Forty years ago today I was in a hotel in Iceland enroute to Rome . It was my thirtieth birthday and, although birthdays have never bothered me the way they do some people, I thought it somehow appropriate to be in this part of the world with its moon-like landscape on this day.

I was traveling with a group from the United States to Rocca di Papa on Lake Albano outside Rome directly across from where the pope has his summer residence. I was so naïve I had taken a bathing suit with me not realizing that the lake was formed on the site of an extinct volcano! This was not the first of the “mistakes” that the adventure would mean. We were going to the international Centre of the Movement for a Better World. We were going to take a five month course to become facilitators of their Retreat of the Christian Community. This course was going to coincide with the last session of Vatican Council II and we were going to hear lectures from some of the Council fathers and experts as part of our studies. I was incredibly excited.

As a member of a Jesuit sodality I had made an annual eight-day retreat for the past seven years, using one week of my annual two week holidays to do so. They were usually silent retreats and specifically for the members of our single women’s sodality all of whom were evening college students at what is now St. Joseph ’s University in Philadelphia . They were based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

In March of 1965 I read about a new kind of retreat called the Retreat of the Christian Community, the brain child of Father Ricardo Lombardi, S.J., which brought together laity and clergy, men and women, vowed religious, and persons of other Christian traditions than the Roman, if they desired to come. Only one day was given over to silence and the rest to the dialogue which Father Lombardi thought was the future of the Catholic community and its outreach to all others. I made that retreat the summer of 1965 at Barat College of the Sacred Heart near Chicago , traveling by coach class in the train, and had a foretaste of all that I had ever hoped my church would be and become.

I was invited by the United States director of the movement to go to Rome for this training course. I had no money to do so and wondered how I could even secure a loan to make the training possible. Through a rather amazing set of coincidences – or was it Providence ? – I learned that the brother of a Medical Mission sister who was the superior at a home for single mothers where I was volunteering to teach shorthand and typing was Bishop Vincent Waters of Raleigh , N.C. He was the bishop who sponsored the first United States Centre for the Movement for a Better World. Sister called her brother who agreed to lend me the money for the trip which I said I would take but only at 6% interest!

And so I was enroute to the Centre and to my experience with others from thirteen “more or less” English speaking countries. We used to joke that the “more or less” depended on how far south in India the participants came from!

How do I even begin to describe this group itself? I became friends with a Zulu priest who told me with tears running down his cheeks of how white parishioners in his part of Africa would not receive Eucharist from him. I met Sr. Charles Borromeo, a Carmelite from India , who entered the convent after the death of her dear husband Francis. They had been married six months. I met Sr. Gemma, a Presentation sister who danced an Indian liturgical dance for us in a modified habit to the dismay of some of her Irish Presentation community who were also in the course. I was in awe of the dignity at worship of the Indian priests in their several rites and of the guitar playing of Father Valerian D’Souza who is now the bishop of Pune, India, who stills sings his way into the hearts of so many in the name of Jesus.

Our group was able to attend several sessions of the Council. I remember standing beside Bishop D’Souza at one where the mutual excommunications of the Roman and Orthodox churches were revoked, in the French language of course. “We are in the presence of history being made,” Valerian whispered to me. During the breaks in the Council sessions the experts who were assisting the bishops at it came to our Centre and spoke to us about what was happening and what they thought were the implications of it. Abbe Francois Houtart, Cardinal Suenens, Father Yves Congar, O.P., Monsignor Ivan Extross of the Indian Bishops’ delegation were among them. It was at the lecture that Monsignor Extross gave us that I came to meet my friend and colleague of almost forty years, Archbishop Leobard D’Souza, then bishop of Jabalpur , India , and now the retired bishop of Nagpur . (Cf. www.bishopbhai.org)

It was Fr. Congar, whose great works on the laity are still being studied and appreciated, who stood before us in full Dominican regalia and who shook his finger at us and said in his accented English, “It is you laity who will have to preach this Council. When these bishops get back to their own countries and come to understand what the Holy Spirit has pulled over on them, most of them will have little or no interest in preaching it.” I remember this so well because in my study and reading of the Council documents up until that point I had come to the conclusion that it was the priestly identity that was going to be in crisis if and when these documents were taken seriously. I remember, too, weeping tears of gratitude at the vindication of the lay vocation and of what I can only call the “feminine” dimensions of the Christian vocation to be compassionate as well as just. One of the main reasons that +Leobard and I have been friends all these years is that he did and does take those documents very seriously, including the commitment to be merciful as well as just.

