Sister Marie Neal; challenged roles of women, church; at 82
In 1966, Sister Marie Augusta Neal conducted a survey of 130,000 Christian women across the country. The results of the study, "The Sister Survey," provided Neal with piercing insights that challenged the traditional roles of women in the Catholic Church.
Sister Neal, longtime chair of the Sociology Department at Emmanuel College in Boston and visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, died of pneumonia Wednesday at the Notre Dame Long Term Care Center in Worcester. She was 82.
A November 1997 Globe story credited Sister Neal for a strong voice that took on the church's most charged issues, including questions of patriarchy. "I remember speeches she gave in which people walked out in droves because they just did not want to hear it," Kip Tiernan, founder of Rosie's Place, a Boston area shelter for homeless women, said in the story. "But she wasn't a revolutionary. She was and is an angry daughter of Christ."
Born in Brighton, Sister Neal quickly distinguished herself in the classroom. "She was always very intellectual and a really good student," said her younger sister Grace DiSciullo, of Holliston, adding that her bookish sibling worked at the Faneuil Library in Brighton's Oak Square as a teenager. "It was hard for me to follow such a smart person in school."
Earning scholarships to the former Notre Dame Academy on Granby Street in Boston and Emmanuel College, Sister Neal earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1942. She began teaching at her alma mater, entered the convent, and continued her own education, later completing a master's degree at Boston College and a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University.
One of two religious representatives on the Governors' Commission on the Status of Women, which met at the White House in 1965, Sister Neal met President Lyndon B. Johnson on the South Lawn. "But it was utterly by chance," Sister Neal told the Globe about the encounter. "It was simple -- he walked over and shook hands." A photographer captured an image of the greeting, which Sister Neal referred to affectionately as the "funny hat picture" because of her protruding habit.
A compact woman who friends said never topped 110 pounds, Sister Neal received increasing attention for her unconventional and antiauthoritarian stances. She challenged notions of a woman's role in the church, confronted a checkered Christian history, and railed against capitalism and unequal distribution of wealth -- approaches that often provoked anger from within the church.
"Some religious [people] did not learn," the red-haired nun wrote in a 1965 essay, "that we, modern Christians, and not the devil, were responsible for the genocide of the Jews, the exploitation of the Negro, and the noneducation of the poor in the most forsaken places. We cannot be contemporary Christians fully cloistered."
Sister Grace Pizzimenti, Sister Neal's former student who went on to teach at Emmanuel as a colleague, said, "Her passion for social justice was the burning issue in her soul. Sometimes her ideas weren't acceptable to some, but she never retaliated when attacks came her way, because she had something more important to do, which was to talk about helping the poor and social justice."
According to colleagues, Sister Neal was a meticulous planner, treating lessons in the twilight of her 40-year teaching career like they were her first. "She was an absolutely fabulous teacher," said Sister Esther MaCarthy, a colleague at Emmanuel who visited her during the last few years.
In 1970, bishops called on Sister Neal to travel to South Africa, a political landscape divided by apartheid, to inspect the country's Catholic schools. MaCarthy said the bishops expected her to study the white schools, but she protested, claiming she would only complete research if she could look at both black and white schools. MaCarthy said Sister Neal's work, reported in the South African Catholic Education Study, had a groundbreaking effect on the country's integration.
In 1995, Sister Neal wrote in the epilogue of the last of her eight books, "Themes of a Lifetime": "From 1965 onward, I began Sociology 101 with a question: Why are there poor people in a rich society like the United States? When it became clearer in the early '70s that we were already developing as a world community, I changed the question to this one: Why is it that two-thirds of the world is poor, when we have resources and technologies sufficient to provide well for all but we do not?"
Sister Pizzimenti said in the 1997 Globe story that if it weren't for Sister Neal, "and some others working with her, nuns might still be living in the Middle Ages. When many were accepting the status quo, she was very independent-minded."
Sister Neal leaves a brother, Frank Neal, of Orleans; and another sister, Marie Kelley, of Medway. A funeral Mass was said Saturday at Notre Dame du Lac Chapel in Worcester. 