Three times a day on Sunday for the past 52 years, Camille D’Arienzo, R.S.M., told millions of New Yorkers exactly what was on her mind. In her mellifluous, Queens-accented voice, Sister D’Arienzo interrupted breaking news of crime, traffic and weather on New York’s news station, 1010 WINS. In 60-second bursts—called “New York Minutes”—she offered inspirational stories of humans doing good in their community, provided holiday greetings and, more often than not, challenged listeners to think about moral questions swirling around them on the streets of New York and beyond.
In 1979, she questioned the arrest of an undocumented immigrant couple that left their children orphaned in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. In the 1980s, she addressed the murder of clerics by repressive governments in Central America, and in the 1990s, she spoke out against the genocide in Rwanda. There were segments opposing capital punishment, welcoming the L.G.B.T.Q. community into the Catholic Church, railing against nuclear proliferation and, later, the war in Iraq, and even offering forgiveness to penitent abusive priests. Though she was part of the Catholic Church with the Sisters of Mercy, she did not speak for the Catholic Church.
“I was nobody’s spokesperson,” Sister D’Arienzo told me. “I was an independent voice.”
Sister D’Arienzo, a New York City legend, delivered her final commentary the first week of June. At 92 years old, she felt it was time to retire. But for weeks, letters, emails and phone calls have flooded in about how much she will be missed—not just for her voice but for the actions behind it.
“Hers was the longest continuous voice on 1010 WINS in history,” Scott Herman, the former chief operations officer of WINS’ parent company, CBS Radio, and now chairman of the Broadcasters Foundation of America, said. “She didn’t toe the line. She said what she believed. She is a progressive woman who had a very big pulpit, which was over three million listeners a week.”
Sister D’Arienzo’s broadcasting career began in 1973, when WINS was searching for a religious commentator to replace a priest who was getting married and stepping down from the job. Mr. Herman explained that Westinghouse Broadcasting’s plan, when starting the 24-hour station in 1965, included political and religious commentary to break up the 22-minute chunks of hard news day after day. There was a rabbi, a Greek Orthodox priest, a Lutheran minister—and, eventually, Sister D’Arienzo.
At the Sisters of Mercy residence in Queens, after her last broadcast this spring, Sister D’Arienzo—a tall woman with white hair, a lined face and a calm, alto voice—recalled how she got the job over 50 years ago. Sister D’Arienzo studied communications at Fordham University and had just taken a position teaching television and radio at Brooklyn College—the only female faculty member in that role. She was also writing regularly for the Brooklyn Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, where a fellow writer, the Rev. Howard “Howie” Basler, was approached about the WINS job.
She recalls him saying to her: “I have neither the voice nor the interest. But I think you have both.”
When Sister D’Arienzo inquired at WINS, there was a long silence, followed by: “‘Well, we never thought about a…a…a woman for the job.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’d like you to think of this woman because I’m able and ready.’”
The station executives asked for an audition, scheduled for Sept. 24. “As soon as I heard the date, I knew the job would be mine,” she explained. “Sept. 24 is the feast day of Our Lady of Mercy. Our feast day. So I knew it was a good sign.”
Her commentary, meticulously written on a single page of her spiral notebook and delivered by telephone to the station each week, was often informed by experiences from her life of service. That included visiting prisoners on death row, traveling to El Salvador and Nicaragua as a reporter, and helping find an apartment and a job for a homeless teenager from Ann Arbor, Mich., whom she met while getting her doctorate from the University of Michigan. (She wrote her dissertation on CBS broadcasting legend Eric Sevareid.)
Maureen King, R.S.M., now a member of the Institute Leadership Team for the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, grew up listening to Sister D’Arienzo’s talks from her home in Flatbush, Brooklyn. When Sister King became a nun later in life, she wound up living in the same Queens convent as Sister D’Arienzo, who was incredibly welcoming to her. With her broadcasts, Sister D’Arienzo touched people of all faiths because she personalized her weekly messages, Sister King said. “Camille combined what was going on in the world with her own world, and it was appealing to everybody,” she said.
Well, almost everybody.
Sister King’s father, a political conservative, would listen to the broadcasts every Sunday and then argue with his daughter because she knew Sister D’Arienzo personally and he knew she agreed with her on most issues. “He would ambush me and take exception with every word she said,” Sister King said with a laugh. “I used to say, why are you telling me? I’ll give you her phone number, and you can tell her what you think.”
One of Sister D’Arienzo’s more controversial topics was the ordination of women to the priesthood. In the 1990s, after Brooklyn’s Bishop Thomas Daly issued a public statement on women’s ordination, Sister D’Arienzo took to the airwaves to address his view that the topic was no longer up for discussion.
“But she ended it by saying, ‘Well, we’ll see about that,’” remembers Margaret Dempsey, R.S.M., who worked with her on a Sisters of Mercy leadership team in 1993. “That’s how her broadcast ended.”
The following Monday, Sister D’Arienzo was summoned to the bishop’s office and told that she could no longer tag her broadcasts with “from the Diocese of Brooklyn.” From then on, the tag would simply be “The comments expressed are solely those of Sister Camille D’Arienzo of the Sisters of Mercy.” When their meeting was over, the bishop offered her his blessing. When he was done, Sister D’Arienzo offered the bishop hers.
“She went beyond the beyond,” Sister Dempsey said. “She is so brave.”
