A slight 17-year-old named Cora Marie Billings made history on August 22, 1956. On that overcast summer Wednesday in Philadelphia, she became the first African American member of the Sisters of Mercy.
The great-granddaughter of William Henry Lee, a man enslaved by Jesuit priests at Georgetown University, Sister Cora Marie, now 82, remembers “feeling overwhelmed” by a sea of white nuns.
But she felt proud too. When two of her aunts became nuns in the 1940s, no Philadelphia religious order would have them. They had to move to Baltimore to join the Oblate Sisters of Providence, a religious order established by, and for, women of African descent to teach enslaved children.
Within weeks of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, Sister Benvinda Pereira, then 18, also joined the Sisters of Mercy in Philadelphia. She had been inspired to enter partly by Sister Cora Marie, who she visited while exploring religious life.
The young women hadn’t known each other, but their mothers and grandmothers were friends.
Although Sister Cora Marie sponsored Sister Benvinda’s entrance into the order, the two nuns didn’t form a friendship of their own until years later. Despite divergent ministries, they eventually bonded over their efforts—together with other women of color—to challenge and begin to heal racism in the Sisters of Mercy, the Catholic Church, and the culture at large.
Sharing the stories of Sisters Cora Marie and Benvinda during Black Catholic History Month is a fitting tribute to the women. Not only have they persevered in religious life despite painful racism, but they have also helped the Sisters of Mercy to commit to becoming an anti-racist community and to making anti-racism a key part of their order’s mission.
Sister Cora Marie: Pioneering African American Nun
Born an only child to Jesse and Ethel Billings in West Philadelphia in 1939, Cora Marie attended a predominantly Irish Catholic elementary school.
Walking to school, she prayed to Martin de Porres—the first Black saint of the Americas—for help in coping with racist aggressions—from being denied Communion by a priest to not being invited by nuns, as white girls were, to go with them on after-school errands.
“Sisters couldn’t go out alone in those days, and they would invite a female student to accompany them to the store,” says Sister Cora Marie. “I was never asked to serve as their companion. I felt the reason had to be because I was Black.”
That she would receive a Catholic education was never in question. Nor was it surprising that young Cora Marie would consider religious life.
In 1955, her grandfather, John Aloysius Lee Sr., became the first African American recipient of an international award for an outstanding Catholic lay person. As a teenager in 1902, he had desegrated Philadelphia’s Catholic high school basketball league; he later had a cultural and recreation center named after him. Mr. Lee’s 12 children included Susan Grace (Sister Mary Paul, OSP) and Bertha Amelia Theresa (Sister Mary Agnes, OSP).
Her aunts inspired Cora Marie’s vocation, as did the Sisters of Mercy—one of seven orders of nuns who taught her at West Philadelphia Catholic Girls' High School, a school that six of her aunts had also attended.
The Mercy sisters stood out for “their laughter, their happiness,” recalls Sister Cora Marie. “They were a happy people.”
Their compassion moved her too.
Her 9th grade religion teacher, Sister Mary Vincent, asked her often about the sick mother of a nun who lived at the convent where Cora Marie’s mother served as a temporary cook. It was an era where nuns couldn’t just call each other. Cora Marie enjoyed giving her teacher updates about her friend’s mom’s health—and talking with her about God and what she should do with her life.
“Sister Mary Vincent affirmed me,” says Sister Cora Marie softly. “I was special to her, and I believe that through her God led me to religious life.”
Sister Mary Vincent’s Jean Naté perfume also caught her student’s attention. “I loved it! It was something different. None of the other sisters wore perfume.”
It was a little thing, but the perfume made Cora Marie believe that the Sisters of Mercy were an order where individual nuns could be themselves. It gave her hope that they would see her as an individual too, beyond her skin color and race.
In her early years as a nun, Sister Cora Marie taught as many as 100 first graders at a time—all of them white—in Levittown, Pennsylvania. She arrived in Levittown in 1961, just months after the community’s only African American family left the area because a cross had been burned on their lawn.
She loved teaching and had no trouble with her young charges. “Children are not born racist,” she notes drily.
In 1968, Sister Cora Marie became a founding member of the National Black Sisters' Conference, which brought together Black nuns nationwide to assert their voices in the Catholic Church—and to urge it to confront more effectively “the sin of racism.” She eventually served as its president and its executive director.
Her teaching ministry brought her back to her alma mater in the 1970s, where she was the high school’s first African American teacher. She taught religion and started the school’s first Black Studies Club.
“I became known as ‘the nun with the ‘fro’ because of my afro,” recalls Sister Cora Marie with a laugh. (Robin Farmer, her former student, recently fictionalized her as Sister Carol—a courageous nun with an afro—in the bestselling novel Malcolm and Me.)
