Double Crossed

Chapter One Making Waves in Kansas Toting a small hoe and pruning sheers, Sister Agatha Grosdidier crept her way along the flower beds straddling the massive stone Ursuline convent in Paola, Kansas, bending to paw the earth and clip a useless twig. She was lean and large boned with a broad, handsome face. A plain black head covering that fell back to the nape of her neck--a veil--was the only outward sign that she was a nun. The profusion of roses, irises, tulips, jonquils, wild sweet Williams, poppies, bluebells, and tiger lilies, among others, was her doing. Her love of tending flowers dated back to her childhood spent on a Kansas farm. It was a passion that she later saw as helping her to nurture children in the classroom. When she wasn't digging in the dirt, Sister Grosdidier answered the convent phone or sewed aprons. In 1995, she was ninety-five years old, the eldest of the sisters. For nearly seventy-five of those years, she had been an Ursuline sister in Paola, a farming town forty miles south of Kansas City. Her chronology coincided remarkably with the history of the sisters' community. She was born five years after the Paola community's founding by thirteen nuns and three postulants, or trainees, and had lived to celebrate its hundredth anniversary in 1995. Sister Grosdidier was the kind of sturdy survivor who attracts accolades such as "remarkable" or "awesome." She was astonishingly robust, with a sparkle still dancing in her eyes. Her health had been so resilient that an insurance man, noting that no claims had been filed under her name, called the convent to ask if Sister Agatha was still alive. She loved tacos, spicy foods, and chocolate milk shakes. Lighthearted and quiet, she adored her flowers and her sisters, and her sisters adored her. She was special, but she did not see herself that way; rather she was a sister among sisters doing the ordinary things. It had been for her the best life she could imagine. Longevity and constancy had been hallmarks of Ursulines for nearly five hundred years. St. Angela Merici (1474-1540) began the community in sixteenth-century Italy, forsaking riches to feed the poor. She took the name of the order from the ancient German saint Ursula. Two centuries later, in 1727, the Ursulines became the first order to reach North America when French nuns from Rouen planted a convent in New Orleans seventy-five years before the city became absorbed into the United States. The Ursuline migration to Kansas had been by way of Louisville and St. Louis. Over that inclusive span of history, the sisters had endured waves of plenty and scarcity in both numbers and resources. Various branches had waxed and waned. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Ursulines still carried a distinct heritage but generally fit the profile of most other orders. Their story has become the familiar story of scores of communities from Sinsinawa Dominicans to Sisters of Mercy to Blessed Sacrament nuns. The circumstances differ, as do the particulars of their community arrangements, but they are much more alike than dissimilar. Sister Grosdidier and her fellow Paola Ursulines, therefore, reflected a much wider picture of the recent struggles and triumphs of American nuns in the mid-1990s. Sister Grosdidier joined the Paola sisters in 1924 when they numbered more than fifty. She had shopped around before making a decision. The Ursulines won her allegiance because, unlike the nearby Benedictines, they had somewhat less stringent rules. They allowed sisters to go home if a parent died, for example; the Benedictines did not. The majestic stone 1920s convent where she had moved as an excited young postulant had evolved into a three-story hub-and-spoke structure. At the ground-floor center stood a hand-carved solid walnut statue of Angela Merici bringing a basket of bread to peasants in a field. Over the decades, the Ursulines hadBriggs, Kenneth A. is the author of 'Double Crossed ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780385516365 and ISBN 0385516363.