One tortoise-shell cat has only one eye but looks up with it trustingly at a visitor.
A large apricot and white cat walks as if she`d tippled a few too many catnip martinis; actually Karat has cerebral palsy but manages to get around with dignity.
An all-white cat has rounded ears like a squirrel`s-the tips have been frozen off.
Another has no ears and no tail but rubs her head under her custodian`s chin, despite having been experimented on in a laboratory.
There are lots of cats roaming about this house, most of them without handicaps, if you don`t count being without a home or human of your own. Some explore, others sit on windowsills, mesmerized by scenes outside.
Eight of them, including a peach-colored whopper named Chas, are mounded, snoozing, on a big cushion atop the table at which Sister Marijon Binder and her visitor sit, the nun telling the story of how she came to be guardian angel of cats in the nine circles of hell that the city can be for homeless animals.
Despite her exterior calm, it is a time of crisis for Binder. She is being forced to abandon her furry constituents or break her vows. Both missions remain dear to her.
She had been ordered to return to California to face religious trial. She wants to remain a nun but fears this will not be allowed if she doesn`t abandon her feline ”flock.”
”I`ve been a nun for 32 years. I totally believe in my vows and commitment to religious life,” she says. But ”I know I can`t abandon these guys.
”I went there and pleaded with the (trial) council for two days and tried to explain fully what I`m doing. I believe that God has missioned me to take care of animals and educate people about them. They do not in any way want to endorse the care of animals as worthy of a religious mission. They denied me my request for a second year of leave of absence in which I could act independently and take care of the animals. They`ve ordered me to return by Sept. 3. They want me to transfer responsibility for the cats to the organization” she has created. A spokesman said the religious order had no comment on the situation.
So Binder is in the same dilemma she was before, torn between her commitment to her religious vows and her cats.
Binder entered convent preparatory school at 13 and after 1/2 years went into the novitiate of the Order of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Orange, Calif. ”I wanted to do something more with my life than one could attempt normally,” she says.
She was sent to San Francisco, where for 18 years she taught 6th grade and eventually specialized in social studies.
On to Chicago
Hearing of her good work, publishing companies began to contact her to write 6th grade texts for teachers. In 1975 that work brought her to Chicago, where a stint turned into a stay. Eventually she traveled all over the country, providing workshops to educators on how to use maps and globes.
”Somewhere along the line I got the idea that as a religious, it was important to me to be doing something that was helping human beings, not just adding to the profit margins of a company.” Her idea was to establish a Global Concern Center.
”Global education means seeing the interdependency of history, geography, economics, so we can see cultures as integrations of all the things that have come into their experience,” she says. Her general superior gave the go-ahead, and in 1978 Binder rented a house where she could have an office and library and could receive teachers doing research. The church later bought the house. ”I supported myself by writing textbooks as a freelance writer and editor. I have 20 books to my name. I had no animals.”
Then came a tiny but powerful presence into her life.
”In the summer of `82, I was out planting the garden one night. A little black cat came out of nowhere and was playing with me and my trowel. Of course, I told it to go find its home. I came in here at night about 10 o`clock. That cat was asleep on my bed. I`d left the door ajar. Obviously she already had found her home. I named her Weeds, because she came into my life while I was weeding the garden. She brought me closer to the Lord and taught me a lot about gentleness.”
While Binder was away on a trip, Weeds slipped out on her caretaker and was killed by a truck.
In 1983 she decided to get a master`s degree in geography, working her way through Northeastern Illinois University ”all with the blessing of my community.”
”I didn`t feel I needed another animal,” Binder adds. But people started calling to see if she could take in handicapped animals. She consented to help a neighbor woman who had found a half-wild cat and kittens.
”It is such a wonderful thing to see fear go out of a little thing`s eyes,” she explains. ”I wish I could do it for all the little children.”
She placed the cat and kittens in homes, and ”somehow the news was broadcast far and wide among the cats of the alleys that here lives someone with a soft heart.”
Since the fall of 1983 she has placed 700 cats in homes. ”If I could only get the (religious) community to understand how this has brought me to people I would never meet otherwise,” especially the homeless.
”For many of these people, the cat is the only other living thing that he or she can trust, so they become very fond of it and search through dumpsters for food for it as well as themselves.”
Then personal tragedy struck. Nine members of her family have died over the last few years, including two brothers, one to suicide, one to AIDS.
”Because of my brothers` death and illness . . . , I missed the prime adoption season, so here I was with all these cats, 30 of them, in February
`89.
An order to leave
Last spring the general superior ordered her to close the Global Concern Center and return to Caifornia. ”I really had wanted to obey her, but I had not been able to place those cats, and I was still grieving a lot for my family. She gave me to July 15 to close up the house. In June she sent two nuns out from California to help me.
