Rebel Hearts portrays the community pitted against McIntyre, who was a runner on the New York Stock exchange before he entered the priesthood and brought Wall Street savvy with him to Los Angeles, overseeing unprecedented growth in Catholic parochial and high-school enrollment. The IHMs provided the greater portion of his teachers. A cheap and, McIntyre must have supposed, docile workforce, they frequently taught seventy or eighty children in each classroom. The majority of women had neither training nor experience. Says one sister, all they felt was defeat. “I think Cardinal McIntyre saw women, at least nuns, as coolie labor for his schools,” one sister remarks, as a cartoon image of nuns placed on a conveyor belt, like so many mass-produced dolls, takes over the screen. “We realized that our labor problem was at the root of everything else…. I can hear the cardinal telling us you aren’t going to tell me how to run my schools,” another remembers. The women stood firm for better working conditions, including smaller class sizes and greater institutional support, feeding the anger of their boss.
A different spirit, one of mutual support and open inquiry, reigned at the sisters’ Immaculate Heart College, whose all-female professoriate had more degrees than all the priests in the diocese of Los Angeles, and who took up their task as researchers and educators with a confidence and ambition that threatened the clergy. Photographs and film capture classrooms crammed with tools of investigation and creation—scientific apparatuses, books, musical instruments, paintbrushes—conveying the exuberance that accompanies the love of learning, which the sisters cultivated and which fed the community’s devotional life. Students and teachers collaborated to replace staid Mary’s Day processions with a boisterous paean to her role in recreation. “God Likes Me,” a hot-pink lettered sign proclaims. “Peace, Peace, Peace,” reads another, as women in full habit and crowned with wreaths of flowers strum guitars alongside their students, dressed in bursting purples, blues, and yellows and waving giant paper sunflowers, all jostling for our attention against a southern California landscape of palms and pines, together proclaiming the grandeur of creation and celebrating human creativity.
“In those days, I was surrounded by some of the best women you could ever meet…. I’m sure if I had been a nice proper housewife I would not have bumped into any of these ideas,” says Corita Kent, Caspary’s contemporary and the community’s most well-known member, who taught her students to scout supermarkets for source material, to mine for meaning in everyday banality, and to wonder at the hidden gems of L.A.’s landscape, littered with gas stations and garages. Although the Los Angeles Times hailed Kent as one of its 1966 “Women of the Year,” and Newsweek featured her on its cover—“the nun going modern”—in 1967, she was overshadowed in art by big boys such as Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana. “Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of all,” her take on the Del Monte slogan, is a one-upping of Warhol’s Campbell Soup canvasses, a text-heavy offering for ecclesial renewal, a silkscreen in red, yellow, orange, and white. The piece was a breaking point for McIntyre, its mingling of the mundane and the holy an affront to his more tidily organized sensibility. “You will suffer” for this, he promises the congregation, one of the several hold-your-breath moments this film provides.
Energized by a growing attentiveness to the world around them, the sisters took their enthusiasm for engaging with it outside the college. A clip captures them dancing with their students among the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. “Perhaps everything terrible,” one of Kent’s silkscreens reads, quoting Rilke, “is in its deepest being something that wants help from us.” She and her sisters responded to contemporary demands for justice by marching in Selma in 1965, protesting the war in Vietnam, and linking arms with California farmworkers. The “college always provided an alternative education,” we hear one sister say, “but it was the years ’63 to ’70 where everything was popping.” Catholics more tightly bound to the trappings of tradition began keeping their daughters away from the college. The film only hints at the larger Los Angeles Catholic context of the sisters’ activism and the political engagement the IHMs inspired. A National Catholic Reporter article suggests the power of the sisters’ words and example. Sue Welsh, a graduate of the Immaculate Heart College and one of many who decried McIntyre’s racist disregard for his Black parishioners, recalls her involvement with Catholics for Racial Equality: “We had marches, sit-ins, and even a torch-light procession in front of the cardinal’s home.… After I appeared on the NBC news that night, they sent two priests to my house looking for me. It was crazy. They called us communists and outside agitators from their pulpits. We were just putting into action what we learned from Catholic schools.”