Sister Beth: ‘God, how can I focus my flickering?’

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, the eldest of eight children in a lovable Irish Catholic family, was a first-grader at St. Dominic School in Lakeview in the late 1950s when something kept coming up in her daily prayers.

She absolutely loved school, but not particularly some of the Mount Carmel sisters who were teaching her.

“I used to pray, ‘Don’t ask me to be a nun, because I really don’t want to be one,’” she recalled.

There was a reason. Even as the ideal student – the girl who could ace every test without blinking and earn her teacher’s undying admiration for her academic mastery – she was haunted by two things that changed her life.

It involved a boy with developmental issues, a classmate. He was cutting up in class one day as usual – making a brown paper hat out of the cover of his math book and putting it on his head – when the nun walked him over to the corner of the room and made him sit in the trash can.

“I just felt like – I mean, I was in first grade – and I knew that that child would think he was trash, and he wasn’t,” she said.

The boy also had difficulty walking in a straight line, the ones that were so cherished back in the day for their controlled, geometric precision.

“So, she put rulers behind his knees and bound them with something in an effort to make him walk straight,” she recalled. “I just thought that was so mean. I was a very mild student, so she loved me, but I didn’t miss the fact that I was being treated differently than that child.”

Giver of gifts

Elizabeth Fitzpatrick eventually went on to become a Sister of Mount Carmel and eventually the leader of her congregation from 2005-13. The spiritual arc of her life has been to take her gifts and give them to others, especially to those who have not been so blessed.

For the last nine years, Sister Beth has served as head of the archdiocesan Office of Religious, where she has been a point person for the dozens of congregations of religious men and women who serve in a vast array of ministries. She is stepping down this month.

Sister Beth won’t verbalize it, but at a recent gathering to discuss a Loyola University-directed project about how members of religious communities in the Gulf South are “flourishing” in their daily lives, a sister who grew up elsewhere and only recently came to the Archdiocese of New Orleans said she never had experienced such a close fraternity and communion among religious.

“That’s a credit to you, Sister Beth,” the nun said.

Beignets and windows

Sister Beth said she knew early on how privileged she was.

At the age of 7, she and her sister Brownies took a field trip to St. Louis Cathedral, which was one part beignets and chocolate milk and one part stained-glass windows.

“As we were walking down Pirates’ Alley, I just had this overwhelming sense of how much I love this city,” Sister Beth said. “I was so glad I was born here, and I felt so sorry for the poor little children who weren’t born in New Orleans. It was almost like praying for the poor pagan babies. Now, how provincial is that!

“It was a sense of being a part of something that really matters. The church and New Orleans have been intertwined from the beginning, for the good and, also, there’s been some ill will. But, at that point, I was totally blind to anything that wasn’t good.”

Father’s early death

Even when her father, William Fitzpatrick Sr., died at 48 of acute leukemia when she was a junior at Mount Carmel Academy, Sister Beth experienced the goodness of family and friends. Her godfather, Uncle Joe Fitzpatrick, stepped in to oversee the family’s concession business at City Park, which her father had run, and the family survived.

After teaching home economics at Mount Carmel Academy, she spent three years working at Hope House, working with the poor who lived in the St. Thomas Project.

“My environment at the time was mostly white,” said Sister Beth, who recalled walking four blocks from Hope House to the community apartment in the evening, with her Black neighbors sitting on the porch, waving and calling out to her.

“I felt like a queen,” she said. “I was happy. My ministry was meaningful. I felt like I was doing what was important – working for justice in our city, which was so sorely lacking. By that time, my eyes were open enough.”

A mirror image

She befriended the Hope House receptionist, a St. Thomas resident named Earline Dent.

“Her story was so much like my own – an intact family, educated through high school, she was smart, her family loved her and she knew she was loved,” Sister Beth said. “But she fell in love and married at 18 or 19 a fellow who was just not right, and that began her trails to the St. Thomas Project.”

Sister Beth taught G.E.D. classes to another woman in her early 30s who had dropped out of school in 10th grade.

“She had a young daughter, and when her daughter got to the point where she could no longer teach her, she said, ‘I’ve got to finish my education so I can help my daughter,’” Sister Beth said. “I saw her one day sitting in the back working with an Algebra II book, and she was crying. She told me, ‘I just can’t get this. And, if I can’t learn it, how will I ever be able to teach students? Because that’s what I want to do. I want to be a teacher.’”

Sister Beth told her she was going to be a better teacher because of her own struggles.

“The Holy Spirit must have given me those words because I didn’t think that through; I just said it,” Sister Beth recalled. “She went on to graduate and she became a teacher.”

After Katrina, when the Mount Carmel motherhouse and school were swamped and sisters were scattered across the country, Sister Beth said she relied on her spiritual anchor.

“Katrina was probably the most difficult period of my life, not just for me but for everybody in New Orleans, including the religious,” she said. “However, I was surrounded by love, and when you know you are loved, you can do anything. When I look back on that, I don’t want to repeat it, but I don’t look back on it with fear or dread or disgust.”

These days, the number of religious women and men is shrinking, and some communities with few or no vocations are coming to terms with the concept of “completion.”

“This time in religious life is part of the paschal mystery,” Sister Beth said. “It’s part of the whole mystery of Christ, the incarnation, the growth of Jesus himself, his teaching in the temple and being taught, his Christian ministry and then his suffering, death and resurrection.

“Jesus himself said, ‘I have completed the work you gave me to do.’ Jesus’ own ministry came to fulfillment, to completion. And then, he left us some ministry to accomplish. But, that doesn’t mean each of us individually – or even congregationally – has to do it. I would love if my mother were still alive, but she completed the work God gave her to do and completed it beautifully.

“I certainly want the Sisters of Mount Carmel to live on in some kind of fashion, and they will. How? I’m not sure, but that’s part of the paschal mystery.”

She loves poetry, especially a poem by Denise Leverton, who describes Sister Beth’s – and our – “flickering” attention to God.

“It is I who am absent, Lord, not you. ... I stop to think about you, and my mind at once, like a minnow, darts away; darts into the shadows. ... How can I focus my flickering, perceive at the fountain’s heart the sapphire I know is there. How can I focus my flickering?”

For those who may be anxious about a world gone crazy, Sister Beth points to Psalm 46: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

“I am God, Beth, not you,” she says. “You don’t have to handle everything today – or any day.”

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