by Janet Hurley

Patty MacDuff knew she had a confession to make. She was out for a drive with her new boyfriend John Peil, somewhere between her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, and his home in Kalamazoo in 2000. MacDuff, then 51, had been vague about her last exclusive relationship of almost 20 years. And now Peil, a paper industry consultant whom she’d met on Yahoo Personals, wanted her to visit his church. He’d told her all about Sister Sue—so pretty and nice it was hard to believe she was a nun, he said. MacDuff knew Sister Sue, though she hadn’t mentioned that to Peil, and she knew Sue would surely recognize her. “Honey, I have to tell you something,” MacDuff said. “I used to be a nun. That relationship I told you about, it wasn’t with a man, it was with God.” It took a while for Peil to digest this big news, but they were married seven months later.
MacDuff’s choice to enter the convent at 26 seemed to come out of the blue. Her father was a lapsed Catholic. Her mother converted to Catholicism when she married, and she sent her children to religious schools early on, but the family wasn’t fervent. They followed her father’s sales career from West Virginia to Pennsylvania to Long Island and finally to Birmingham, Michigan, where MacDuff graduated from a public high school. MacDuff, who is barely five feet tall and has a girlish, pixie-like face, says she was a moody teenager and a bit withdrawn. “There were girls that had the ‘future nun’ look, but I was not one of them. I was just not the nun model,” she says.

While living with a roommate in a small apartment after high school, MacDuff dated occasionally and didn’t attend church. She had completed a year at Northern Michigan University but couldn’t decide what to study, so she dropped out to take a customer service job at an insurance company. She remembers that she was contentedly “average” and not searching for anything just then, but it was the early ‘70s. MacDuff started reading Ms. Magazine, admiring Gloria Steinem and was a charter member of the National Organization for Women—none of which, again, seemed to fit the nun model.

But then, one Easter Sunday when she was 22, she settled on the couch to watch the movie King of Kings. Two different versions. The first was a silent film by Cecil B. deMille, and it was the first time anyone had seen a screen actor depicting Christ. The second was a 1961 MGM production, a historical account of Christ’s life. MacDuff still remembers the actor Jeffrey Hunter and his moving portrayal of Jesus. By the end of the second movie, MacDuff says, she felt a powerful belief in Jesus and his divinity. “I knew that he was real, and that he loved me,” she says.

Soon after, she got involved in a Catholic church in Royal Oak, Michigan, during “the charismatic renewal,” a period in the ‘70s when some congregations focused on spiritual gifts and vibrant masses—something new to Catholics, MacDuff wryly admits. After reading an article about Mother Teresa and her work in Calcutta, MacDuff says, “I started thinking, gee, I might want to be a nun.”

 Of course, it’s not that easy. The process of deciding to join an order, and then actually doing it, is a lengthy one. She visited religious orders for three years in a process that sounds much like an extended sorority rush. “They are looking at you, too, to see if you’re a good match for them,” MacDuff says. When she finally made her choice, she told her mother first. Her mother was supportive, if not enthusiastic, but said Patty had to tell her father herself. MacDuff and her father had never been close, and she was terrified. She remembers finding him watching television in the living room. “I said, Dad, I have something to tell you,” MacDuff says. “It’s the kind of thing that can’t wait until the commercial.” Her father’s reaction amazed her. “He said, well, Patty, I’ve seen how happy you’ve been the last couple of years so involved with the church and I’m not surprised.” She took it as his blessing.

MacDuff finally entered the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph (based in Kalamazoo, with a convent in Detroit) in August of 1975. She was surprised to discover that, just as in sororities, there were exclusive cliques to navigate around. Eventually, she found nuns who inspired and nurtured her. She commuted from the convent to her insurance company job, where co-workers were none the wiser about her new life, partly because MacDuff’s order was a progressive one and didn’t require her to wear a habit. Then she left for several years of church secretarial work in Kalamazoo and Detroit, all in preparation for the novitiate, a year of intense religious study. Finally, in 1985, she took her final vows of obedience, chastity and poverty.
Her first official assignment as a nun was to take a secretarial job at a school in a rough Detroit neighborhood, Highland Park. In the school parking lot one morning, a man approached her with a sawed-off shotgun. He demanded her purse, which contained small change and Sisters of Saint Joseph credit cards. “I remember being paralyzed as I stared at that gun,” MacDuff says. He fled with her purse as soon as she handed it over. Despite the challenges of living in a tough area on an allowance of $40 a month—her salary went straight to the order’s main office—MacDuff loved the parish and her job. Her face lights up as she describes the loving relationships she had with the students. “I’d tell them they were beautiful,” she says, “It was really a ministry.”

But the big picture in the church was not so bright—at least not for women. “My religious order was very aware of the gender inequity,” she says. “They were trying to work within the system, which is hard because it all comes down to one man.” In the early ‘80s, MacDuff took classes at a local seminary until the archbishop said women couldn’t participate—not even nuns with final vows. She remembers being shocked. “That was the beginning of the real challenge for me,” she says. She tried not to make too many waves at first. “You focus on your mission and you’re faithful to that and toe the line and pray for change,” she says. But the challenge became greater as she grew more aware of sexist language and the Church’s relatively recent moves toward exclusion—women, she found out, had been priests and leaders in early Catholic Church history. “It was like my church was at odds with my faith,” MacDuff says. “I didn’t want to be a priest myself but I didn’t understand why genitalia should determine whether or not you have the call.” 

