By Jim Stingl
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
January 24, 2009
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/38248269.html
When people ask Mary Grace Cano why she's no longer a nun, she usually sidesteps the question by replying, "It's a long story."
And it's a story that bears similarities to a film that's in theaters now and has grabbed some key Oscar nominations - "Doubt."
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| Onetime nun Mary Grace Cano shares a real-life story that is similar to the storyline of the movie “Doubt,” showing at the Oriental Theatre. Photo by MaryJo Walicki |
We went to the movie together last week and talked about art imitating her life, though "Doubt" is a fictional tale and not an exact match to her ordeal.
On the big screen, Meryl Streep as a nun and rigid school principal confronts Philip Seymour Hoffman as a priest. Cano found herself in a similar situation when it came out that a priest was molesting children at a Catholic elementary school in Shreveport, La., in 1967.
Cano, then a nun in the Daughters of the Cross order, was principal of St. Catherine of Siena school. She was called Sister Mary Carmel back then.
She's now 77 years old and a retired Milwaukee Public Schools teacher living in the Riverwest neighborhood. Cano said she never told her story to a reporter before. Nor did she have one invite her to a movie.
Before heading to the Oriental Theatre for the 4:30 show, we sat in Cano's living room and talked about what happened 42 years ago at her school. The movie also is set in the 1960s, when the ground was starting to shake under the unquestioned authority of the church and its leaders.
A student named Eddie came to Cano's office and asked to get out of attending gym class. When questioned, the boy said the priest running the class had molested him. And he named other boys it was happening to.
"The more he talked, the more I realized Eddie was not making this up," Cano said. She then talked to understandably angry parents of the other boys, leaving no doubt what was going on.
Not sure what to do, she went to the monsignor who was pastor of the parish. "He said, 'Don't worry about it. I'll handle it. That's a man's job,'" Cano recalls.
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| In 1959, Mary Grace Cano was known as Sister Mary Carmel |
A couple of weeks passed, and it didn't seem anything had changed. The priest in question, an associate pastor, still interacted with children, coached, taught religion class and shepherded the altar boys, much like Hoffman's Father Flynn in the movie.
One day, that priest burst into Cano's office and demanded to know "what the world was coming to" when a nun excuses boys from his gym class. She told him to his face what she knew.
"You tell me what the world is coming to when priests are molesting little boys," she thundered at him. He never brought it up again.
It's an exchange that could have been right out of "Doubt." Cano told me she picked up a letter opener and aimed it toward the priest. We noticed later in the movie that Streep's character had a metal crucifix at the ready during a confrontation with the priest in her office.
"My mother superior didn't know anything about this. I was thinking this is getting over my head," Cano told me. The superior eventually ordered her to keep her mouth shut.
Cano contacted the bishop and caught the interest of the deputy in that office, a priest named Henry Van Der Putten. He investigated, and suddenly the offending priest vanished from the parish.
"To this day I don't know where he went," Cano said.
But she knew he had been at other parishes before hers, and she feared he was sent to another assignment. There was no criminal prosecution, which is why I'm not naming him.
That same year, the 35-year-old nun asked to be released from her vows.
"I left because I didn't want to belong to any organization that covered up and sent the priest from one place to another," Cano said.
But she retained her Catholic faith. Today, she's a member of Our Lady of Divine Providence in Milwaukee and has served on the parish council. Her sister is still a nun.
I won't ruin the ending of "Doubt" for you, but Cano did not find a kindred soul in Streep's Sister Aloysius.
"She was going with a hunch," Cano said. "I thought she was cold and not compassionate at all, not even with the children."
But both of these women of God refused to be silenced.
Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or e-mail at jstingl@journalsentinel.com
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