The Sisters of St. Joseph die in as orderly a fashion as they live. A trim plot behind the Motherhouse in Baden, Beaver County, is lined with rows of stones all the same size, bearing testimony to their equality in the eyes of one another and, ultimately, God. It is a doctrine of faith in our church that anyone who goes to heaven becomes a saint. To walk their cemetery is to travel a calendar of anonymous feast days.
The woman who began life as Mary Elizabeth Roddy and lies in the earth as Sister Joseph Catherine Roddy was deposited here on May 18, 1977. Her row reads like an immigration list from County Kerry: Conway, Haley, Donovan, Conroy, Lynch, Tenney, Gibbons, Manning, Hannan, Kane ... .
In everyday parlance the residents of the Baden convent are referred to as "nuns," but this is incorrect. Nuns are cloistered from the rest of the world. The Sisters of St. Joseph live very much in the world -- teaching, evangelizing, commenting on civil affairs. In January, they issued a simple, impassioned manifesto denouncing the coming war in Iraq. Once war began, they distributed prayers to stop it.
The order was founded in France and, during the revolution, members were hunted like Falun Gong. They went underground and, after Robespierre received his eternal reward, reassembled in larger numbers and struck out for the New World. Note to tyrants: If you want to advance a cause, take care to persecute it.
They are surprisingly unsentimental in the ways a lack of sentimentality enriches life. Two weeks ago, two members, Kari Pohl and Roseann Gaul, gave away their hair so it could be made into wigs for children who have lost theirs. When Sister Joseph Catherine lay dying of cancer 26 years ago, I was in her room, holding her twig of a hand when a fellow sister popped her head in the door and said, "Hey, Joe Kate! You still alive?" Sister Joseph Catherine turned her head, nodded slightly, smiled, and resumed the completion of her task. Every woman in the building expects to die and seems resolved not to turn it into a major event.
The night before Joe Kate's funeral, I walked the grounds, examining the statuary when a dog that seemed especially hungry for a human thigh came lunging at me. The sisters have erected life-sized, stone stations of the cross around the grounds and I spent 20 minutes clinging, I think, to Simon of Cyrene until the dog gave up and left.
I was left alone with the dead and the trees. The grounds are rich with them and a woman who entered the order one year after my aunt has done a census of them, as if every living thing the Almighty has placed on that hillside must be accounted for.
There are 688 trees on the property, in 54 varieties. Sister Marie Helene Monahan has met each one, placed it on a map and kept an archive. The weeping willow and the black locusts probably were there when the order built its monastery in 1900. Other trees joined later. A tree can be surprisingly uncommunicative with the impatient. The leaves, the buds, the bark, the flowers must all be examined in various successions.
"I watched them in the fall and I watched them to see what they were like in the spring and summer and by then I had them all found out," she said.
On occasion, Sister Marie Helene visits a chestnut oak someone planted too close to a gigantic sycamore.
"I keep apologizing," she said.
Sister Marie Helen is 88 now or, as she puts it, the same age as the sycamores which are growing hollow and knotty.
"Then they'll fall over," she said.
They fall the way trees fall. It is a thing both certain and rarely seen and, when over, something else grows.
Dennis Roddy can be reached at droddy@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1965.
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