu.
NARRATION: This is Sister Mary Theonilla Chukwu. She's known as Sister Theo, and when we talked, she was in charge of all the North American sisters in her religious community, which is actually based in Nigeria.
But I grew up seeing them around my town. We all called them the blue nuns because they wore these bright, rich, blue hued habits in a world where nuns of pop culture were black, maybe white, these women stood apart. The bright blue is hard to explain. It's more blue than the Tiffany's color, deeper than robin's egg.
It's this warm color blue, which is actually indicative of the nature of these women. They're warm and inviting, and I remember they were always smiling and they drove cars, which I thought was hilarious. I guess I thought nuns couldn't drive anyway. Their habits were blue and that's basically all we knew about them.
Leslie: And the name of your order is?
Sister Theo: The full name is Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Mother of Christ,
Leslie: also known as the blue nuns. What is, what is the significance of the, of this color?
Sister Theo: First of all, our lady is identified with a blue and our congregation is a Marion congregation. However, our main habit is white because in other countries, particularly countries in Africa, we use white. But because of the weather here, we needed something thicker.
NARRATION: thicker, because these nuns live in Freeport, Illinois. It's in the northern part of the state, basically Wisconsin, where it's winter from November to April. Bitter winter.
Leslie: Tell me about more about your order. because I, I know that within different orders mm-hmm. , there are different practices …
Sister Theo: Yes, it's like having different schools, you know, that you have different schools. The goal, they take the same SAT exams, they, they're hoping to get to college, you know, but each school is different.
NARRATION: just like each school is different in fulfilling similar goals. Each religious order has its own particular emphasis for fulfilling the same goal.
Sister Theo: The goal is the same. The goal is having, the goal is to serve in order to emulate a particular aspect of Christ Jesus. You know, we realize Christ did so many things while on Earth, and if you want to put your hand in everything, you may not do everything well for everybody.
You know, So for instance, for our religious community, the core reason for our foundation is the compassion of Christ that his heart went out. You know, for people, for the poor, for the marginalized, for women, that his heart went out, reached out for them.
NARRATION: the mission of this religious order is stated on their website as quote through our religious consecration and religious profession.
“We carry out diverse apostolic work to uplift the status of women, to promote Christian education in schools, to provide healthcare for the sick, to engage in social and pastoral activities and other works of charity in keeping with our charism of compassion.”
This mission of theirs can be traced back to Nigeria in 1937 when their order was founded by a missionary named Archbishop Charles Heerey. Missionaries started coming to Africa in the late 1800s as a part of colonization. Charles came from Ireland to the southern part of Nigeria. But he was very different than the missionaries that came before him:
Sister Theo: because before then, the first missionaries that arrived came in, you know, everything they did not understand was bad. We played the instruments, they said, “oh my goodness, that must be some demonic something.” And he said, “we need to understand their culture and their context. We don't need to turn them upside down. We don't need to turn their culture, reject their culture, not import our own culture and impose it on them.”
NARRATION: He was interested in preserving the culture. He also recognized something significant about the women in the local community.
Sister Theo: So what he realized is, it was a male world. Most of the women were in the background. They may work hard, they may do all kinds of things, but the men made the decisions.
NARRATION: So Charles Huey called his fellow missionaries and advocated for this culture and the women who were the backbone of the community.
Sister Theo: He told them that if we want the church to survive, we cannot leave the women behind. He said, you leave the women. The church will never survive. So his emphasis was then on the women, the growth of the local women, what they do, helping empower them, start little trades, help them, you know, navigate through life better.
NARRATION: Then Charles leaves for a pilgrimage and he spends a trip praying and felt that God was calling him to begin an indigenous religious community…
Sister Theo: …who understand every aspect of this culture and understand the Christian faith fully well in order to be able to lift their people instead of [the missionaries] standing from a distance and then imposing rules and regulation on things [they] don't even know what it is about.
NARRATION: And where did Charles Huey start? With the women.
Sister Theo: From then our foundation was laid.
Leslie: And you have Irish roots.
Sister Theo: Oh, they, they ask me and I tell them I'm Irish. Everybody looks, they're like, what? Don't I look like I’m Irish?
NARRATION: So to recap this story you're hearing, it's told by a Nigerian Irish nun who leads the North American branch of her religious order of nuns (all Nigerian Irish, like herself) in Illinois and the habits they wear are blue. So locally they're known as the blue nuns. Great. Now, how did these Irish Nigerian nuns come to find themselves in the United States?
Sister Theo: will say I, I think it's Providence because. One of our sisters had visited Texas. Her younger [family] lived in Texas, so for many years they have not seen her. They kept pleading that she come for a vacation in Texas and eventually she was granted kind of a sabbatical after many years. So she stayed in Texas with them in Houston. When she stayed in our community, she got involved in the local life of the community, in the church and all that. They liked her a lot.
They asked her to open a convent there and bring her sisters. They said, we want to religious just community around us for a good influence on our children and whatever. She eventually gave them the contact of our superior General. She said, if you are serious, talk with her. They went and called her Superior General. [The Superior General] kept asking them questions, trying to make them understand that it's has a process. They wouldn't give up. They wrote 10 letters to Bishops introducing our religious community and sharing their experiences of our sister with them. And the first response that came was from Bishop Doran of Rockford.
So by 1998, Our sisters arrived in Rockford.