”Apparently they had different orders than I knew of, and they cleared out the house. You don`t need a bed, they told me. They threw away all the food and the cats` medications.”
She immediately appealed to her general superior for a leave of absence, but the request seemed to go nowhere.
”People who got cats from me called the television stations, telling them of the situation.” Then the general superior granted the leave, so Binder asked reporters not to use the story. The general superior still did not recall the other nuns.
”Then a group of people began writing and sending donations and offering to help by forming an organization.” Cats Are Purrsons, Too, Inc. was incorporated, with a board of directors, last July to eventually establish a nonkill cat-rescue shelter and in the interim to help Binder take care of and find homes for her cats. A fundraising dinner brought in about $5,000 and yard sales still more.
”Our effort was to buy the house. The very next day after my leave of absence was granted, the general superior contacted a real estate agent and told him to act on it fast. It sold in two days regardless of the cats.
”The general superior ordered me out of here under the Vow of Obedience, which under church law is a very serious matter, and I had no desire to break that vow.
”I had no money, no savings account, no credit history. The (religious)
community did give me some money as transition money. Where was I going to move with 30 cats?”
An attorney volunteered help, working out an agreement under which Binder would move but the cats would remain, at least temporarily.
”At the last minute an elderly woman . . . allowed me to stay with her in her condo on Sheridan Road.
”I really believe the Lord was with me and wanted this thing to continue,” Binder says. She was offered a job as chief writer for a publishing company at $30,000 a year, ”but my general superior wouldn`t let me take it.”
An attempt to buy another house failed because she had no job and no credit history.
”It was a terrible summer and yet lots of good people came into my life. They had raised $30,000 over a three-month period.
Buying the house
”In the meantime, the escrow on this house fell through, so we negotiated to buy this house.” The religious community demanded $110,000 in cash, she says. ”We had only $30,000, a long way to go. My Realtor did find an anonymous private investor who at the last minute said he would put up $80,000 for a six-month period to cover us.
”The community had bought the house in `85 for $47,900 and sold it for $110,000 four years later to us.”
Now back in the house, she pays $800 a month, ”which is only the interest on the loan. Ten percent of that goes to the bank, 1.5 percent to the private investor. None of it goes to the principal, so I could be doing this till eternity and would never own the house. But that was the only way I could get it,” Binder says. ”We hoped in six months we could get the $80,000 to pay off the loan or get a grant or I`d be able to take that $30,000 job, but they gave that to someone else.”
Despite that cost, the expenses of caring for the cats also are great. She pays $500 a month for cat food alone and has more than $4,000 in bills from her vet, who lets the debt ride.
Dr. Walter Bruno, her veterinarian at North Central Animal Center, says,
”I commend her; she`s doing so much good for these pets that are abandoned and injured. Without her I don`t know where they would go because so many other shelters are full.”
”Before I was able to do this with my entire salary going to the community; they gave me a stipend to live on,” Binder says. ”I used donations and told people who adopted to write the check out directly to the vet. So I wasn`t really spending convent money. Now I can`t turn the money over to the vet; I have to use the money for what`s the most pressing need for that day, pay the electricity or the gas. I`m finding out what the real vow of poverty is all about.
”One of the things I really need is some volunteers for cleaning, making and selling things at the craft shows, handyman work, transporting litter and supplies and cats to the vet.
She sees her mission as a true form of Christian charity. ”Jesus praised the good shepherd for taking care of the animals even to the point of giving his own life for them. Jesus didn`t say, `What a stupid shepherd, giving his life for those animals. He should be taking care of people instead.` ”
She wears a T-shirt of her own design: a kitten sitting atop a globe with the words, ”Gentle the Earth.” She constantly hustles to sell these and similar stationery at fairs for $15.
A colleague in animal welfare, Grace Bluek, says, ”She`s under a tremendous amount of pressure because you have constant bills to meet. I don`t know how the heck she takes it. She needs a lot of help.”
Father Joseph Downey, editorial director of Loyola University Press, gave his cat to Binder when other men in the house where he lived were allergic.
”I feel for Sister and grieve for her. She`s a generally good woman and a religious woman, entirely sincere, not in an off-the-wall way but a normal woman. I told her I`d be praying about these things for an appropriate answer.”
A vegetarian dinner to raise funds for Cats Are Purrsons, Too, will be held at 4 p.m. Aug. 8 at the North Park Village Nature Center, 5801 N. Pulaski Rd., catered by the Chicago Diner. Reservations are required. Donations for an August rummage sale are needed, and Binder will have a booth at the Abyssinian Midwest Breeders Cat Club Show at Hemmens Auditorium, 150 Dexter Ct., Elgin, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. June 30 and July 1. For more information on fundraising, write or call Cats Are Purrsons, Too, Inc., Box 59067, Chicago, Ill. 60659
(312-728-6336).
