Sacred Heart celebrating sister’s 90 years
Former school director Nancy Morris still making a difference
ATHERTON — Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Sister Nancy Morris wasn’t considering becoming a nun.
“I never thought of it,” she said during an interview at Sacred Heart Schools. “I was going to get married and have seven kids, like my mother.”
While a student at Cal Berkeley, she attended a semester at the school that eventually came to be called Lone Mountain College in San Francisco — and loved it.
It was staffed by “brilliant women,” Morris said, “all with Ph.D.s — mostly from Stanford or Cal. The professors monitored one’s thought process, not merely the mastering of content.”
Morris, who is about to celebrate her 90th birthday, stayed at Cal and graduated in 1949, but she remained impressed by those nuns, who were part of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, an order founded in 1800 by St. Madeleine Sophie Barat.
“In post-revolution France,” Morris said, “women had no advocates. But, to establish civilized order in society, you have to educate women” — which became one of the driving forces behind St. Madeleine Sophie’s order.
It also became a driving force in Morris’ life, which has included educating women and men at all levels.
Charming and gentle with a good sense of humor, while still showing that strong edge of leadership that has served her career, Morris is a walking exemplar of what it has meant to be a woman in the Catholic Church in the 20th and 21st centuries.
She wore a nun’s habit until 1970.
Her order, known by the acronym RSCJ (Religieuses du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus), had to be wary of anti-Catholic feelings when it was founded in post-revolution France, Morris said.
“We had to go incognito, which is why we wore the dress of widows,” she said.
Which is what led to the creation of nuns’ habits — those long, black gowns of the widow.
“The nuns kept their own names because of the intense anti-church atmosphere in France following the revolution,” Morris said, “and lived a cloistered life within the school grounds, taking the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.”
Even when she was president of San Diego College for Women, starting in 1966, she had to ask permission if she wanted to attend a meeting outside the cloister.
When the call came for nuns to wear civilian clothes, she found hers in secondhand shops.
Most canonized saints are men, she pointed out. Mostly European men. Mostly Italian men. And there continue to be no female priests in the Catholic Church, although she herself would not want to be one.
Sitting for an interview in the well-appointed room at Sacred Heart once known as the Reverend Mother’s Parlor, Morris carried an iPhone 5c (the least expensive iPhone) and a copy of a children’s book, “Dear Pope Francis: The Pope Answers Letters from Children Around the World.”
She was unhappy about the iPhone because she had heard that Apple would no longer support it. She threatened to replace it with a simple flip phone, although she said one of the qualities she liked best about the iPhone was that it could hold her photographs.
She’s very positive about Pope Francis.
“He is wonderful. A blessing,” she said. “He is
exemplar of what the papacy should be all about. He listens, he’s fearless.”
Pope Francis’ influence is needed in the world, she said.
“We haven’t evolved to a greater civility,” she said. “We have devolved . ... People are so eaten up by money. The spiritual world is really invisible today.”
A key job of any head of school, in addition to educating children, is raising money to pay for the education.
Morris said that she learned in her leadership roles that people don’t give to an institution, people give to people. That is perhaps why she is still an effective fundraiser for Sacred Heart Schools.
She is clearly happy that Sacred Heart Schools has done so much to help students who needed assistance, including being the first school on the Peninsula to bring in students from East Palo Alto via the Bridge Program, and being committed to reserving several million dollars for scholarships.
“We are open to all faiths — we have Hindus, Muslims, Jews,” she said. “The parents want that value system.”
Morris was born on June 2, 1927, in Piedmont to Thelma and John Morris, the middle of seven children.
“My mother loved silence and reading,” Morris said. “She didn’t get much of that for 20 years.”
“Daddy was a very convinced Catholic,” Morris said.
After graduating from Cal, and following a trip to post-World War II Europe in 1949 and a year teaching at Holy Names High School in Oakland, Morris entered the noviceship of the Society of the Sacred Heart in Albany, New York, in 1951. There were close to 100 novices at that time. She took her final vows in Rome in 1959.
Once she was a nun, Morris kept getting asked to take this job or that — serving as a teacher, and as principal of Convent of the Sacred Heart on Broadway in San Francisco, and as president of San Diego College for Women.
That job began in 1966, when “all hell broke loose” with student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Over her five years in San Diego, she helped merge the women’s college with the men’s college, which became the University of San Diego in 1971.
When she became director of schools at Sacred Heart in Atherton in 1971, she was “forced to close the boarding division of the high school,” and advocated for coeducation at the high school (the elementary school had been coed for years).
She “learned the art of fundraising,” introduced the annual auction and grew the school to close to 700 students. Launching the schools’ first capital campaign in 1980, Morris and her team added the first gymnasium on campus.
She stepped down from that job in 1989, took a sabbatical at Cal’s Graduate Theological Union, then traveled the country for her order, helping especially with fundraising and grant writing, skills she picked up during her tenure at Sacred Heart.
Since 1997, she’s been back at Sacred Heart in Atherton, living in the Gate House with four other nuns.
“Sister came here in 1971 as head of school,” said current head of school Rich Dioli, “and I think she fell in love with the place . ... She continues to be extremely dedicated to Sacred Heart. She is a presence on campus.”