Recalling Meryl Streep’s “Half-Assed Genuflection”

To her friends, Sister Margaret McEntee, of the Sisters of Charity of New York, is Sister Peggy. In 1956, when she was a twenty-one-year-old rookie teacher at St. Anthony School, in the Bronx, she was Sister James, a name that she shed in the late sixties, after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among her first graders was a shy kid named Johnny. “Every day, he’d raise his hand: ‘May I sharpen my pencil?’ ” she recalled recently. “The pencil sharpener was at the end of four windows, and he watched everybody going by. Finally, I said, ‘Johnny, you don’t have to sharpen your pencil. You just want to see what’s going on out there!’ ” Decades later, in 2004, Sister Margaret found out that her former student, John Patrick Shanley, had written a play called “Doubt,” in which a young nun named Sister James, who teaches in the Bronx, is torn between a charismatic priest, Father Flynn, and her rigid supervisor, Sister Aloysius, who suspects the priest of molesting a schoolboy. Sister Margaret attended a performance Off Broadway, and Shanley nervously watched her watch his rendering of her younger self. “It’s magnificent,” she told him. She saw the play again when it moved to Broadway, and met with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams when Shanley turned it into a film. “They would sit together with the habit on, and they’d be knitting,” Sister Margaret recalled of the two actors. “I said, ‘Oh, I knit,’ and I used to bring my baby booties over. The three of us, we had this little knitting circle.” Streep thanked her by name when she won the SAG Award. “Doubt” is now back on Broadway, in a Roundabout revival, and Sister Margaret, a cheery, chatty eighty-eight-year-old, had once again met with the cast, including Zoe Kazan, who plays Sister James. “They always pick a good-looking young actress to play me,” Sister Margaret boasted. She sat in a former novitiate, now an administrative building on the Riverdale campus of the University of Mount St. Vincent, which the Sisters of Charity founded as a […]

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