A Degree of Closure

It took Pilar Sarabia de Ramirez the requisite four years to complete her bachelor’s degree at Mount St. Mary’s College in West Los Angeles.

It took her 34 more years to get her diploma.

In 1964, weeks before she was to graduate and take her final vows as a nun, Sarabia made the agonizing decision to drop out of the Catholic college’s convent, suddenly convinced that the church was not her calling.

She went back to her native Mexico, got married, raised a family and began researching a book.

Seeking to bolster her academic credentials before her work was published, she wrote to her old campus about clearing up her graduation status, but she and the college disagreed on whether she had adequate credits. After several go-rounds over the decades, the college decided she qualified and invited her to come back to attend Monday night’s graduation.

Accompanied by 20 members of her family who flew here with her, Sarabia triumphantly received her degree in general studies. Three of her dorm mates who went on to become nuns were also there, watching her cross the stage to thunderous applause and a moment of special recognition during the ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium.

“I’m happy,” Sarabia said simply.

She spoke more expansively about her decision to leave the cloistered life, made at age 24 after countless nights crying and praying for enlightenment.

“God had other plans for me,” said Sarabia, an elegant woman with a warm demeanor, who lives in Guadalajara with her husband and four daughters.

As a girl in Mexico City, Sarabia’s role models were the nuns at her private school. Her mother insisted that she learn English, so in her junior year she moved to Los Angeles and attended the now-defunct St. Mary’s Academy in South-Central Los Angeles and then went on to Mount St. Mary’s College.

Back then, the college was an all-female, largely white institution. Monday night, Sarabia was surprised to find that Caucasians are in the minority, 10% of the students are men, and only two of this year’s 359 graduates are nuns.

During her last year of school, Sarabia taught fourth grade at Our Lady of the Valley in Canoga Park, where she again lived in a convent.

She had nearly concluded the long process from postulancy to final vows when she balked.

“I wasn’t ready to make the decision to spend the rest of my life cloistered,” she said. “I wouldn’t say I wasted that time, but a girl of that age lives a lot and I didn’t.”

Her departure from the religious school was done quietly, and she was told not to discuss her decision with the other novitiates.

She returned to Mexico and was soon sought out by a young man she had met at a party in Guadalajara five years earlier, but hadn’t seen since. Eleven months later, she and Eduardo Ramirez were married.

In the decades that followed, she busied herself raising their daughters and worked as a volunteer with handicapped children through a Catholic charity.

She said she contacted Mount St. Mary’s several times inquiring about her diploma but was repeatedly told she didn’t have the required credits to graduate.

Finally, a few months ago, Sister Kieran Vaughan, an education professor at the school, rechecked her academic records one last time and came to a different conclusion: Sarabia had indeed completed her course work.

The college’s decision was especially crucial to Sarabia. For one thing, having a degree in Mexico is far rarer than in the U.S., conferring higher social standing. For another, Sarabia is completing six years of research on a book about a Catholic laywoman who founded a religious order and two lay foundations in Mexico.

Her subject, Concepcion Cabrera de Armida, is in the process of being canonized. Born in San Luis Potosi in 1862, she was a mother and devout Catholic. She raised nine children and wrote a 60,000-page diary filled with insights from family life to theology.

Cabrera carved the initials “JHS” (Jesus, Savior of Men) into her chest with a knife--an emblem Sarabia had engraved into a gold cross she wears around her neck.

Sarabia said Cabrera’s writing has been a great source of consolation and inspiration to her through the years.

“Up to recently, everyone thought you had to be a priest or nun to truly commune with God,” she said. “She [Cabrera] found sanctity was also for laypeople.”

And when her book comes out, she’ll proudly be able to sign it: Licenciada Pilar Sarabia, B.A., Mount St. Mary’s College--a college graduate.