#52 Ancestors 2024 Week 15 School Days: Villa Regina Academy

As a child, I attended Catholic schools taught by the Sisters of Mercy and the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND).  By the time I graduated from 8th grade at St. Mary's in Annapolis, I wanted to be a nun and a teacher and join the SSND order.  The SSNDs ran a high school in Baltimore specifically for girls who wanted to enter their order: Villa Regina Academy (VRA).  And that is where I attended high school.

Villa Regina was a very small school.  At any given time, there were between 100 and 120 girls enrolled. My class (1966) had about 30 girls in freshman year and 16 graduated four years later as many young women decided against a vocation as a nun. The school was only open for about ten years, closing about 1968, a few years after I graduated. There were about six nuns who lived at the school and supervised the students.  Some other nuns came in during the day to teach various classes. 

VRA was located in Baltimore, next to the SSND Motherhouse, so the aspirants, as the students were called, had frequent inspiring glimpses of the postulants and novices of the order across the parking lot and occasionally got to attend services in the big Motherhouse chapel. 

The school had two buildings: the old Villa, an early 20th century mansion house and a more modern school building with dorms and classrooms and dining and recreation facilities as well as a chapel where we attended daily Mass. The picture at the right shows me and my Dad with the Old Villa in the background. It has since been torn down.

The curriculum was pretty standard for a Catholic high school.  It was run by a teaching order, after all, which also ran several other girls' schools in Baltimore.  So, we studied what other girls studied, more or less: Latin, French, Biology, History, Theology, Music, Literature, with lots of personal attention since the classes were so small. No chance of hiding if you were unprepared.

I will never forget my terrifying piano lessons with Sister Ceciliana. (I was a very mediocre musician, but she was determined to make me an acceptable accompanist for the Villa musicals.  It was a losing battle!)  I still have a few medals lying around from the Auxilium Latinum exams we took every year.  And I can still sing La Marseillaise in French (which was how we started every French class). There was only a small library at the Villa, so assigned research projects meant taking the bus downtown to the Pratt Library, trips that I still remember fondly. 

Outside of class, there was a strict schedule of meals, chores, recreation and study with bells rung to tell us when to get up in the morning, when to pray, when to eat, when to study, when to go to bed. Chores rotated every month, so someone didn't get stuck with the same job for months.  Taking care of the chapel was a highly coveted assignment, peeling potatoes not so much. In the study hall each girl had a desk, seated in alphabetical order with her classmates. In the evening, when silence was observed, laundry would be delivered in big carts. Everyone went to the laundry baskets and helped distribute the clean clothing to the proper desk. (Of course, every piece of clothing had a name tag.  I still occasionally come across a handkerchief with a name tag in the back of a drawer.)

Mario Lanza The Drinking Song

Recreation on Friday nights often consisted of movies rented on big reels that we ran on a cantankerous projector.  The movie fare, of course, did not include any current hit films; it mostly ran to religious movies like The Song of Bernadette or classics like The Student Prince.  Not exactly sure why the good sisters thought this was a suitable film for teenage girls who were considering a religious vocation.  Perhaps they were Mario Lanza fans! But, I saw that film often enough that I can still belt out the Drinking Song sixty years later. 

Let every true lover salute his sweetheart! Let's Drink!

On one memorable occasion, we were actually taken on a field trip to see The Ten Commandments which was being featured at a local theater.  Perhaps even more memorably, after the feature film, the theater ran previews of coming attractions, including a steamy Station Six Sahara.  Our English teacher made us all write letters to the theater scolding them for their appallingly bad judgment. 

While I was a student at the Villa, the nation was rocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I can vividly remember the day. Classes were cancelled, and we spent the day huddled in the recreation room eyes glued to the small television at the front of the room where Walter Cronkite gave us the unbelievable news. Most of us sobbed quietly throughout the day and prayed many decades of the rosary. 

However, some of my most cherished memories of the Villa are the many musical skits we created to celebrate various holidays or significant occasions.  Each class was expected to create a production with dialog, music, and costumes (which were usually pretty minimal since we didn't have a lot of wardrobe options to choose from).  To call the plots convoluted would be a wild understatement, and the lyrics stretched the rules of rhyme to the breaking point.  But we did have a lot of fun exercising our creativity.  I have a picture, below, from one of my class's productions, but do not ask me to explain what was going in the picture. That explanation has been lost in the mists of time. (And no, I am not in the picture.  I was taking the picture, probably a wise decision on my part.)

I did eventually graduate from Villa Regina along with fifteen other dear friends. As you can see from the picture, it was strictly a formal affair, white gloves and all. 

The following fall, I did enter the SSNDs as a postulant.  The order sent me to college that year at Notre Dame of Maryland College (now University) which was just down Charles Street from the Motherhouse. There I had the great good fortune of being taught by one of my literary heroes: Sister Maura Eichner, a gifted poet who inspired me to write poetry myself. 

For a variety of reasons, I eventually decided that being a nun was not my calling, and I left the order at the end of my postulant year. I came back over the next several years to visit my classmates as they moved through the various steps of religious life. 

Over the years, there were only rare group gatherings.  We didn’t really have an alumni association.  But, in  2008, the Villa held a rather spectacular reunion. One of the former aspirants won the Maryland lottery that year for about $80 million. She decided to spend part of the money to bring together the women who had attended the Villa during its ten-year life.  She paid for a weekend of hotels, meals, and activities for 150 or so former Villa girls. I was lucky enough to be able to attend and had a wonderful time catching up with the women who had played such an important part of my teenage years. 

Class of 66 in 2008

Even though I did not ultimately enter the SSND order, being a student at VRA made an indelible mark on my life. I still cherish my friendships with my classmates both inside the SSNDs and outside. (One of my fellow graduates is now a Mother Superior in the order and another is a member of the governing council.) I have made a number of trips around the country to visit with these women over the years. And thanks to an email list, we now have regular reports on the lives of our beloved fellow Villa girls.

I often wonder how different my life might have been if I had attended a bigger school with different opportunities.  But in the end, I cherish the experience that so largely shaped me. 

The words of the VRA Alma Mater have proved true:

As we go onward, 

there will be

in each of us, 

a part of thee.

Villa Regina, Hail!