Sister Baby Needs a New Pair of Black Lace-up Shoes

‘Tis the season when we can expect a lot of heart-tugging and/or feel-good stories in the news. Occasionally there’ll be one involving a heart-tugging, feel-good nun. (No more heart-tugging, feel-good priest stories, I’m afraid.)

But the story of late that has put the biggest smile on my face is the one of the two nuns in California who embezzled as much as half-a-million bucks from their school over a 10-year period. They used the dough on trips to Las Vegas to gamble.

$500K is a lot of money by anyone’s standards, but by the standards of funding a parochial school. Yowza! Amazing that the school is still standing.

Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper and Sister Lana Chang are not nuns on the run, however.

They’re holed up in their convent:

The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, the order the nuns represent, said the nuns have been placed in a religious house under the supervision of community leadership. (Source: USA Today)

Which I guess means no more casino nights in the parish hall, no more bingo games with the old ladies, let alone trips to the The Strip.

"Sister Mary Margaret and Sister Lana have expressed to me and asked that I convey to you, the deep remorse they each feel for their actions and ask for your forgiveness and prayers," [St. James Parish’ Monsignor Michael’ Meyers said in his letter, reports AP.

I’ll bet they have. I’ll bet they do.

The order is going to pay the school back – which I don’t imagine will be easy. These orders are dying out. Over the years, even when we were in that heady Church Triumphant era of the 1950’s, nuns were paid next to nothing for staffing parochial schools. They were provided with a pittance, and that pittance also went to support the older, retired nuns. It all worked because there were plenty of new young nuns to support the golden agers. And then there were no longer that many new nuns. And a lot more grey-haired nuns out there.

I think that in some cases, the Church was shamed in to providing support for convents. But orders of nuns have also sent out plenty of pleas to former students to help keep Sister Mary Filter of the Holy Smokes in sensible shoes.

So I’m guessing that this will be an awful lot of money for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet to part with. And much like the Catholic Church having to shell out so much money to settle molestation suits, having a scandal – even one as somewhat ludicrous as the gambling jones of a couple of old nuns – can’t help with fundraising.

The good sisters aren’t defending their rogue members.

"As a religious community, we will not defend the actions of our Sisters," said the order in their statement. "What happened is wrong. Our Sisters take full responsibility for the choices they made and are subject to the law."

There may, however, be no legal repercussions:

The archdiocese notified police, but doesn't plan to press charges, reports the AP.

Okay, I really don’t believe that justice will necessarily be served by shipping the duo of Sister Mary Margaret and Sister Lana – kind of a kippy nun name, no? – off to the hoosegow.  Especially since they look like they’d be buddies of my mother. That said, they might be helpful as embeds doing some sort of prison ministry. They could help inmates get their GED’s, and plenty of other things. After all, people do serious time for doing a lot less. Think of the woman in Texas who’s in the slammer for 8 years because she didn’t understand that people with green cards weren’t eligible to vote.

In any case, I suspect that the Church is relieved by having this sort of scandal on their hands, rather than the usual fare.

I have to say that I am a bit surprised by this.

I knew plenty of nuns growing up. Sure, there were many who were kind, good teachers, etc. On the other hand, plenty of them were mean. Plenty of them were cruel. And plenty of them were crazy – and I don’t mean good crazy either.

But larcenous nuns on gambling sprees? Not something I can reconcile with the nuns I grew up under.

The greatest incident of dishonesty I remember occurred in the fifth grade.

In grammar school, we were members of something called the St. Dominic Savio Club. Dominic Savio was a child saint, an exceptionally pious little Italian boy of the mid 19th century who died at the age of 14 of TB. Exceptional piety and child death being two favorite memes of nuns of my era, we heard a lot about St. Dominic. (His canonization was pushed by a priest who had taken what today we might generously characterize as a creepy interest in the boy.) Even a child as religious as I was found Dominic Savio a boring little prig.

Anyway, our class belonged to this Club which meant that once a month we had a meeting where we sang a song about St. Dominic Savio:

St. Dominic Savio
A saint of great power.
In Don Bosco’s garden

Don Bosco was the priest who favored little Dominic.

A fair youthful flower.

Ooo boy…

We also got to read the monthly Club newsletter, which was a nice break from the usual.

Now one of the things that nuns would do regularly was to change the classroom seating arrangement. Out of nowhere, Sister Whatever would order us all to “Take our books, pens, and pencils” and stand next to our desks while she announced where our next seat would be.

There were a couple of normal patterns: seated by name, seated by height, and – the most common – smart row girls, smart row boys, average row girls, average row boys, dumb row girls, dumb row boys. But occasionally they mixed things up.

On the occasion I recall, Sister Saint Wilhelmina did something of a random distribution.

After we were all settled in, she handed out the December issue of the club bulletin.

Low and behold, the monthly contest promised a prize to a classroom where a student with the initials MC (for Merry Christmas) was sitting in the second seat in the fifth row (December 25th being Christmas Day).

Low and behold, Sister Saint Wilhelmina had miraculously assigned Michael Curran that seat.

Even as gullible fifth graders, we knew the fix was in. It served us right that, although Willy wrote right in to the Dominic Savio Club, we didn’t get a prize. It’s highly likely that pretty much every other classroom that had a kid whose initials were MC landed that kid in the prime seat. We were too late to the game. The prize would probably have been a picture of St. Dominic Savio and/or St. John Bosco, so no great loss.

Anyway, that’s as close to a larcenous nun that I ever experienced. But who knows what might have happened if Sister Saint Wilhelmina had run into Sister Mary Margaret and Sister Lana. She might well have been blowing on dice and muttering under her breath, “Sister Baby needs a new pair of black lace-up shoes.”