Brides of Christ
Monica Hingston was a nun for 26 years, a bride of Christ and cousin to Australia’s most powerful and conservative Catholic Cardinal, George Pell. Then she fell deeply in love with a nun named Peg and everything changed, writes Gary Nunn.
Summer light streams into Monica Hingston’s Victorian home, illuminating the single teardrop travelling down her cheek. Monica, 77, is recalling the greatest love of her life – her partner Peg, who died from cancer in 2011.
The depth and quality of their relationship is writ large in Monica’s face. “We connected on every level possible,” Monica says of Peg. “Our temperaments perfectly complemented each other – I miss her beauty. But most of all I miss the sense of touch. We hugged five, six times a day, or just gave each other a flick of the hair. Touch communicates so much without words; her touch would lift my spirit and nourish my soul, flesh to flesh. I still get lots of hugs today. It’s not the same.” A second tear accompanies the first, Monica’s smile fades and a cloud temporarily dims that light coming through her windows.
The truly remarkable aspect of this story is not that a woman such as Monica fell in love with another woman named Peg. It’s that Peg and Monica were both dedicated brides of Christ and servants of the Catholic Church – Monica was a nun for 26 years; Peg for 35.
But it was the church’s attitudes towards Monica and Peg’s love for each other that ultimately led to a schism between them and their faith, and an unexpected public showdown with her conservative cousin, Australia’s most senior Catholic, George Pell.
If Monica Hingston’s life was a film-script pitch, it’d be declined for its implausibility. As a fun-loving teenager in Ballarat, she had a motorbike-riding boyfriend and enjoyed the odd cigarette. At 21, she became a nun for 26 years, following vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. During that time, she survived a decade of Pinochet’s oppressive regime in a Chilean shanty town.
Meeting Peg in Santiago, then a nun of 30 years. Falling in love with her. Writing to the Vatican to be released from her vows. Leaving the convent to become a lesbian couple with Peg for 27 years; each realising they’ve found their ‘soulmate.’ Becoming an atheist. And taking on one of the world’s most powerful Catholics, Cardinal George Pell – who wasn’t just in the same church, but also in the same family as Monica.
The December week I meet Monica at her home in rural Victoria is pertinent. Days before, marriage equality finally became law, “something Peg and I often talked about; it was a human rights issue for the both of us”, she says.
Having devoted their lives to the rights of others, it was only in later years they became increasingly aware of their own lack of rights. However, one family member – now the Pope’s closest advisor – didn’t feel the same. Monica
first got a taste of the “closed-mindedness” of her cousin years earlier when he visited the school where, while still a nun in the 1970s, she was teaching 16-year-old girls economics, legal studies and occasionally, religious education.
It was during a religious education class that Cardinal Pell visited. He asked Monica which doctrines she was teaching. When she told him she used a broad application of spirituality to help the girls tackle life’s challenges, he admonished her for teaching “nothing but fairy-floss.”
Years later, in 2004, Monica publicly took on the Vatican’s so-called “bulldog”. A 2003 Vatican edict describing homosexuality as “seriously depraved” drew her ire. It instructed Catholic politicians to actively oppose and repeal laws recognising homosexual unions.
Media reports at the time suggested Cardinal Pell backed these sentiments. It awakened Monica’s quiet fire, one that has burned ever since. “When they started dictating to politicians whose laws affect my daily life, I got upset.”
Monica wrote to him – then the highest-ranking Australian Catholic – appealing for a “response that comes from the heart, based on your knowledge of who I am.” It stressed the service the couple gave as nuns, and the Christian values of “compassion, deep empathy and generosity” that defined their lives. The most powerful part described Monica’s relationship with Peg – a love he refused to accept, even after meeting her.
Monica wrote: “It is a rare and precious gift. A partnership of sensitivity and selflessness, of warmth and humour, of wonder and beauty ... it daily enriches me, it empowers me to work for the wellbeing of others.”
Her words were only ever intended for one set of eyes. Monica sent it to Cardinal Pell’s home and workplace, and waited four weeks “even for a one liner” of acknowledgement. She then repeatedly called him – to no avail.
A friend asked to read it, but Monica refused: “I said that letter’s going nowhere till I receive a response from George.” Still, no response came (Pell has since admitted receiving and reading it). When she eventually emailed it to her friend, she suggested making it an open letter to a major newspaper, saying: ‘That’s going to be very helpful for gays and lesbians struggling, and figuring out how they’ll survive with their sexuality.’ It was then that Monica knew what she had to do.
Like all big decisions, Monica talked it through with Peg. They wondered if they’d be thrown out of their golf club or have a brick through the window. “Then we said, ‘we’ve faced tear gas, water cannons and being detained by secret police in Chile; we could deal with a smashed window and find another golf club!’”
Postergirls for progress
The letter was explosive – front page splash of both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The first call came at 6:30am from a man living on a tiny NT island. “My first reaction was, how did you get my number? I’m not listed,” she says.
The man had tried several numbers, such was his need to speak to her. “He said, I’m a 50-yearold gay man and I wept as I read your letter – I had to find you to tell you how uplifting it was,” says Monica, beaming at the memory. “I said to Peg, ‘we only needed to do it for that one man, living up there alone.’”
In total, Monica received 200 similar calls and emails. Just two were negative. “One angrily said what a terrible thing I’d done to George and the family.” Cardinal Pell’s eventual reaction was as concise as it was cold: “I continue to regret the path she has chosen. I feel for them, but I can’t say what is wrong is right.”
“He’s just impossible,” Monica sighs. “He simply doesn’t hear you. Dad told me, ‘Monica, he doesn’t understand you: you’re the same woman you were before you came out. And you’re happy.’”
