NUN MISSED MOST NEWS ABOUT WWII SISTER NOW SPENDS EVENINGS STUDYING

Sister Eileen Lillis prays for peace by day and pores over the stories of war at night.

Sometimes the abbess at the Monastery of St. Clare chides her for staying up too late reading. Lately, Sister Eileen has been reading the autobiography of World War II General Omar Bradley.

She was 18 when she entered the Spokane monastery in 1939. It was one month before Hitler invaded Poland. Bright, perpetually smiling, and Irish-Catholic, she entered a world without radios, newspapers, or movie newsreels. There were no visits to the outside world, no gossip with family. She had heard Hitler's speeches on her cousin's shortwave radio. She had caught the world's sense of impending doom. But it was as though the monastery lowered a black curtain between her and war. "I was the only sister in the community at the time who had any knowledge of World War II," Sister Eileen said. "In a sense, they didn't know what to be afraid of." The years 1939 to 1945 became for Sister Eileen a vacuum, sprinkled with rare announcements from the Reverend Mother: Hitler invades Poland, captures Paris, bombs London; the Allies liberate Rome. "My mind wanted to go deeper," she said. It would not be until the mid-1960s that she finally began to piece together the history of the war she had missed. That's when the Second Vatican Council opened up the church and the lives of its nuns and priests. The Poor Clares exchanged long brown wool serge habits for calf-length brown dresses. They took off the starched white coifs which had framed their faces, and learned to curl their hair. More importantly for Sister Eileen, abbess at the time, they started a library. She filled it with biographies and histories from the World War II era. Finally, she could read the writings of Winston Churchill, discover the horror of the Holocaust, and begin to ponder the ways society was devastated by the war she had missed. She estimates she's read close to 200 books on World War II in the years since. "I was looking for not simply historical facts, but I was searching for why things have happened the way they have," Sister Eileen said. She talked about the stark contrast between the simple, sane life of her teen years, and the violent, disjointed world that has replaced it. She believes that American families were shattered by the trauma and upheaval of World War II. Today she prays for them as they continue to mend the broken pieces. "War is no solution to anything," Sister Eileen said. "You see it when you study it."

Copyright 1996 Cowles Publishing Company
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