Sister Briege McKenna, a nun who left school in Northern Ireland at 15, has a vocation like no other woman in the world today. At a time when many women are seeking the right to be ordained, she has become, at 40, the most successful and sought-after spiritual director of bishops and priests in the Roman Catholic Church, and she has achieved it with visionary and prophetic powers that her devotees say defy rational explanation.
She has ministered to many thousands of prelates, priests and monks on five continents, and she is adding national leaders and Catholic cardinals to her flock.
President Jose Sarney of Brazil announced on television this fall that a meeting with Sister Briege had changed his life. Cardinal Ratzinger, guardian of Catholic Orthodoxy and the most powerful prelate in Christendom under the Pope, recently spent an hour and a half in prayer and consulation with her.
Entering a strictly enclosed convent in Newry, Northern Ireland, 25 years ago, Sister Briege lived a life of grinding austerity before emerging 10 years later to start up her extraordinary ministry from a convent in Tampa, Fla. She has never had any formal training in theology. Her inspiration comes from three- to five-hours of silent prayer daily and the exercise of visionary powers that can unnerve the most hardened and cynical of priests.
Following the upheavals of the Vatican Council 20 years ago, more than 100,000 priests have abandoned their ministry, leaving those behind overworked and largely demoralized. Spiritual direction is time consuming. A priest often must wait several hours or even days to confide his problems and receive appropriate guidance.
Briege McKenna has broken through this lengthy and, in her view, often uncertain process. She can counsel as many as 12 priests in one hour. She sees each priest alone, takes him by the hand, puts an arm around one shoulder and bows her head towards him.
After a few brief prayers, she begins to perceive what she calls a ”word of knowledge” that comes unbidden into her head: It is a vivid allegory or emblem, ”like an image on an overhead projector,” she says. Invariably it illustrates a deep-seated spiritual problem or anxiety; sometimes she confronts a priest with a grave habitual sin.
She begins to speak to him in the words of Christ or the Virgin Mary, using the first person. Often it is a message of comfort and understanding;
sometimes it is a severe reprimand. The experience is often so stunning that many priests break down in tears.
In a church that is still divided over the acceptance of Pentecostalism, Briege McKenna`s ministry may well be mocked by opponents to charismatic practice. Non-Christians might deem her powers to be no more significant than a clairvoyant or fortune teller. She is by any criteria open to accusations of exploiting men who live unusually stressful and lonely lives and who come to her with high expectations.
There is nothing particularly sublime about the content of her visions;
often they are homespun and unexceptionable: ”a high hill,” ”a twisting road,” ”a deep hole,” ”an arid field;” her verbal messages are invariably rooted in familiar Scriptural quotation.
But the majority of priests who have undergone her ”method” insist that she always delivers a miraculously appropriate image and message; they are in no doubt that she is directly inspired by God.
”We priests are a skeptical, hard-nosed lot,” said Father Harold Cohen, an American Jesuit broadcaster. ”If she were bogus, she wouldn`t have lasted two minutes. The effect on most priests is fantastic; they return to their parishes utterly transformed.”
Briege McKenna herself is assailed by neither worldly nor ecclesiastic scruples. She said that 20 years ago her bishop, Msgr. Thomas Larkin of St. Petersburg, Fla., foretold that she was to be an ”Apostle of the Lord,”
which is tantamount to the status of an unconsecrated female bishop.
For 10 years now Briege McKenna has been traveling by invitation of national hierarchies to minister to scores of priests daily at special retreats. Last year her itinerary included Brazil, Nigeria, France, Holland, Australia, Taiwan and the United States. She is booked for the next two years; her schedule includes Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, India, Peru and Argentina. She travels the length and breadth of each country, visiting remote parishes and mission stations. And she continues to communicate with her ”charges” by sending out a daily flood of handwritten
”little notes.”
Up to now she has avoided publicity. But last month she published a book about her life, ”Miracles Do Happen” (Servant Publications, $5.95). Written in an artless, conversational style, its 150 pages contain many extraordinary claims about herself, her powers and her relationship with God. She said she wrote it in 10 days, each writing session preceded by three hours of prayer. It is widely expected to become a modern spiritual classic. She wrote it, she said, because God told her to.