The letter had a broader influence, too. Another unexpected call came from Sydney Mardi Gras, asking Monica and Peg to be Chiefs of Parade in 2004. After much deliberation, they agreed, fronting tens of thousands in a convertible sports car in the torrential rain. “I remember dancing and having a ball,” Monica recalls. Gay press at the time reported Monica leading the parade as
a sea change for Mardi Gras, giving it fresh political impetus after years of a more celebratory feel. “We want the church and the state authorities to hear what we’re saying about our second-class citizenship,” Monica told journalists in 2004.
Sitting in that car with her partner, Monica felt “an overwhelming sense of belonging and community”. It was a similar sense of community she’d felt as a Mercy nun, but circumstances that couldn’t be more different.
Becoming a nun aged 21 was perhaps unsurprising, given her family’s sense of social justice and service. They attended weekly mass and her school was strictly religious. But Monica had a rebellious side – she remembers getting in trouble for seeing a forbidden film, Rock Around the Clock, which gave birth to a love of rock music. Later, it was that defiant streak that left the nuns in her convent asking, ‘how do you solve a problem like Monica?’.
A fellow nun said it was the obedience vow Monica would most struggle with, having had five years in the secular “world” before entering the convent. “Never a truer word!” she concedes. “We’d be given strange instructions like moving furniture unnecessarily … to demonstrate blind obedience.” When she was discovered reading a banned book by French philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, a Superior said: “Careful. You can read your way out of the church.”
Her memory of the day she became a nun in 1962, as a “bride of Christ”, is still vivid. It was replete with ritual – a borrowed white dress and spoken vows. The knowledge of what she was leaving behind found visible expression in the black habit she was presented with, and her hair which quickly went from coiffed to chopped.
Finding a higher purpose
After 13 years in the convent, with doubts swirling, Monica took a year’s sabbatical. A friend invited her hitchhiking around South America. On her return, Monica said to the Mother Superior: “I’ve no idea why, but I think I should stay.” Her request to be posted in Nicaragua, a country in political turmoil, was refused. But in 1982 a post in the shanty towns of Chile beckoned, educating poor and illiterate women. It was here Monica’s commitment to social justice and the empowerment of women in an aggressively patriarchal society gained strength.
Another woman, a Franciscan nun from Iowa, had taken a similar path, inspired by a desire to work alongside the poor. Together they established the Casa Sofia (House of Wisdom) a community centre designed to address the unique and often ignored challenges women faced in such an oppressive environment.
Monica’s early faith was replaced by an even more powerful belief system in the latter half of her life. A word she uses to describe it is
‘serendipity’. “If I believed in a guiding force, I’d assess all the strange stepping stones that led me to one person,” she says. These included the inexplicable decision not to leave the convent despite doubts, and the unexpected appetite for Latin America. “They all led me to her. To Peg.”
In Chile, Peg was the first to confess her feelings. The two discussed being released from their vows: “No rule book could ever convince me what I had with Peg was wrong. It daily enriched me.” Having given 61 years between them, they left the church in 1985 (they had to write for dispensation from the pope, who responded in Latin). Still passionate about their work, they continued empowering Chilean women through education. They attended anti-torture marches where they were blasted with water cannons and tear gas; they were detained by the secret police and together learnt to live with high levels of surveillance. In 1992 they made the decision to live in Australia, making a small coastal town in rural Victoria home.
Their 27 years together were the most fulfilling of Monica’s life. “She doubled the joys and halved the pain,” she says, and was “mischievously fun” – suggesting they dress as nuns for a Sound of Music- themed party.
In Monica’s house hangs a photo montage of the couple’s life together. On it, Peg has written: “Once in a lifetime we meet the person of our dreams who shares our innermost thoughts and hopes ... the one who connects with our soul. Once in this lifetime 25 years ago we received the gift of that blessed meeting. What a dream life it has been.” It was dated March 11, 2009. Two years later, Peg died.
In 2011, Peg was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer and given six months to live – but she got less than half of that. Her final request was to die at home, with Monica.
The day Australia voted yes to marriage equality, Monica cried: “In relief, in gratitude. And in deep, deep sadness as my beloved Peg did not see this day.”
In the aftermath of Peg’s death, grief enveloped Monica: “I went down to something so far removed from living, in a fog,” she recalls.
It took Monica five years to resurface. For a year, she felt nothing but numbness. She even considered suicide. “I lost sense of even the slightest feeling for life,” she says.
It was crushing to see for those who loved her. Niece Natalie Charles, 47, chokes up on describing her aunt’s grief: “She had to systematically shut down everything they’d loved together – playing golf, listening to music – in order to come back again. It reminded me of a line from CS Lewis: ‘ Her absence was like the sky – it covered everything.’
“Monica always chose the bravest path and trod it with strength, compassion and intelligence. She showed me how you can be a complex woman – both strong and vulnerable.”
Natalie’s relationship role models growing up were Monica and Peg: “They had the most enduring love affair amongst many friends and family who were divorced. Through them I saw the most beautiful model of how two people can be best friends, lovers and life-long activists.”
Throughout their relationship, Peg had gifted Monica with delicate owl bracelet charms and keepsakes. She reads me Peg’s final letter to her. It says owls are symbolic of “intelligence, brilliance, perspective, intuition, quick wit, independence, wisdom, protection, mystery and power. You are all of these dearest Mon.”
One morning, a year after Peg’s death, Monica heard a “cawing of crows”. They were attacking something in a small tree outside her front window – all its larger branches had been cut off except one. Monica slowly raised her window blinds, in shock.
It was an owl. A “big, beautiful white barn owl with a heart-shaped face” – sat there in broad daylight. It ignored the crows and held her gaze for 15 minutes, before flying away.
Monica finally felt the fog lift. Through tears, she says: “I just had this well of joy, that I was alive. And no longer alone.”