Sister Cora Marie moved to Virginia in the early 1980s to work as a campus minister at Virginia State University and several other historically Black colleges and universities—the first Black nun to serve in such a job in the Bible Belt. She then became director of the Richmond Diocese’s Office for Black Catholics, a position she held for 25 years.
In 1990, Sister Cora Marie again made history, when she was appointed as the first African American nun to lead a U.S. Catholic parish—St. Elizabeth Parish in North Richmond, where she served as pastoral coordinator for 14 years. (This appointment made her name the answer to a “Jeopardy!” contest question.) She went on to direct Virginia’s Human Rights Council and then became a community volunteer, becoming known for her public speaking about racism in the church and outside of it.
These days Sister Cora Marie continues to advocate for racial justice. She recently celebrated her 65th jubilee as a Sister of Mercy and has been taking stock of her journey.
“I tell people I’m glad I’m a Mercy sister, but I have had some tough times in these 65 years,” she says. “There were times when I wanted to leave, times when I couldn’t take it anymore.”
But Sister Cora Marie has always believed that she could be more effective within the order than outside of it. “People don’t listen to someone outside of an institution,” she says wryly, adding that being a nun allows her “to be a thorn in the side” of her community when necessary.
She has been leading anti-racism workshops for the Sisters of Mercy for over 40 years. Several years ago, Sister Cora Marie helped the community form an anti-racism and racial equity office to educate its sisters, lay associates and companions, and staff about racism.
“I have seen change within the Sisters of Mercy,” says Sister Cora Marie. “I tell them that’s why they’re stuck with me! If I didn’t see some sisters trying, I wouldn’t have stayed. But there’s movement toward change, and that’s where the hope is, even though there’s still a long way to go.”
At her jubilee Mass on August 22, 2021—65 years after she entered the Sisters of Mercy—Sister Cora Marie asked St. Elizabeth’s Parish choir to sing the Gospel hymn “Lord, I’m Available to You.” The song’s lyrics state: “You gave me my hands/To reach out to man/To show him your love/And Your perfect plan.”
Sister Benvinda Pereira: Bearing Racism and Healing Others
Growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s, a daughter of Cazimiro and Estella Pereira—a Portuguese merchant marine and a woman whose ancestors had been both enslaved and free—Benvinda Pereira found herself immersed in two things: her Catholic faith and her desire to be a doctor.
“Because my maternal grandparents were converts, we were inundated with Catholicism,” she says with a chuckle.
Benvinda, now 76, was the fourth of nine children and the first girl. “My mother badly wanted a girl child, so she prayed to St. Anne,” says Sister Benvinda. Her Portuguese name means “welcome” and “gift of God.”
The joy of her family’s newfound faith was marred by racism, however. In the mid-20th century, African Americans were expected to sit in the back of their parish church in West Philadelphia, while white people took the front pews. That is, until some African American grandmothers had had enough.
“One Sunday my grandmother and [Sister] Cora Marie’s grandmother and other Black ladies marched up the aisle and sat in the front with their arms folded,” recalls Sister Benvinda.
The pastor quietly backed the protestors. Outraged white parishioners—many of them the descendants of German immigrants for whom the parish was founded—began leaving the parish.
“Until the white [parishioners] fled to suburbia, we had gone to school for free,” Sister Benvinda says. “My parents had to start paying tuition for my younger siblings, which was a financial strain for them. But Catholic education was paramount.”
As a student at West Philadelphia Catholic Girls' High School, Benvinda earned top grades so she could eventually become a doctor and go to the medical missions. But she found herself “struggling with the Holy Spirit” as a junior—and wondering if she should also become a Sister of Mercy, like two young nuns who first captured her attention with their laughter.
The sisters, who had only recently taken vows, “were laughing in a classroom doorway because they didn’t have a clue about being teachers,” says Sister Benvinda. “I had never heard nuns laugh before and I thought, well, they are human!”
Her conversations with them “pulled me in to religious life,” says Sister Benvinda, who had also come to realize that, while she still wanted to go into medicine, the medical missions weren’t her calling. “I hated bugs!” she says.
After entering the order, Sister Benvinda told its director of education that she wanted to go to medical school. She was shocked by the nun’s response.
“With great disdain, [she told me] I could never be a physician,” recalls Sister Benvinda, her voice tight with emotion. “I stared at her, and she looked up and saw my expression. She said, ‘Maybe you can become a nurse, but first you must teach.’”
Sister Benvinda taught elementary school children for four years. She especially loved her 2nd graders and led them in rousing songs from Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales between classes.
