Growing up in tiny Bement, Ill., Mary Ann Weakley played sports, helped on the family farm and dreamed of being the executive secretary to a famous baseball player.
She decided she wanted to go to St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic all-girls boarding school 200 miles away in Nauvoo, Ill., even though, as her father pointed out, the local high school was just across the street. Then, after high school, she decided to join a Benedictine convent.
“My parents were not particularly thrilled with that, either,” she says with a smile. “In the 1950s, when I was coming out of high school and deciding on my life, women were only becoming nurses, teachers or getting married. I wasn’t interested in any of those.”
Mary Ann also was interested in doing good works.
“If there had been a Peace Corps at the time, I probably would have done that,” she says.
Even though she did not want to teach, she joined a teaching community and spent the next 20 years as a nun, teacher, school administrator and student. Her order specialized in providing teachers to Catholic schools in small towns that could not afford a full roster of educators.
Like many others, Mary Ann (known as Sister Mary Magdalen) received cursory training in education and teaching, then was sent off to handle elementary first or second grades. Nuns in each town lived together – sometimes only three or four in a house with its own chapel – with a sister in charge.
“I don’t even know what I got paid because I never saw a check,” Mary Ann remembers. “We didn’t have money – we took a vow of poverty. Our food, clothing and everything was provided. I never managed any money.”
During this time, Mary Ann also was the student, completing her undergraduate degree and a Master’s in Business Education and English at Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa. By then she had been in the community for a decade, cramming in summer courses and one final full year at Marycrest. That brought her back to her alma mater, St. Mary’s Academy in Nauvoo, as the assistant to the principal.
“I was in charge of discipline, manager of the residence hall and also doing some teaching. Since it was our convent motherhouse, I also lived there,” she says.
But, during the sixties and seventies, the school would change.
“In the fifties and sixties most of the students were little farm girls like me,” she says. “Then, the students began to change – troubled girls from broken homes, parents sending girls away from ‘bad companions,’ drug problems. We weren’t equipped to handle psychological or suicide situations. But there was a need to educate and be there for those students. It caused great conflict among the sisters.”
To further complicate things, in 1959 Vatican II updated the Catholic Church’s relations with the modern world.
“The message of Vatican II to our convent was to get out of your competence and serve people in the way they needed to be served. To us sisters, it meant we could do more than one thing,” Mary Ann recalls.
Some wanted to go into social work.
“Religious women came to the realization that they could serve God outside the convent,” she says.
Even the traditional nun’s black habit was starting to undergo the eventual transition to street clothes.
A significant number of nuns across the country, including Mary Ann, left their order.
“It’s difficult. You don’t just wake up one morning and say ‘That’s it, guys. I’m out of here,’” she says.
There was counseling, prayer, discussions and the application to Rome for a dispensation. By that time, Mary Ann had been working in a high school in Rock Island, Ill., and her principal helped her get a new position at a school in Arlington Heights, a suburb in North Chicago.
“I knew little about city living, didn’t have a car, home, insurance, and I lived on a shoestring for a year because the school didn’t really have a budget for me,” she says. “My background in business benefited me a lot because I knew how to budget and handle money. Most of the sisters coming out didn’t have that experience.”
She made a firm decision not to go back to Bement, her hometown.
“Can you imagine the stories, ‘What? Did she get kicked out or what?’” she says.
In another twist of fate, Mary Ann then met her husband-to-be, Hal Weakley – from Bement – an introduction made by her sister-in-law.
“He drove the 150 miles to Arlington Heights and took me out to dinner. And I thought, no harm, he’s divorced, had two kids and wasn’t Catholic,” she says.
Three years later, in 1976, they married. Again, Mary Ann had no intention of moving back home.
Hal sold his gas station and home in Bement, moved to Arlington Heights and bought a gas station. Mary Ann continued at the school and Hal ran the gas station business for the next decade.
But the cold got to them both.
“It’s cold up there. A lot of snow,” she said. “Hal would have to be out in the freezing weather starting cars and so on. And my school was transitioning from all-boys to coed.”
The couple moved to Nashville, where everything changed again.
“I always wanted to run a business of my own,” Mary Ann says. “And decorating has been a passion of mine forever.”
She bought an interior decorating franchise and later expanded it with a partner. In 2009, Hal passed away and Mary Ann eventually looked at Florida as a place to live.
“Hal and I had traveled on both coasts and enjoyed that, but always said we never wanted to live in Florida,” she says. “Then one day it just popped into my head: The Villages. We’d stopped here to visit friends, so I took a three-day tour, rented a place for three weeks.
The second week I bought a house in the Village of Gilchrist.”
In 2014, her memoir, “Monastery to Matrimony: A Woman’s Journey,” was published and life changed again. She was asked to be a consultant on a movie, “Notivate,” about a young woman leaving the convent. She asked to have her name removed from the credits and her 2017 review of the film in Villages-News.com was not exactly flattering.
The book also started a new organization in The Villages – Kick the Habit – a group of about 35 former nuns who now live in the area. Those interested in learning more about the group can contact Mary Ann at (615) 397-8063 or by email at maweakley4@gmail.com.
Now, Mary Ann is working on her second book, the true story of a monastery started by two nuns in the late 1800s in Navoo. They were scammed by a smooth-talking con artist who stole their money and left them bankrupt.
“I’ve done a ton of research, which I enjoy doing,” she says. “I’d like to get a draft finished by the end of the year.”
John W Prince is a writer and Villager. For more information, visit www.GoMyStory.com. If you know of someone with a good story to tell, contact John at John@GoMyStory.com.