To meet Sister Briege preceded by her reputation is a profound anti-climax. She is no luminous, wraithlike mystic. She is slightly thick around the middle and, as befitting a thoroughly modern nun, dresses in comfortable skirt, blouse and handknit cardigan. Her concessions to religious status are a silver crucifix and a short brown veil.
She speaks rapidly, melodically and smiles readily. Her gray eyes are scrutinizing. She touches those she speaks with frequently, almost
flirtatiously, on the arm. And yet she exudes an unassailable chasteness as bracing as convent soap and cold water.
Were she a woman of the world she might be a prodigious gossip. But her talk is entirely to one point: a torrent of anecdotal parable, some awe-inspiring, some comic, illustrating the astonishing nature of her powers, which, she is at pains to tell you, come entirely from God. In rare moments, when the smile fails, she seems hag-ridden with effort, betraying a day of nonstop work and prayer that starts at 5 a.m. and ends after midnight.
We met in the seminary of All Hallows Church in Dublin, where 60 priests were attending one of her summer retreats. Participants had traveled from as far as New Orleans, Maiduguri, Nigeria; and Perth, Australia.
The fathers, fresh from midday mass, were making their way down the cloister, Sister Briege in their midst, bandying quips. Many of the middle-aged clerics had spent seven cheerless years of their youth shut away in colleges such as this where women were firmly banned. Her peals of laughter echoed to the vaulting.
”Nobody could have been more reluctant than I to accept that I had special powers,” she said later, in her temporary office. ”I used to pray to Jesus and say, `Oh, God, please keep your miracles to yourself.` ”
It all began with a dramatic healing of her own body. In 1962 she left behind her tenant farmer father and four brothers to enter the convent. Her mother had died of a cerebral hemorrhage when Briege was 12. Her father was heartbroken at her decision, but he told her: ”If that`s what you want, go ahead, and if it`s not what you want, you`ll know it.” Two years later she developed crippling rheumatoid arthritis in her feet and hands. She remembers that the sisters had to put plaster boots on her feet to prevent deformity.
”I used to faint with pain,” she said.
She was transferred to a community in Tampa, but the humid climate only made it worse. ”By 1968 I was a cripple on high doses of cortisone. My feet were completely twisted, and I had sores.”
During this period she suffered doubts about her vocation and sat for many hours in the chapel close to despair. ”One morning I felt a hand on my head. I opened my eyes, and no one was there, but I felt a power going through my body. I looked down. My fingers were limber, the sores were gone, and my feet were no longer deformed. I jumped up, screaming, ”Jesus! You`re right here!”
The summer after her healing she returned to Northern Ireland for a vacation and said she cured a woman dying of cancer in a hospital in Newry.
”The town was in an uproar looking for the healing nun. People were phoning and coming to see me. Every time they saw a nun in the street in a brown habit they would dash after her.”
But the ”miracles,” which include, according to her supporters, not only healings and prophecies but even an instance of ”bilocation”-being in two places at the same time-were, in Sister Briege`s view, a mere prelude to her real mission, the renewal of the Catholic priesthood.
She said she received the call while alone in prayer some 12 years ago. She had been contemplating the turmoil following the defection of large numbers of priests worldwide, and she cried out, ”Oh, God, what is wrong with the priesthood?”
She said that she began to receive a sequence of visions that appeared vividly ”as on a television screen” above the tabernacle on the altar and lasted for four hours. ”I found myself weeping as I watched the unfolding of this powerful revelation of the priesthood and what it means for a man to be ordained.” A voice told her to go out into the world and lead priests back to God.
Not long after this a Jesuit asked her to help him direct a retreat for 100 priests in Orlando. ”When we got there, he fell ill, and I was left holding the baby. The only people I had ever instructed were 9th graders, so I thought, right, I`ll treat them like little children.”
It worked with a vengeance. Invitations to give retreats and spiritual direction started to flood in.