I remember, too, standing outside St. Peter’s watching when the sessions were over as the bishops spilled out of the basilica like so many magenta, pink, and white azalea blossoms into their means of transportation back to their residences, the North Americans into their chauffeured limousines and the Third World bishops into their chartered buses. Archbishop Eugene D’Souza, then of Nagpur , and +Leobard entertained a group of us from the Centre at their pensione at one point and I remember as they literally served us our food that this was symbolic for me of everything that the episcopacy was supposed to be about and for. I wondered if I would in any way ever experience it again.

(I want to mention in passing that the book Clerical Error by Robert Blair Kaiser is a must for anyone who would like a lay, insider’s view of the four sessions of the Council. I would not pretend to have the insights that he does. I relished every word of his astute text.)

I was at the closing session of the Council on December 8, 1965, having said goodbye the night before to the Indian bishops who had become so dear to me personally and to so many of us at the Centre. I was with Father Paul Schmidt, then a graduate student from Philadelphia at the North American College , who had come to my rescue with food supplements when the Italian diet began to stop working for me. He and Fathers Jim Collins and Joe Gallante, now the bishop of Camden , N.J. , were special gifts. As Paul and I stood atop the Bernini columns watching the bishops scrambling for seats at the outdoor assembly, we could not help but laugh. I remember saying to him, “Paul, after four years of this you’d think they’d know how many bishops there are here, wouldn’t you?” One by one, in their special uniforms, assistants of various kinds began to bring out chairs to supplement the seats for the bishops. It was years later that I would learn that +Leobard was one of the four bishops who officially closed the Council, the responsibility of the last four ordained to that office.

We continued in the course until January of 1966 when I returned home to Philadelphia knowing that I needed to make some choices about my future. I had been refused as a full time worker in the Better World Movement, a long and sad story and really not germane. I did come away from Rome versed in the documents of the Council and the method of the Retreat of the Christian Community. I returned determined to become one of the theologically trained lay persons the documents said were so desperately needed to balance the celibate clerical male culture in the Church’s leadership.

I was committed to bridging the gap between the pulpit and the pew forgetting that bridges get walked over, driven over, and sometimes even blown up, but most of the time they do manage to span different masses and bring them together and provide some kind of integration. All of these experiences of “bridging” have been mine and I would not trade most of them for anything.

It was the Better World adventure that took me eventually to study at Temple University in Philadelphia to understand better the religions of my world neighbours. When I read the Council document on these religions I knew I had to learn more about them. Years later I put together my interests in these religions and philosophies with the potential reconception of Christianity and worked on it for my doctorate at McMaster University in Hamilton , Ontario . From 1966-96, I was an educator at many levels, most in connection with courses in religious studies. I continue to do that now with a variety of not-for-profit organizations. I volunteer in a variety of ways connected with group participation, conciliation, and grass roots community development in North America and in India .

There have been so many who have made these seventy years of my life so worth living. But there are three whom I must mention, two of whom have gone into God’s Arms. My husband, Bent Stidsen, whom I married in 1969, was the human face of God for me, giving my life meaning and purpose in a way that it did not have before him, and has not had fully since. Through him I came truly to understand that God is love.

+ Leobard D’Souza has been and continues to be a special “grace” for me even as he now deals with aphasia as the result of a second stroke. His courage from the days that I came to know him in 1965 and as it continues now is a special beacon of hope for me. From my childhood, Leonard W. Broughan, O.Carm, who died in 1998, was my friend and then my colleague for almost fifty years. We grew up together in Manayunk on the outskirts of Philadelphia and he spent the last years of his life almost in my back yard at Mt. Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls , Ontario . For these great men and all the other great women and men in my life, sources of incredible joy – the infallible sign of God’s presence as Leon Bloy was wont to remind us – I am enormously grateful. May I know the Whole of which you are each so beautiful a part!