By Catherine Walsh, Features Writer
Cover art: "Breath of God” by Sister Larretta Rivera-Williams
Two Black Sisters of Mercy entered a mostly white religious order 40 years apart.
One of the women was shocked to hear a racial slur used repeatedly by a sister when she arrived at a Mercy convent in 1982. “I was highly disillusioned because it’s not what I expected nor experienced as a student at the college where some of the sisters taught,” says Sister Larretta Elizabeth Rivera-Williams.
Sister Boreta Singleton, who became a novice with the Sisters of Mercy on September 18, 2022, has had a vastly different experience in the order. “One of the things I appreciate about the Sisters of Mercy is that racism is [now] one of their critical concerns,” she says.
As Sisters of Mercy immersed in many ministries, including the arts, Sisters Larretta and Boreta seek to further the Mercy mission and overcome racism. A Global Sisters Report columnist, Sister Larretta is also a poet, playwright, producer, director, choreographer and abstract artist. She has also spoken about “The Eucharist and Racial Healing.” Sister Boreta is a musician who sang with three choirs until she entered the novitiate, including the Ignatian Schola vocal ensemble and Choral Chameleon. She is also a contributor to the Jesuit publication America, Catholic Women Preach and National Public Radio.
The Sisters of Mercy share the women’s stories during 2022 Black Catholic History Month as part of the order’s ongoing efforts to confront its own racism and that of the church and American culture, and to help build an anti-racist “Beloved Community” here on Earth.
Born in 1954 to Larry Lee Williams and Elizabeth Rivera in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Larretta was named for her broadcast-journalist father, who signed on to one of the first African American radio stations in the country.
Her parents divorced when Larretta was three, and her mother eventually remarried, to Lester Ervin, who served as North Carolina’s first Black fire chief. Young Larretta and her siblings from her mom’s second marriage grew up financially comfortable in a segregated neighborhood. Educated in Catholic schools, Larretta first wondered if she might have a vocation to religious life when a Sister of St. Joseph at her high school suggested she could.
A prospective students’ weekend at the former Sacred Heart College (now part of Belmont Abbey College) in Belmont, North Carolina, led Larretta to the Sisters of Mercy. She stayed in a dorm where Sister Pauline Clifford (d. 2009) lived. Some students invited Larretta to join them in Sister Pauline’s suite for Frosted Flakes and cartoons. “I’d never seen a sister out of habit. It seemed so real, and everyone was so happy. I knew this was where I wanted to be.”
Her call to religious life grew in college, fostered partly by some friends who also believed that they were being called to become Sisters of Mercy. But her mother’s hesitation about her entering the convent led her to wait for a few years. “I didn’t want to do anything that didn’t have the full support of my mother,” she says.
After college, Larretta worked at a TV station and the radio station where her dad had been, and as a religion teacher at her former high school before entering the Sisters of Mercy at age 28.
She was unprepared for racism at the convent.
Time and again Larretta encountered racial slurs and off-color jokes—what today are referred to as microaggressions. She regrets not being more upfront about what she was experiencing “instead of letting other sisters tell me I was having a problem with authority, or that I was just too sensitive!”
“But when you are young and you’re the only Black woman and you’ve entered an all-white community, you kind of take it,” says Sister Larretta sadly. “I would hear things like, ‘If you’re going to be here, then you’re going to have to get used to it.’”
“I would call home crying, and my mother would say, ‘Remember, you can always come home, but you are where you feel God wants you to be, and, if that is true, you will be able to stay there. But remember, they are women first, nuns second.’ That’s what got me through; the reality of their humanity.”
When it was time for Sister Larretta to make perpetual or final vows in 1990, sisters overseeing the process decided that she wasn’t ready—that she should wait another year. When she asked why the only reason given was “to learn humility,” according to Sister Larretta. One of the sisters put a note about the decision under her door and told her, “Well, at least we didn’t ask you to leave.”
Sister Larretta adds, “I was not certain how a ninth year of much of the same [experiences] with the same people would change how they would accept me or how I would continue to receive negative encounters. I was certain, however, that the grace of humility had gotten me this far; to gain more within a year would simply be gift.”
In the years that followed, Sister Larretta taught high school, served as a pastoral associate, worked at Wake Forest University Divinity School as a chaplain and educator, and held an administrative job at Catholic Charities. In 2013, she became coordinator of pastoral care at St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Winston-Salem, where she cares for parishioners who are ill or dying and for their grieving families.
Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994, Sister Larretta is also a member of the parish support group that she co-facilitates for people living with chronic or severe illness. “So now I’m not only facilitating the group, but it’s a support group for me too,” she says, noting that her disorder is a moderate one. “It has helped me to make more connections with people in the parish.”
Most weekends, for community life, Sister Larretta drives to Sacred Heart Convent in Belmont, something she began doing when her mom lived with the sisters at the convent’s Marian Center during the last three years of her life.
She has experienced emotional healing in recent years, thanks to a former leadership sister and some sisters in Belmont and beyond who listened to her stories.
“I give [them] a lot of credit,” says Sister Larretta. “They didn’t tell me, ‘Oh, you know, that's just how Sister is. She’s from this state or that state [in the South] or that's just how she was raised. Or she is older and that’s just how it was when she was growing up.”
She is grateful for these sisters’ prayers and support, as well as for the Sisters of Mercy’s commitment to the critical concern of racism.
“Dismantling racism will be an ongoing challenge for Mercy, but a necessary one if we are going to move ahead with the signs of the time, claim interculturality, protest against any injustice, and expect to be seen as people of justice, mercy, and the love of Christ,” Sister Larretta says.
After seeing the 2015 documentary #BlackLivesMatter, she wrote about it for Global Sisters Report, a project of the National Catholic Reporter. She continues to bring her perspective as a Black woman and a religious sister to columns about race, faith and American culture.
Additionally, Sister Larretta draws sustenance from playwriting and directing, from abstract drawing that is rooted in prayer, and from her relationship with the Divine.
“My hope comes from a Source deep within that was nurtured long before religious life,” she reflects. “It’s an emotion or presence that I sense. The last 40 years as a Sister of Mercy have only magnified and strengthened that inner Source which is God.”
Sister Boreta (center) with Sisters Maureen King and Alicia Zapata.
Born an only child to Paul and Naomi Singleton in Philadelphia in 1959, Boreta grew up in a multiethnic neighborhood and parish that encouraged parishioners to embrace Vatican II’s reforms. “It was a wonderful upbringing,” she says.
Her parents held Bible studies in their home as part of the parish response to Vatican II’s mandate for Catholics to learn more about Scripture; other African American couples attended, as did white couples. “My early experiences of race were positive because our orbit of church and neighborhood were very integrated,” reflects Sister Boreta. “And even though I went to school with doctors’ and lawyers’ kids, they never made me feel any different.”
Her first encounters with racism came when she was 10 or 11 and accompanying her grandmother Elise Singleton on errands in white-owned shops in a predominantly African American neighborhood. One day Mrs. Singleton, a talented seamstress who only spoke Creole and French, needed to buy buttons for a cousin’s wedding dress that she was making.
“Person after person came into the store and we were not waited on,” says Sister Boreta. When she finally got a salesclerk’s attention, the woman questioned whether Mrs. Singleton could afford the buttons and demanded to know what they were for.
When young Boreta complained to her grandmother afterwards, the woman gently covered the girl’s mouth with her hand. On the bus on the way home she took out her rosary beads. “We started praying,” recalls Sister Boreta. Mrs. Singleton, a daily communicant who once worked as a housekeeper for a Lafayette, Louisiana, bishop, and was illiterate, responded to other racist incidents in a similar way. “She was never aggressive,” her granddaughter says.
A more blatant racist aggression occurred when Boreta was in 8th grade and was told by the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of Education that she would receive a $500 high school scholarship.
Before she could attend the awards ceremony, however, her parents received a phone call stating that a mistake had been made and the award was going to someone else. Her parents probed but didn’t receive a satisfactory answer. When the award recipients’ photo was published in the newspaper, “we noticed that all were white,” says Sister Boreta. An African American City Councilor apologized to her parents. “He saw my name in the [original] list, and on the day of the ceremony I had been replaced with a white student.”
Boreta still managed to get enough scholarships to attend an upscale Catholic girls’ academy for high school, where her enrollment in Latin, physics, and other demanding classes caused tensions with classmates. “I started to be the only kid of color in these classes,” she says, noting that a third of the students in her school were girls of color.
“The sisters never treated me any differently, but the upper-class white girls did. All their interactions with people who looked like me [up until then] had been with their drivers, cooks, maids and laundresses.”
Her white friends from high school and later from college, however, “accepted me for who I am and to this day remain women who have generous spirits and are open to all,” she says.
When Boreta arrived at Immaculata College (now Immaculata University) in Chester County, Pennsylvania, she discovered that she was one of only three students of color out of nearly 130 women in her class. “I just studied and did my work and kind of ignored what was going on around me,” she says. “For the most part, I was around girls who had never encountered a woman of color until they went to college.”