Her mission was not to be without difficulties. In Brazil, where she has been concentrating most of her efforts recently, her simple reaffirmation of traditional Catholicism does not always prosper among political radicals. A group of liberation theologians came to hear her speak last year. When she told them that ”to follow Marx is to supplant the teachings of God with the teachings of man,” they accused her of working for the CIA. She recounted that a monsignor came up to her afterwards and said, ”Briege, I would`ve needed 10 double whiskeys to talk to those fellows like that!”
On another occasion she received ”knowledge” that a man who had come to her for help had committed a murder. ”When he realized that I knew his secret, he began to stalk me wherever I went. Eventually he committed suicide. He left a diary revealing that for several weeks he had been plotting to kill me.”
Sister Briege is no darling of the feminist movement in the church. On her frequent tours through the United States she is sometimes the target of demonstrations protesting the church`s refusal to ordain women. ”I tell them that I frankly do not believe that women have a right to ordination in the same way that they may have the right to be lawyers and doctors. Even men do not have a right to ordination. It is a gift, and God has yet to reveal through his church that it is open to women to receive it.”
By the same token she energetically expounds the merits of celibacy, or what she calls ”the positive virtue of a single ministry.”
Her ready intimacy and electrifying insights in counseling, however, occasionally lead to infatuations. ”One day a priest told me he was in love with me and wanted to have a close relationship. I refused to see him again, and he practically went berserk. But I was adamant. What he was proposing could have destroyed us both.”
Because her ministry poses a constant danger that she in turn might be attracted to the men she helps, her counseling does not allow for priests to unburden themselves. ”It all comes from my God-given insights. I do not want to listen to a priest talking about himself. I am flesh and blood and just as prone to falling for him as any woman.”
For the first two years of her ministry Sister Briege worked alone from a small house in Florida provided by her order and the Grace Foundation in New York. Now she has a partner, an affable Irish priest, Father Kevin Skallon, who organizes her schedules, travels the world with her and combines his priestly function as confessor with her more dramatic powers and insights.
She is convinced that many of the problems experienced by priests stem from their inability to cope with celibacy and relationships with women.
”Many of them are frightened of women and as a result end up shunning them. Many priests are incapable of accepting the feminine side of their own natures. I help them come to terms with that.”
Undergoing Sister Briege`s ”heart surgery,” as her priests call it, can be a daunting prospect. At tea in the refectory I sat with a priest in his 40s who had been directed by her that morning for the first time. He said: ”I came with a lot of misgivings. I`m an army chaplain and I`ve been working in Beirut, seeing young men dying and nearly copping it myself once or twice. My milieu is the NCO`s mess, not a nun`s apron strings. But that women put her finger on a deep problem I`ve been wrestling with for 10 years.”
A young priest who works in hospitals and prisons in the west of Ireland told me: ”I came two years ago and she homed in on a great failing in my spiritual life. She said she had an image of me standing in an arid field with an empty jug wondering how I was going to water it. She said: `Your problem is that you`re not praying!` She was 100 percent on the nail. I`d given up my prayer life. I`ve put that right.
”Now I`ve come to see her again. And I thought this morning, if she tells me abut that arid field, I`ll know she`s an old fraud. When we had our session, she simply said she had a vision of me in a crowded room. She said to me: `God didn`t make you a priest to be a social worker, you know!` Bang on the nail again. She couldn`t have been more accurate about the way I`ve been leading my life recently. There`s absolutely no doubt in my mind that she has special guidance from God.”
As she looks to the future Sister Briege has no intention of starting a movement or a new order. She believes that her gifts answer the needs of a specific problem in the church`s history.
As for suggestions that she is a saint, she said: ”The important, the most beautiful thing, is to be human. I`m no plaster saint. I`m afraid I`m totally normal, with plenty of human weaknesses and self-indulgences. As for miracles, I can do nothing; it`s a gift that I hand back to God every night of my life. As for the rest, I take aspirins when I get a headache just like anybody else. And I enjoy going to the beach and out to dinner when I`m on vacation. I love being human.”
