The Curiosity Curator

She entered the Dominican order in 1942, at age 20, in New York City.
For the next four decades, Sister Marjorie Tuite — Marge, to everyone who knew her — lived inside the paradox that defined her life: absolute commitment to a Catholic Church she believed was profoundly wrong about women, and absolute refusal to leave it or stop saying so.
"The church is totally sexist," she said, in public, repeatedly, without apology.
Then she went back to her work of trying to change it.
She earned a Master's in Theology from Manhattanville College and a Doctorate in Ministry from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago. The Vatican II reforms of the 1960s opened new possibilities for Catholic nuns — and the women's liberation movement opened others. Tuite absorbed both and built something from them. She became a coalition builder before the term existed in its modern sense, someone who moved between peace groups, civil rights organizations, women's groups, and church communities and insisted they could see themselves in each other.
Her philosophy was direct: "Do the analysis, make the connections." Her strategy was equally direct: "There is no way to do political work unless you are networked to others who are doing the same thing."
In 1971, she organized a gathering of more than 40 Catholic sisters in Washington D.C. Out of that gathering came NETWORK — a Catholic social justice lobby that continues to operate in Washington today, and that became widely known during the 2012 "Nuns on the Bus" campaign, when sisters traveled the country advocating for the poor in defiance of Republican budget proposals. NETWORK exists because Marge Tuite called a meeting.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, she organized, spoke, testified, and built. She served as national coordinator of the National Assembly of Religious Women. She spoke publicly against Reagan administration policies in Central America, believing they caused direct harm to the poorest people in Nicaragua and neighboring countries — and she said so, clearly, to the press.
In October 1984, she signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. It was signed by dozens of Catholic nuns and lay Catholics and called for open, pluralist dialogue within the Catholic community about abortion — at a moment when Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic woman, was running for Vice President and facing intense pressure from Church hierarchy about her public positions. The ad did not stake out a pro-choice position. It called for honest conversation within a faith tradition that was refusing to have one.
The bishops responded with public condemnation. Male Church officials criticized the signatories by name. The pressure on many of the women who had signed was significant and sustained.
Marge Tuite continued her work. She died in June 1986 during surgery, nearly two years after the ad appeared — at a moment when the controversy it had generated had not fully subsided.
Her obituaries remembered her as a leader of Church Women United, a builder of coalitions, a woman who was brave enough to say the hard thing out loud and then stay in the room for the response.
The Women-Church Convergence continues her work today — organizing for women's right to ordination in the Catholic Church.
She loved the Church. She never stopped saying what was wrong with it. She never stopped working to change it. She never left.
That is not contradiction. That is the deepest kind of faith — the kind that insists the thing you love can become what it should be, even when it keeps proving otherwise.
She taught a generation of women to do the analysis, make the connections, and stay in the fight.