The principal’s office was next to her classroom, and the principal—who was also a Sister of Mercy—pleaded with the order’s education director to let the young nun go to nursing school. “She couldn’t take the singing anymore!” Sister Benvinda says. “That was Spirit at work.”
Letting go of her dream of being a doctor was hard, however.
“I fought and fought and fought [with my superiors] because there was no reason that I couldn’t be a physician,” says Sister Benvinda. “I was smart. I had all A’s.”
She found “a class system within the Sisters of Mercy” that meant that only nuns from elite backgrounds went into healthcare. Just one sister in the Philadelphia order was a doctor at the time; she served in India. Learning about her bolstered Sister Benvinda’s determination, but the young nun felt “pushed back and pushed down” by superiors when she tried to make her case.
But Sister Benvinda came to love her nursing ministry, which she started in 1970 at the former Misericordia Hospital in Philadelphia (later known as Mercy Philadelphia Hospital). By 1980, she had worked her way up to head nurse of the general surgery and orthopedic unit—a job in which she thrived until encountering a racist nursing director.
Needing a change, Sister Benvinda enrolled in Boston University’s nurse practitioner program—a new masters-level degree program that enabled nurses to do similar work to doctors. While there, she traveled to Alabama and found her new calling—rural healthcare with people on the margins.
Guided by the Holy Spirit’s promptings, Sister Benvinda first ministered in Alberta, Alabama, for three years, followed by nearly 10 years in Biloxi, Mississippi. She started mobile clinics in both communities, bringing healthcare to African Americans and white people alike who lived in poverty.
“I loved it,” she says. “There was a need for my skills there, unlike in Philadelphia, where there were all kinds of doctors and nurses. I felt strongly that marginalized people deserved the same quality, accessible health care as those in urban areas.”
Sister Benvinda then served the Navajo Nation in Ganado, Arizona, for several years before finding her long-term home in Salome, Arizona—located near the California and Mexico borders—where she helped open a clinic for migrant workers and their families.
The needs of the migrant people, who sustained injuries of all kinds as they labored on farms each day, moved her deeply. She ministered with them for a decade before being called to work in urgent care for three years. In March 2020, her tired body “forced me into retirement.”
In an Advent essay, Sister Benvinda reflects: “[For] close to six decades, my purpose in life was trying to heal the brokenness of others, trying to piece together broken fragments of their humanity with hope, compassion and a bit of medical knowledge and science. Will it have made a difference? Was hope and caring for God’s people on the fringe of humanity enough?”
Her faith in God and the wisdom of the elders—especially the strong Black women who have gone before her—emboldens her, she says. She has felt called by the Holy Spirit to be not only a healer of people’s bodies, but also of their spirits—especially when they have been wounded by racism.
These days Sister Benvinda sees herself as a “prayer warrior” for racial justice from her home in the desert. She has been heartened by the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death of George Floyd.
“It was good to see my white brothers and sisters out there with my Black brothers and sisters,” she says. “Now I want to see [white people] more involved in the ongoing struggle to have the Black vote matter.”
For more than a decade, Sister Benvinda has been immersed in the Sisters of Mercy’s anti-racism efforts. Along with Sister Cora Marie, she has served on the order’s internal anti-racism transformation team and helped create a high-level office within the organization to continually educate its members about racism.
The process, she says, hasn’t been easy.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall,” says Sister Benvinda ruefully. “We are an order of well-educated and over-educated women. It’s easy to intellectualize what is happening among us and not to realize when our policies are racist.”
But she’s hopeful that the order’s anti-racism journey, while a work in progress, will result in true change. “We are far better with a diverse group of women than with monolithic whiteness. We need to let diversity in at every level of the Sisters of Mercy!”
Her friendship with Sister Cora Marie has helped sustain her, says Sister Benvinda, even though their ministries in different parts of the United States have prevented them from spending much time together. They share a bond through their mothers, who volunteered for the Sisters of Mercy, and through their efforts to make the order more inclusive.
“Through the work of anti-racism, Cora Marie became my friend and confidant,” Sister Benvinda says. “The work has brought us closer together.”
EDITORS' NOTE: As this story was being published, we learned that two African American women briefly served as Sisters of Mercy before Sister Cora Marie Billings. One sister entered in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1929 and the other sister entered in Burlingame, California, in 1951. We are grateful to Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, author of the forthcoming “Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle” for this information. Dr. Williams also reminded us that the Sisters of Mercy had accepted women of color from outside the United States before Sister Cora Marie, especially light-skinned women. We are committed to telling these stories in the future as part of our efforts to begin to become an anti-racist community of religious women.