By: roberto r. treviño  (Page 11/14)

The authors of the letter sensed that Ayers was “able to recognize and understand the needs and aspirations of other peoples,” and they recognized the potential impact she and the nuns at OLLC could have on the larger community by the “transmission of that spirit to large groups of young people.” The sisters’ attitudes and actions augured well for “smoothing out discords, and establishing a harmony that will tell for the good of our common life,” the letter stated. Ibid. Evidence suggests that Ayers’ willingness to challenge society’s racial “norms” influenced others. Sister Immaculate Gentemann, who taught in the Department of Sociology and later became the Dean of the Worden School, prized the multi-ethnic experiences of those years. Another nun of the same generation, Sister Clara Kliesen, also recounted how the sisters of the Congregation tried to improve race and ethnic relations, despite the prevailing social constraints. Gentemann interview; interview with Sister Clara Kliesen, CDP, August 7, 1997, San Antonio, Texas. Ayers apparently promoted ideals that others shared at Our Lady of the Lake College and within the Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Providence, raising a countervailing force to the social discrimination Texas Mexicans faced.

Such progressive thinking reverberated beyond the convent walls and college classrooms, moving others to engage in Catholic social action. Historian Margaret Thompson has argued that nuns motivated untold numbers of women in history “to follow their example as active participants in the secular realm.” Margaret SusanThompson, “Women and American Catholicism, 1789-1989,” in Perspectives on the American Catholic Church, 1789-1989 , ed. Stephen J Vicchio and Virginia Geiger (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1989), 128. An example of this is seen in letters written by a laywoman, Virginia Tatton, to her former college mentor, Dean Ayers. These revealing letters testify both to the moral influence of the sisters at OLLC and to the fact that lay Catholics also were grappling in a new way with the “Mexican problem” in Texas in the 1940s. In the summer and autumn of 1942, Tatton wrote excitedly to Ayers after hearing about the new Worden School, and to announce that she had become “wholeheartedly” involved in Archbishop Lucey’s “welfare drive” on behalf of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Virginia Tatton to Mother Angelique, 13 October 1942; Tatton to Ayers, 17 August 1942, Deans Correspondence Coll., Ayers File, ALLOU. Lucey was becoming a high-profile leader within the American Catholic Church with his staunch advocacy for Mexican-origin people, especially the migrant farm workers. Saul E. Bronder, Social Justice and Church Authority: The Public Life of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). Tatton unabashedly admired the dynamic archbishop, especially “his fearlessness.” Tatton to Ayers, 13 October 1942 (original emphasis). It took courage to promote the rights of a pariah community. Tatton recognized this in Lucey’s defense of Texas Mexicans, as others earlier had seen it in Sister Angelique’s willingness to promote interracial harmony.