She found solace not only in her studies as a music and elementary education major, but also in singing. From the time Boreta was in first grade and was selected by a sister for after-school choir practice—the students learned Gregorian chant before any other music—she sang in choirs at every turn.
She came by her love of music from her family. Her mother and maternal grandmother “were big opera fans,” she noted in a 2019 podcast, while her paternal grandmother sang often in Creole and French, and a great-aunt sang with Duke Ellington’s band.
As an undergraduate, however, she had to persuade a sister on the music faculty to let her do her senior paper on William Grant Still, the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States. “She was like, ‘I don’t know about that,’” recalls Sister Boreta ruefully. “I killed myself to make the paper perfect.”
But she mostly loved the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHMs) who had taught her first in elementary school and then in college. Boreta entered the IHM community after college graduation and spent 24 years with the order, ministering mostly as a middle-school math, science, and religion teacher and then as director of the Philadelphia Archdiocese’s Office for Black Catholics.
Along the way she earned a Master of Theology from the University of Notre Dame, becoming the first African American woman to do so. (She later earned a Master of Counseling from Newman University and spiritual direction certification from Fairfield University.)
Although she was grateful for her time with the IHMs, Boreta came to realize that the community wasn’t the “right fit” for her and left in 2002. She then worked in Jesuit education in New York City and Jersey City, spending 15 years at St. Peter’s Prep, where her jobs ranged from religion teacher and department chair to director of faculty formation.
Her first encounter with the Sisters of Mercy came when Boreta was a child and her maternal grandmother was dying. In “A Mercy Kindness, Etched in Memory,” she recalls crying in a Mercy hospital waiting area because her mom had gone to see her own mother, and children weren’t allowed in patient rooms. Within seconds, a Sister of Mercy was at her side, asking her what was wrong and drying her tears. The sister then said she would be right back.
Moments later, the sister told her, “You must be very quiet. I am going to cover you with my cape, and we will go up to see your grandmother. You can give her a kiss and hug, and then we will have to come back downstairs, okay?”
Not only did Boreta enjoy a few minutes with her grandmother, but the Sister of Mercy then stayed with her in the waiting area until the child’s mom returned. “My grandmother died the next day, and that beautiful memory of Sister’s charity is etched in my memory. Sister saw a need and responded. Isn’t that what the Gospels call us to do?”
In the early 1980s, Sister Boreta met Sister Cora Marie Billings, the first African American Sister of Mercy, while visiting an IHM sister named Sister Marie de Porres who was dying. “Sister Marie told Sister Cora, ‘Boreta is my good friend and I need you to take care of her for me,’” recalls Sister Boreta. “From that time on Sister Cora and I became friends.”
While directing the Office for Black Catholics in Philadelphia, Sister Boreta also came to know other Sisters of Mercy involved in African American ministry. The Mercy sisters supported her when she left the IHM order, she says, and in 2017 she accepted their invitation to co-facilitate the Sisters of Mercy’s anti-racism initiative, which later became the Office of Anti-Racism & Racial Equity.
As a layperson at that time who was active in the anti-racism work of her Jesuit parish, St. Francis Xavier in New York City, Boreta decided she needed to learn more about Catherine McAuley, the Sisters of Mercy founder, so she could more effectively help the Mercy order in its anti-racism efforts. She found herself “captivated” by Catherine’s story and became a Mercy Associate in 2018.
The words of a sister-friend, “Why don’t you just become one of us, a Sister of Mercy?” stayed with her, however. Boreta had come to know the community over the years by singing at sisters’ Jubilee celebrations and found herself moved by the Mercy commitment to overcoming racism in the order and elsewhere. In 2021, she moved into a Mercy convent in Brooklyn, where she lived for a year before entering the Mercy Novitiate in Philadelphia.
Although her first year of novitiate is “time apart” from everyday ministry, Sister Boreta looks forward to continuing to help the Sisters of Mercy grapple with racism.
“I think it's important for us to acknowledge the harm that has been done, and we do that by listening to people’s stories,” she reflects. “But we also need to acknowledge where we are right now, and what we’re doing to help this sin of racism move in a different direction.”
“Talking about racism is an uncomfortable conversation, but it is a necessary one,” says Sister Boreta. “Because we must acknowledge the fact that we’re all here, and we all have a place at the table.”
Thanks to Sisters Boreta and Larretta, the Sisters of Mercy are repairing and rebuilding their own “table” so that, one day, it will be a place where all can feast on God’s abundant Mercy, love, and joy.