The Nun, II   By Melissa Tawn   Sister Agatha is martyred, and then proposed for beatification.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story ties together the lives of two of my characters — Sister Agatha (born Henri Dumont), whose tale is told in “The Nun, I”, and Mary-Anne Cardinal O’Connor (born Mark Anthony O’Connor), whose tale is told in the four-part story “The First Woman Cardinal of the Catholic Church”. It is strongly recommended that both of these be read first.
 
 
CHAPTER 1. THE MARTYR

Sister Agatha’s tenure as mother superior of the Convent of Ste. Genevieve of the Roses was extremely successful. Not only did she manage to place her struggling convent on a firm financial basis, she also bolstered its dwindling membership. Moreover, the enhanced public interest in medieval church music which followed the publication and later performance of the works long hidden in the convent’s archives helped present a positive public image of the Church, at a time when such an image was desperately needed. She turned out to be an articulate spokeswoman for cloistered religious orders, who came across in radio and press interviews as a sincerely religious woman totally dedicated to her Church and her God and very articulate in presenting her views.

All of this was not lost, of course, on the authorities in the Vatican, and Sister Agatha was called away from her house on more than one occasion to serve on various commissions or to perform other tasks for the bishop or for her order. In late 1953, she was chosen to be part of a three-woman team which was to check on the status of the various convents in French Indochina. Much as Sister Agatha did not like the idea of leaving the Convent of Ste. Genevieve of the Roses, even in the service of the church, she knew that she could not refuse the assignment.

The French colonists in Indochina had been preceded, as was the usual colonial pattern, by a flow of priests, nuns, and missionaries. Indeed, the first French mission in Indochina was founded by Jesuit father Alexandre de Rhodes in the early 17th century and much of the early justification of French colonial intervention was for the purported purpose of protecting the establishments of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in the country. By the end of the 19th century, when the colony of French Indochina was formally established, there was a considerable Catholic infrastructure in place and several monasteries and convents had been established throughout the country. However, this infrastructure began crumbling even before the Japanese occupation (during which time it was still administered by the collaborationist French regime in Vichy) had ended and the postwar wave of nationalistic ferment, led by the Communists under Ho Chi Minh. By the early 1950's, the officials in the Vatican decided that the Church would have to retrench and many of the more isolated and indefensible religious houses would have to be closed. In order to make the hard decisions which would have to be made, a comprehensive survey of all Catholic institutions would be undertaken.

There were a total of 18 convents in Indochina, belonging to various orders. Each commission member would visit six of them and write a report to the Secretary of State of the Vatican on the status of each and the viability and desirability of its continued operation. Most of the convents were in or near major cities, but a few were scattered in more remote areas. One of them, on which Sister Agatha was to report, was the Convent of the Holy Heart in the northwestern hills. It was a small house, the membership of which had dwindled further because of the intense fighting in the area between the nationalistic Viet Minh forces under the direction of General Vo Nguyen Giap and the French Far East Expeditionary Corps under General Henri Navarre. When Sister Agatha arrived (she was flown there in a small Piper airplane, at considerable discomfort and definite risk), there were only six nuns remaining in the convent — the French-born mother superior, Sister Helene, and five Vietnamese nuns. They were all medically-trained, for the convent ran a local hospital and medical-care center, in conjunction with several lay doctors and nurses.

Sister Helene tried to be as optimistic as possible. The sisters gave medical treatment to all who needed it, including cadres of the Viet Minh, and she felt that this gave them a modicum of immunity from attack. Moreover, the French military had established a large base only a few kilometers away, and that gave the nuns a sense of security. The name of the base was Dien Bien Phu. The commander there, Brig. Gen. Christian de la Croix de Castries, promised the nuns that, in case of trouble, his men would come to their rescue immediately.

