c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Roman Catholic sisters are often mysterious, even frightening figures for some people. Questions abound about nuns.

Why do women commit themselves to lives of chastity, obedience and poverty? What kind of lives do nuns lead after they have taken their vows? What impact has modern American society had upon nuns?

Cheryl L. Reed, a Chicago Sun-Times journalist, provides some surprising answers in her new book, “Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns” (Berkley Books). Reed, who was raised a “fundamentalist Protestant,” spent four years interviewing more than 300 nuns. She lived, ate and prayed with them, celebrated their joys, mourned some sisters’ deaths and “drank beer with them.”

Reed has provided a vividly compelling picture of nuns that goes behind the sometimes forbidding walls of convents, and she also describes nuns who are on the front lines battling America’s social ills.

Her book set me thinking about five nuns, all personal friends, whose lives and teachings have greatly influenced me.

Mary Boys is a world-class biblical scholar who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a bastion of Protestant Christianity. Boys is a formidable theological and academic foe of religiously based anti-Semitism, and her book “Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding” charts the way to building lasting mutual respect and understanding between Jews and Christians.

Boys believes authentic Christianity does not require the spiritual annihilation of Jews and the destruction of Judaism. She repudiates the Christian arrogance and religious competition that have bedeviled Christian-Jewish relations for 2,000 years.

The late Anne Gillen led the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry for over 20 years beginning in 1972. A former parochial school teacher, Gillen found her true vocation in mobilizing Christians in the successful struggle to free Jews and other oppressed peoples in the old Soviet Union.

Gillen and I spent hours in congressional offices and the U.S. State Department seeking public support for our cause. We also had a memorable meeting on Soviet Jewry in the White House during the Carter administration.

Public officials invariably underestimated Gillen the first time they met her. Just another “do gooder” nun, they thought, but that attitude changed once she began citing statistics, her firsthand experiences in the U.S.S.R. visiting Jewish “refuseniks,” biblical citations, and the human rights provisions of international treaties. Her absolute integrity dominated such meetings.

She taught me two imperishable lessons. Accept people “where they are” on an issue, and then work to move them to your position. And enlist people for a cause one by one by one. Each person counts in the battle for religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

Carol Rittner is one of America’s great teachers about the Holocaust. She served as a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington and was the co-producer of the acclaimed film “The Courage to Care,” the story of those few Christians who risked their lives to protect and rescue Jews from the Nazi mass murder machine.

Rittner later translated her film into a book that is used in classrooms around the country.

Rittner’s work is a constant reminder that the Holocaust was not a “Jewish” event, but a major challenge to the ethical and moral principles of Christian faith.

Rose Thering is an internationally known Christian leader whose life-long love for and commitment to the state of Israel is the stuff legends are made of.

Thering shattered the educational status quo of the Christian world with her pioneering study at St. Louis University of how Catholic textbooks inaccurately and inadequately treat Jews, Judaism, the Hebrew Bible, the Holocaust and the state of Israel.

She has led 54 Christian study missions to Israel, taught two generations of graduate students at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and participated in public campaigns, including hunger strikes, in behalf of Soviet Jewry and Israeli MIA Ron Arad.

In Vienna, Thering denounced Austrian President Kurt Waldheim for his Nazi record. As a result of her action, she was strip-searched at the Vienna Airport. But Thering turned the tables on her tormentors and made the humiliating incident international news.

Margaret Traxler’s extraordinary life and career as a nun is portrayed in “Unveiled.” Her energy and willingness to confront both religious and civil authority are inspiring. Traxler has vigorously pressed the cause of gender equality in her church, and her special ministry has been focused on the plight of women in prison.

I salute these five nuns for the precious gifts they have given me.

MO/PH RNS END

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)