When progressive Catholic nuns, eager to protest federal cuts in social spending, staged three separate “Nuns on the Bus” tours during the 2012 presidential race, they were greeted in Marietta, Ohio, by Tea Party protesters hoisting such placards as “Bums on the Bus” and “Romney-Ryan Yes, Fake Nuns No.” The “fake nuns” taunt referred indirectly to a Vatican statement, issued six months earlier, that had censured the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 80 percent of American nuns, for “serious doctrinal problems” in its positions on homosexuality and women priests, and for its “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
Parrish had gotten most of her ideas about nuns from movies such as The Blues Brothers and Sister Act, which didn’t prepare her for the plain-speaking Hughes, an Adrian Dominican with a lifetime of teaching and counseling experience. (She died in January at age 76.) “Jean exploded all my stereotypes, and I just loved her, adored her,” recalls Parrish. Counseling a group of parolees in the documentary, Hughes urges them to find good women who will help them stay out of trouble: “If she needs diamonds, drop her!” Parrish says she was struck by how frankly Hughes spoke of her conflicts with the Vatican; at one point in the movie she calls the 2012 censure “a denial of the divine in us.” Like the other three women Parrish settled on as her main characters, Hughes is no simple do-gooder but a conscientious woman on an uncharted spiritual journey.
Directed by Rebecca Parrish