The day after Sister Agatha arrived at the Convent of the Holy Heart, General Giap launched his attack on Dien Bien Phu. In a move totally surprising to the French, he had managed to obtain heavy artillery and place his guns on the crests overlooking the French fort. At the same time, his troops occupied the highlands surrounding the French, including the area of the convent. The French, of course, fired back and, after a few days of fighting, a poorly-aimed shell landed directly on the hospital building. Sister Helene and two of the other nuns were killed, and the gasoline-operated power generator was destroyed, thus also cutting off their radio communications with the outside world, and in particular with Dien Bien Phu. This left Sister Agatha and three nuns, and they realized that there was no point trying to hold out any longer. They decided that two of the nuns, who were native to the area and knew the trails in the jungle, would go on foot to the French fort and ask for soldiers to come and evacuate the convent. Sister Agatha and one other nun would remain to look after the sick and wounded who had survived the bombardment.

It took a week before French commandos were able to come to the convent's rescue. When they arrived, they saw a scene of indescribable horror. The convent and the hospital had been burnt to the ground. The lay workers had, apparently, fled. The only things standing at the site where two large makeshift crosses, and on them the bodies of Sister Agatha and her sister nun — crucified! (One should note in passing that no attempt had been made to rape the nuns — and the secret of Sister Agatha’s true sex was apparently not discovered.) A war correspondent for the Paris edition of the The New York Herald-Tribune, who had accompanied the commando unit, photographed this atrocity and his pictures, printed in every newspaper in the world, horrified all who saw them. He won a Pulitzer prize for his story.

(The pictures horrified General Giap too. In a confidential letter to the Pope written two months later, he said that an investigation had shown that it was not the work of his soldiers but rather of local bandits, whom his army had caught and executed. As a gesture of atonement and expiation for allowing such an atrocity to happen in an area under his nominal control, he invited the Vatican to reopen the convent and hospital, under his personal protection. The offer was accepted and the Convent of the Holy Heart became the only Catholic institution operating openly in Communist-run North Vietnam. It continued at its original site until the war with the Americans when, for the safety of the nuns, it was moved to an area closer to Hanoi, where it remains and flourishes quietly to this day.)

CHAPTER 2. BEATIFICATION

The French encampment at Dien Bien Phu fell after two months of intense fighting, leading to the abandonment of the French colonial empire in Indochina a few months later. This traumatic experience, followed by the Algerian civil war and the withdrawal of the French from North Africa as well, lead to a collective wish to erase from memory all that was connected with the colonial past, and the story of Sister Agatha and her sister nun faded from the consciousness of most Frenchmen. At the Convent of Ste. Genevieve of the Roses, however, Sister Agatha's memory remained very much alive and the bishop of her diocese was repeatedly petitioned to initiate proceedings to have her beatified, the third of the four steps on the way to canonization (she had been declared a martyr, the second step towards canonization, immediately after her death).

On the 25th anniversary of Sister Agatha's martyrdom, the bishop formally submitted his recommendation to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in the Vatican. According to the procedures, the Congregation appointed an investigatory commission to look into Sister Agatha’s history. As head of the commission, the Congregation selected a young priest — a brilliant theologian and scholar of the medieval church who was clearly destined for higher office in the Vatican — the Irish-born Father Mark Anthony O’Connor. Truely, the Holy Spirit must have been at work in this selection. for Father O’Connor too was a transsexual, though this was not known at the time to anyone in the Vatican except for his “father and protector”, who would later become the beloved Pope J** and who would in time elevate Father O'Connor to the College of Cardinals, and to Sister Sophia, the founder the order of poor nuns known as the “midnight angels of Rome” to which Father O'Connor surreptitiously belonged under the name of Sister Mary-Ann. (For details, the reader is referred to my story “The First Woman Cardinal of the Catholic Church, I”.)

