When Anita Caspary was studying at Stanford in the late 1940s, English professor Marge Bailey saw the nun in her habit on a blustery day and commented that Caspary looked "like a windmill." By the late 1960s, though, Caspary not only had shed the habit but also had led her order in Los Angeles to shed the isolation and strictures that characterized the role of women in the Roman Catholic church.
Caspary, PhD '48, died Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. She was 95.
Her early life centered on her family's parish church in Los Angeles. She earned her bachelor's degree in English from Immaculate Heart College and joined the Immaculate Heart of Mary, where she took the name Sister Humiliata. She was selected for graduate studies, including a master's from USC and her Stanford doctorate, when nuns were not usually sent to secular universities.
At Immaculate Heart College, she taught, chaired the English department and served as graduate dean before becoming president in 1958. In 1963, she was elected mother general of the order.
Caspary's defining moment came after the Vatican II call in 1965 for renewal of religious life by enhancing education, expanding prayer times and adopting clothing that better related to the contemporary world. Archbishop (and later Cardinal) James Francis McIntyre forbade changes, however, and Caspary and a large majority of her sisters formed an independent ecumenical community. They described it as "a new style of communal existence, one which will not rigidly separate us by customs, cloister or clothing from those we serve," according to Caspary's 2003 book Witness to Integrity: The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community of California. The struggle for a more relevant life landed Caspary on a 1970 Time magazine cover.
In the 1970s, Caspary taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, returning in 1980 to the community in Los Angeles, where she developed educational programs on social justice and feminist spirituality. "Any moment that she had to live and learn, she seized it," says Susan Maloney, regional director of the American Academy of Religion.
Ever a woman of faith, Caspary nevertheless would speak her mind. Her nephew Joe Roxstrom recalls a Christmas Mass when the parish priest droned on. "Anita said, in a reasonably loud voice, 'Oh, please, Father, it's Christmas morning.' "
Survivors include her siblings Marion Roxstrom, Gretchen De Stefano, Ursula Caspary Frankel and Gerard Caspary.
Wendy Jalonen Fawthrop, ’78, is a senior copy editor at the Orange County Register.