NARRATION: By coincidence that same year an old school, which was formally a Catholic hospital, still owned by the diocese, closed in Freeport. It's a town half an hour from Rockford. Bishop Doran of Rockford wanted to find a property for this order of sisters from Nigeria by way of Texas to give them, as Sister Mary puts it:
Sister Theo: something to start with, something that we can call our own
NARRATION: An so, they moved in.
music
Sister Mary Theo's own story coming into the sisterhood began at a young age so young, in fact…
Sister Theo: if you ask my mother, she will tell you. Started in the womb.
When I was growing up, I kind of saw nuns around. I know they were special. I felt they were close to God, you know, so I loved nuns a lot. So by the time I was five, everything I did, I said was I want to be a nun.
NARRATION: One day around that time, a teacher approached Mary and asked her what she would be doing as a nun. And Little Mary, who I'm sure was quite the precocious child, responded:
Sister Theo: and I said, oh, so many things. I'll be praying for everybody and I'll be taking everybody to God. And he said, yeah, I know every day you say you want to be a nun, that's okay. But nuns it's can be something else too.
NARRATION: This felt like cognitive dissonance to Mary. But one morning she looks up, sees an airplane and makes a connection.
Sister Theo: Usually when I saw airplanes, I thought the airplane, when it disappears, it was going to Heaven. You know? It disappears in the sky, and for me, It has gone to the presence of God. So I got up that morning and I said to my teacher, I know what I will do.
He said, Said what? [I said,] I'll be a pilot.
NARRATION: A pilot. Like…a flying nun, if you can believe it. Kind of like that old TV show with Sally Field. And the teacher asks why.
Sister Theo: And I said, I will go and take people and I will fly them straight to Heaven and they'll go and out and they'll come back.
Everybody thought it was childish dreams. [They said] she will grow out of it, but it was solid.
NARRATION: Keep in mind, sister Theo is currently six in this story, but by the time she was in high school, she still remembered her fondness for the nuns and wanted to go to a boarding school where sisters teach the students like life skills, job skills.
She just wanted to be closer to the faith and the order, but her dad wouldn't allow it, which was really confusing to her because her parents were in, in her words, Very Catholic.
Sister Theo: They wanted it to be my decision and I couldn't understand why they wouldn't let me go. You know, I told my dad, “I can't believe that my own parents wouldn't let me go to become my sister.”
NARRATION: For years. They fought about this and she could not understand. And then one day around two in the morning, Mary's dad woke her up, sat her down, and
Sister Theo: “It pains me that I'm doing this, that I'm blocking you from stepping into what you want to do with your life. And he said, I'm only scared.” I said, dad, what are you scared about?
And he said -- because there was one thing about me. By the time I was five years old, I loved kids. Anywhere they Saint Open had given. And beside looking at this child, admiring this child so much, loving this kid, and I will see it. I want to carry it up, baby. So my dad said “The way you love babies, I'm just scared. I don't want you to grow up at a point and begin to regret that you don't have your own child. That's the pain that is in my heart right now.”
But I said, If I become a nun, I will have more children than I would've had when I married. Every child I encounter become my child.
[This was] the first time I saw my dad cry.
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NARRATION: but he's still not convinced. He thinks she's still too young, so he makes her a deal. He says, you need to go to university, finish your exams. And then…
Sister Theo: by the time you finish university, I still want this. You will go.
I went into my room and cried and cried and cried, and cried and cried. For two days I wouldn't eat. I was bent on becoming a sister. I wanted to be a sister. By all means.
NARRATION: By all means. She was not kidding about that. She devises a plan. See, each time she got a vacation from school, Mary's older sister would pick her up from her parents' house to come visit her nieces and nephews.
So sister Mary Theo uses this to her advantage.
Sister Theo: Two days later, I got up and told my dad, “okay, I'm going to my sister.” He said, “why not wait for her? She normally picks you up.” I said that I can go. So I got my things ready. They did not know…I washed all my school things, the bed sheets and all that. I washed and ironed all of them folded them. I got them ready, and that morning I left for the convent.
NARRATION: and she never looked back. Kind of brazen, right? Wanting to be a nun so badly, you're willing to lie to your parents and run away to a convent. It's bold. Mary Theonilla Chukwu, the young girl who dreamed of being a pilot nun and now is a runaway nun, was on her way to fulfill this dream.
Eventually, she did finish university. Several times.
Sister Theo: Yeah, I finished in Nigeria. I went to school as a teacher, so I taught for many years. I was a principal of a school in Ghana. I did bachelor's degree in psychology from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, and then I went to City Hall University to do a masters in mental health counseling,
NARRATION: and then she ends up in Illinois running the North American branch of her religious order.
But I'm very sorry to tell you, no pilot's license.
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Coming up on the next installment of the blue nuns need an elevator:
Sister Theo: The selling of the property somehow disturbed me more than I could ever imagine. In my heart, it seems so wrong…
…The whole room first went silent, then was screamed out: What are you up to without understand you? He talked and talked and talked and talked…
…Each time somebody picks up the thing, they said “what’s the women empowerment program?” I said, I don't know. But it has to be there, you know?
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MUSIC CREDITS:
Toothless Slope by Blue Dot Sessions
Palms Down by Blue Dot Sessions
Low Coal Camper by Blue Dot Sessions
The Blue Nuns Need an Elevator, Part 1: Meet Sister Theo