As he assembled the biographical and other material on Sister Agatha, Father O’Connor was struck by the lack of information on her early years. Even the date and place of her birth were not given. Her biography, as submitted by the bishop, began with the statement that “she sought shelter in the Convent of Ste. Genevieve of the Roses as a refugee in the opening days of World War II, and later took her vows and was admitted as a sister”. Further inquiries with Sister Teresa, the current mother superior of the convent, did not produce any additional information. Sister Teresa had come to the convent only after Sister Agatha’s death, and had not known her personally. She said that very little remained of the convent’s records from that period, and that she assumed that they had either been taken by the Germans in one of their raids on the convent's buildings or had been deliberately destroyed by the sisters in order to prevent them from falling into German hands.

This troubled Father O’Connor. He know, of course, that many refugees (many of them not even Catholics) were hidden in monasteries and convents during the war, and that some of them chose to remain there after the war had ended. Still, as a historian, he also knew that records of a life can never be completely erased, and he took it upon himself to find out what he could about the real background of Sister Agatha.

Throughout France, the Church maintains several special geriatric sanitaria for aged nuns who are no longer capable of living in their convents, usually because of the need for constant medical supervision or because of encroaching senility. By carefully searching through the records of these, Father O’Connor was able to find, in the city of Orléans, a nun who had been at the Convent of Ste. Genevieve of the Roses during the 1940’s. Questioning her was not easy, since her memories tended to be confused and disjointed, and her concentration wandered. Moreover, she insisted that all of the sisters had taken a vow of silence concerning the background of Sister Agatha. It was only when Father O’Conner produced a letter from the Holy Father himself, absolving her from her vow, did she agree to tell the story of Henri Dumont’s transition into Sister Agatha. She, personally, considered this a miracle in itself, for she had credited Sister Agatha’s faith, cheerfulness, and fearlessness in the face of danger as being the major forces which held the convent together during the dark years of the war and the post-war period.

Any other investigator would, no doubt, have ended the beatification procedures at this point. But Father O’Connor, as was already mentioned, was a transsexual himself and so saw things very differently. The transition of Henri Dumont into Sister Agatha indeed was, to him, the first step in the miracle which built up to Sister Agatha’s martyrdom. The irony of the only offspring of the notorious anti-clerical Socialist deputy Hippolyte Dumont turning into a martyr of the church was not lost on him. God’s mysterious ways cannot be understood, just accepted, admired, and adored. From Sister Agatha's story he took hope and encouragement. His report would not, of course, mention Henri Dumont since Father O’Connor was well aware of the conservatism and prejudices of the majority of the Vatican’s movers and shakers. But he would find a way to make sure that Sister Agatha would, in fact, be beatified, and be on the road to canonization.

Later, when reflecting on these events, Father O'Connor noted that the existence of transsexuals has been recorded in European history since the time of classical Greece, and in Babylonian history hundreds of years before then. The fact that they have always been there leads one to the conclusion that they are not just an aberration or a perversion or even an "assembly line mistake", but must have a reason which we, as mere mortals, cannot ken. Father O'Connor decided that his own decision to hide his transsexuality for the time being must, itself, be part of God's larger plan. The time would come, he was sure, when it would be possible for him to come out into the open. But that time, apparently, was not yet at hand. One must have faith and patience, and trust one's destiny. They also serve, as the poet John Milton wrote, who only stand and wait. He then prepared himself for another night on the streets of Rome as Sister Mary-Anne, helping the poor and the needy as best and as immediately as she could. In her heart, Sister Mary-Anne asked for the intervention of the Blessed Sister Agatha, on behalf of those who still must seek their way.

FINAL NOTE: This story is fiction, and the main characters are products of my imagination. However, as usual, I have included the names of real people in walk-on roles. Thus, the names of the Viet Minh and French commanders at the battle of Dien Bien Phu are real, as well as the other names associated with the French colonization of Indochina. The battle of Dien Bien Phu ranks as one of the most important military engagements of the twentieth century, marking the first time that a colonial "national liberation army" defeated a European regular army force in a head-to-head pitched battle. General Giap, who engineered that victory, is considered one of the most brilliant military strategists of the second half of the twentieth century.