I first knew Sr. Diane when she entered the seminary as a student in 1971. She was a Dominican sister who lived at their convent in Barataria. I myself had become rector in September 1970.

Among her fellow students were Andrew Cromwell from Guyana, Ronald Tagallie from Trinidad and Rudy Wong Loi Sing from Suriname. She studied with us until June 1974 when she with her fellow students graduated.

It was then decided that we would ask her to join the teaching staff. She agreed and began in October of that year. I remember at the dinner of the opening year when I assured the Dominicans that she was a “great sister and would bring a new greatness to our staff.”

She did this and very well too until (after teaching for three years) she went to the Catholic University of America in Washington in the United States to further her studies in theology. I remember at that time visiting her there and was pleased with how I found her. I met a few of her professors and they all expressed their satisfaction with her.

At that stage I had left the seminary and became more involved in working with the laity. It was a great time for me and I learnt a lot from them. Diane and I shared in several aspects of theology especially in working with lay people. I realised that we priests (and religious also) needed to do more of this.

Religious sisters also needed to take this step as an essential stage in their growing up. She saw her own path in this and realised it was a time of her own growth as a religious sister.

She was a member of a little group of laity I had formed then in my work at the Pastoral Centre. She shared a lot of her insights with them and I saw them all grow together. Other members of the group were Holy Faith Sisters like Annie Gomes and Suzanne Roget who later left the convent and now lead extremely fruitful lives.

Others were lay persons like Gary Tagallie, Glenroy Taitt, Margaret Mohammed and Rose Olliviere. These are all married now and live lives fully in accord with their faith.

Of course, most of her time was spent at the Seminary where she continued to teach with great effect on the seminarians and other students there. She was much loved by all.

She also began to work on the renewal of religious life and formed a little centre for the renewal of the life. She worked hard with a little group. She trained them for a reform of religious life which naturally included participation of lay people who, as we know, are also called to holiness.

Her group consisted of different people, mainly women who were interested in the high ideals of the religious life. In fact in her last year she had retired from the seminary and concentrated on the people she worked with. Some of her group were married, notably Clifford and Antoinette Hamid. They had both been involved in the seminary and religious life.

She also worked hard for the renewal of religion among her own sisters. She often shared her own ideas with them and encouraged them to work for the renewal of their lives as Dominicans.

Sr Diane’s life has certainly been a blessing for the Church. We thank God for her and for all that she has contributed. May she rest in peace.

Remembering the bullfighter

Fr Martin Sirju

Diane the Bullfighter. Yes, that is how I remember Sr Diane. In class she took no prisoners. She was always waiting with a knife behind her back to slaughter any spurious arguments bolstering our theological positions.

She met us men head on. Sometimes we disagreed bitterly with her but at least she allowed us the freedom to disagree and to express our opinion. Always a sign of a good teacher.

I first met Sr Diane after leaving the scientific community of UWI, St. Augustine, where I pursued a degree in Natural Sciences. The seminary environment was new to me and the courses, totally unlike what I was used to, were somewhat discomforting.

Hail to the infamous divide between Science and the Arts that our education system is still famous for! In her class in Cycle 1 we encountered “English Methodology”.

I could not even pronounce the word “methodology” too well and hadn’t a clue what it was all about. Under her tutelage it soon became clear. It was a bit like UC 101, an English course that was mandatory for Natural Sciences students who often laboured under the burden of not being able to express themselves too well. At least so the administration thought.

After that stint with Sr Diane we went on to heavier stuff, essentially Systematic Theology. She was the only lecturer in the field for many years teaching Christology and Pneumatology.

She always felt Pneumatology was elusive, like the Spirit after which it was named (pneuma). She said students often complained that when the pneumatology course was finished they always asked themselves what they learnt and it was more difficult to say.

In fact Vatican II had just begun, after several centuries of silence, to revisit the theology of the Holy Spirit. In Christology she was more concrete and challenging. She often exposed our sexist bias. She was the only female lecturer at the time who raised this topic in an in-your-face kind of way.

She nearly paid the price for this. After one of those closed-door seminary (Vatican) investigations we heard that female lecturers and non-Catholic ones were to face the axe. It seemed true of the latter since we never saw him sometime after this visitation.

Sr Diane remained. We were grateful. In one class she gave us a story the details of which I can’t quite remember. Maybe someone who remembers it in detail can send it in to the Editor. It had to with a son who was injured and taken to the hospital.

The attending doctor said, “That’s my son!” We couldn’t figure it out since, from what she told us earlier, we knew it couldn’t be the father, yet it had to be the father who said, “That’s my son!” The answer lay in the fact that the mother was the doctor! We thought if it was a doctor it had to be the father. Sexist bias? Certainly! Remember in the 1980s doctors were still invariably men.

Another Christology class had us arguing about a proper theological anthropology (theology of the human person). We held to the Socratic notion that man was a rational animal. She argued not. Her argument went like this. Whenever we found a fundamental difference between two forms of life we differentiated them.

There was inanimate matter like stone and dust; then there was plant life; then there was animal life; but when it came to human life we continued to define it in terms of the animal.

Rather than say, “Man is a rational animal” we should say “Man is a rational person.” The difference between the two forms of life and the capacity of rationality demanded a trans-animal definition. What do you think?

Sr Diane was a tough marker but a fair one. She demanded the highest standard in written work and exams. Her outbursts in class were quite funny. Some of her expressions were typically “Dianic”: “Doh try dat!”, “Yuh tying up yuhself, man”, “Dat is male chauvinism!”

On the 10th anniversary of the Caribbean Theology Conference in a paper entitled The Power of Woman in Caribbean Life: Implications for a Caribbean Ecclesiology, she gave a magnificent critique of Dr Gerald Boodoo’s “theologizing in a forced context” concept arguing that women have always worked and triumphed in “forced contexts” and if we have to look for a way out of forced contexts look at Caribbean women and how they survived. The presentation deeply moved Dr Boodoo as he thought of his own mother.

Sr Diane also introduced us (as Dr Johnston did in Bible), as early as the mid-80s, to the latest insights in Christology, particularly the Jewishness of Jesus, through the works of Fr John Pawlikowski OSM, Professor of Catholic-Jewish Studies, long before the Jewishness of Jesus was in vogue in common theological discourse.

That has always been a mark of our small, underappreciated and sometimes ill-spoken seminary. In fact, when I was at Berkeley on my sabbatical I found myself to be the most theologically up-to-date person in my sabbatical group and I could hold my own with any of the MA students in class. I also found that some of the topics covered during the sabbatical were already significantly covered during my seminary days 20 years earlier!

I know vaguely of Sr. Diane’s extra-academic interests. I knew she had a pet project in Gran Couva involving young women and training in life skills. It was clearly the practical side of her liberation theology.

“Faith”, remarked the Danish Lutheran theologian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in the epilogue to Fear and Trembling, “is the highest passion in a person.” Sr Diane was a passionate person, and faith in Jesus Christ was the source of that passion.

As I write this tribute in the season of Easter I can see her facing death bravely. Unfortunately, I did not know of her death until a few days later via an e-mail from Fr Don Chambers of Jamaica. I immediately phoned Dr Everard Johnston who confirmed her passing.

And indeed it is just that, a passing from this transient life into the imperishable life to come. And should she be stopped for some reason at the gates of St Peter by the vigilant Apostle, I can see her telling him he must be mistaking her for some lesser mortal, and arguing him into capitulation with those inimitable words, “Yuh tying up yuhself, man!”