In 1988, MacDuff was called to Kalamazoo, where she worked for the president of her religious order. At that high level, MacDuff saw the inner workings of the church hierarchy, and her discomfort grew. One day in 1990, she read a Detroit Free Press story with a comment from a newly appointed archbishop about altar girls. “He said that if he was holding Mass at one of those churches and a little girl came into serve at the altar, she’d better stay out of his presence,” MacDuff says. “I’ll never forget, I thought to myself, any church that doesn’t welcome a little girl doesn’t welcome me.” It was the last straw.

She asked for a leave from the church and headed out into the world—though she didn’t go far, staying in Kalamazoo. She was 41, had been a nun for 15 years and there was so much to adjust to: working as a secretary in a corporation, going back to school, the loss of close contact with her beloved convent family. She was in the habit of praying regularly, and yet she wasn’t moved to find a church. She felt freer in some ways—“I realized lightning was not going to strike if I didn’t pray at eight o’ clock”—and yet she was frequently miserable, with “no clear path, just a hope for better things.” Her mother called every Saturday during her first year away from the convent. “We didn’t acknowledge it until years later,” MacDuff says, “but it was a suicide watch of sorts.”

Paul Schervish, a former Jesuit priest who has known MacDuff since her early years in the convent, says the stigma of leaving the church can be cruel. “Historically, before the ‘50s, leaving the church was shameful. People figured you were flawed somehow,” he says. “Today, people put both positive and negative connotations on it. They might think you’re flawed or they might give you special respect that you feel you don’t deserve. No matter what, you’re seen as an ex-nun or ex-priest and you lose part of your self-definition.”

Life gradually improved for MacDuff and she lived simply, much the way she had in the convent. She got a job at the Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan, and then finished her business degree. She was proud of the foundation’s work, especially its grants to black colleges in apartheid South Africa, and was eventually promoted to secretary to the president of the foundation. She still felt deeply conflicted about being a nun, and when her three-year leave of absence was up, she requested an extension of two years. By 1995, at age 46, she knew she couldn’t stall any longer and asked the church for final dispensation from her vows.

Almost simultaneously, the Kellogg Foundation downsized its staff and MacDuff lost her job. She took another nearby, as an exporter for the Kellogg Cereal company, a job she says was interesting, if not as fulfilling. She focused instead on finding a life partner. This was yet another challenge for an ex-nun nearing 50 who had dated only occasionally before entering the convent. Still, she wasn’t totally naïve. Even nuns get crushes on people. MacDuff remembers one or two priests who made her heart “go pitter pat.” She says her vows were stronger than the physical attraction but admits, “the feelings I had for those men weren’t mutual. If they had been, perhaps my struggle would have been harder.”

MacDuff wanted someone who shared her interests and values and who found her physically attractive, though she says that wasn’t her top priority. In late 1999, she posted a Yahoo personals ad and John Peil replied in December. MacDuff’s employer at the time was worried about Y2K computer problems, which meant that for several days near the end of the year, work was slow. Without much to do, she emailed constantly with Peil and finally met him for breakfast the morning of December 31. They couldn’t stop talking. On January 1, 2000, of course, post-Y2K life was business as usual for everyone—but for Patty MacDuff it was a brand new world.

The couple shared a dream of moving to the Smoky Mountains, a place where Peil said “he wanted to sit in a rocking chair someday.” In 2001, the year after they married, they moved to North Carolina, first to Greensboro where Peil worked in sales and MacDuff worked part-time as a secretary for the Jewish Foundation of Greensboro. But then Peil accepted a position as Director of the Small Business Center at Blue Ridge Community College, and MacDuff was hired by the BRCC Educational Foundation shortly thereafter. Today, she is a communications specialist there and supports fundraising efforts for scholarships, endowments and new programs, which allows her to “do good work in the world,” she says.

MacDuff says she doesn’t entirely reject the Catholic Church. “If anything, I feel sorry for the institution,” she says. “It’s lost a valuable resource in those women who have refused to be regarded as second-class citizens.” Two years ago, MacDuff and Peil visited the Unity Center of Christianity in Fletcher and knew they had found a new spiritual home. Along with an acceptance of “individual freedom of religious belief,” according to the Unity Center’s website, “we choose to work on overcoming all forms of injustice and bigotry in the world and in our own hearts.” They attend services once a week.

In their house in Tuxedo, MacDuff and Peil have a rocking chair that the convent family gave her when she first left the church in 1990. Today, the rocker boasts a pillow imprinted with a Japanese proverb: In the mountains, we forget to count the days. Of course, MacDuff never forgets her convent days and says she wouldn’t have done a thing differently. But she is obviously enjoying the freedoms of her new life—sitting in a swing and reading a book when she feels like it or playing with her dogs. She loves to garden in front of their house, which has stunning views of the mountains. While she may not be counting the days, MacDuff does seem to be counting her blessings.