“Sometimes it’s like we stepped out of the movies,” said Sister Mary Grace, laughing as she described the Scots staring open-mouthed at the Sisters, always in twos, good-humoredly learning to navigate left-side traffic roundabouts and puzzling Glaswegian dialects.
Everywhere they went, however, they were received with cordiality. A minority of stern old Calvinists and new-style atheists alike were simply too shocked to react to their warm, uncomplicated presence. Most had assumed that the Catholic Church was down for the count, as the media trumpeted parishes closing and empty seminaries. A predatory homosexual Cardinal had been relieved of his See by the Pope just a year before; persistent rumors of similarly-disposed prelates dominating the Scottish Church had frightened off many would-be vocations. The media seized the opportunity to scourge the Church whenever possible, and Scottish Catholics avoided discussing what little faith they had left.
Most congregations in Catholic churches in working class Glasgow were thinning groups of old ladies, determinedly singing the forever-1960s anthems of the post-Vatican II generation. Like their Church of Scotland counterparts, wealthy Catholics in posh neighborhoods kept their churches open as necessary outlets for their social and charitable hobbies.
Most had no idea about the American sisters and their quiet work of saving Scottish babies and their mothers, one at a time. Sometimes, Sister Mary Grace doubted if many of the Irish-Scots Catholics would approve, if they knew.
She sighed; her own wealthy Irish-American family had deeply disapproved of her choice to enter the convent ten years before. But she had never looked back from the day she took her final vows, though her own mother, a prominent divorce lawyer, was not in the church to see her daughter clothed in the simple white habit of her Order.
Her father, divorced from her mother when she was a child, was a mostly-unsuccessful artist remotely of Italian extraction. He stood respectfully, hands folded when not nervously running through his shock of unruly gray hair, in the last pew.
As his daughter lay prostrate before the Bishop, dressed in the white, floor-length habit, he, however, remembered the ‘Our Father’ of his childhood, and prayed for the first time in decades.
When he glimpsed his daughter’s face immediately after she took the veil, he was shocked at her expression of pure, unadulterated joy.
The years since had flown by as Mary Grace blissfully immersed herself in the ordered life of the convent. Eventually, she became the Novice Mistress, charged with the formation of the young girls who seemed to gather in an ever-increasing flood at the convent doors.
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