Walking the walk
Spending time in Central America in the 1980s reporting on the civil wars and murders of priests and nuns for the National Catholic Reporter was one of the few times Sister D’Arienzo was ever truly frightened. One afternoon while riding a bus on assignment, she and the other passengers were stopped by soldiers who boarded the bus and then forced everyone to get off. “I remember thinking, ‘Where are they going to take us?’ But they eventually let us back on the bus, and we went on our way. But it was a little frightening. And I’m not afraid of much.”
After one broadcast on the protesting Madres of Central America, a group of mothers searching for their disappeared children, one angry listener sent Sister D’Arienzo a threatening letter. But she refused to be intimidated, and the next week, spoke of the Madres again. She never heard another word from her harasser.
For those who know her personally, it’s not only her reporting and radio commentary that impressed them. She didn’t just talk the talk, Sister Dempsey said. “She walked the walk.” In 1993, Sister D’Arienzo started the Cherish Life Circle, which urged people to sign a form called the Declaration of Life, saying that if they were ever to be murdered, their killer should be spared the death penalty. The first to sign was a fellow Queens native, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. The circle also organized gatherings for the families of victims to help them grieve and heal.
Rather than merely speaking out against capital punishment in the abstract, Sister D’Arienzo forged a friendship with an inmate on death row in Indiana in the late 1990s. David Paul Hammer, who had killed one of his fellow prisoners, reached out to her because of her activism on the subject and asked for her prayers and for someone to visit. When no one else wanted to go, Sister D’Arienzo stepped up and became his spiritual advisor.
Sister D’Arienzo encouraged him to make art for Christmas cards, which the Sisters of Mercy then sold to help at-risk and abused youth. “He was molested by one of his uncles when he was a child,” she explained. She helped get a priest to hear Mr. Hammer’s confession of murder. “Afterward, when I walked back in to meet them, David was flying high, but the priest looked half dead,” she remembers. Mr. Hammer’s sins had worn him out.
She eventually helped Mr. Hammer convert to Catholicism and became his godmother. When he was near death of natural causes in 2019, she brought him one of her famous cheesecakes. “You can’t bring any food into the prison. But I said to the guard: ‘I’ll make a deal with you. If you let me have one piece of this cheesecake for David you can have the rest.’ And that’s what happened. I’m not above or below bribing people.”
Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, which works toward acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics nationwide, said that Sister D’Arienzo, whom he met while a cub reporter for The Tablet, was an early proponent of gay rights in the church. Sister D’Arienzo, who occasionally wrote for America magazine as well, never held back her opinions but also stayed true to her commitment to serve the poor, the suffering and the oppressed, he said.
“Whether writing a letter to a government office or making a cheese sandwich for a homeless person on her doorstep, Camille saw them as equals,” DeBernardo said. “It’s rare to find that combination in someone. Usually people who are more structurally oriented in dealing with political issues are not good at taking care of people. But she did both.”
The message from Sister D’Arienzo, who served as president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious from 1998 to 1999, was always one of love and forgiveness, Sister King said. When a nun is taking her final vows and entering the convent, she chooses what short motto will be written inside her ring. Sister D’Arienzo’s motto is: “She went about doing good.”
“And that’s what she’s done her whole life,” Sister King said.
A difficult choice
Sister D’Arienzo, whose mother died when she was 8 years old, was sent at age 11 to boarding school at Our Lady of Mercy Academy in Syosset, Long Island. In her teens, she became interested in a life of service after meeting the Sisters of Mercy there. But deciding to become a nun was one of the most difficult decisions of her life.
“It wasn’t an easy choice. I had a boyfriend. I liked having a boyfriend,” she said. Sister D’Arienzo visited her parish priest, Father Touhey, for advice, but he said it was her choice to make. “Let’s take three days to pray on it,” he suggested. When she decided to join the convent, Father Touhey predicted she’d be back home in six months. “I entered the convent in 1951 at 18 and haven’t left yet,” she said, shrugging.
Sister D’Arienzo has also been a dedicated friend and teacher. Mr. Herman, before he ran CBS, was a student of Sister D’Arienzo’s at Brooklyn College. She helped him get his first job at WINS. “She was the first professor to show interest in me and told me what I should do for a living. I was this Jewish kid from Brooklyn, but she was a second mother to me.”
When Mr. Herman was sick 20 years ago with a serious lung infection, Sister D’Arienzo showed up at his bedside at Lenox Hill Hospital’s I.C.U. “I was unconscious and hadn’t responded to anyone,” Mr. Herman said. “But when I heard her, my eyes opened up. It was that voice.”
These days, Sister D’Arienzo is “a bit bored,” she said, but stays busy reading several books a week. “It was time to stop,” she said of her broadcasts. “I’m almost 93 years old. I’ve been doing well, and I don’t want to make a fool of myself.” She has diabetes, but is otherwise in good health, though she admits that her memory is starting to fade.
She and her fellow sisters have meals together each day, play Rummikub and keep up with world events by watching the evening news. Their favorite recent news flash was the election of Pope Leo XIV, not only because he is an American but because he’s “one of us,” she said. Pope Leo was born in a Chicago hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy, had an aunt who was a Sister of Mercy and worked alongside the sisters during his time in Peru.
Sister D’Arienzo hopes that the newly elected pope can build bridges in a deeply divided United States and help solve some of the issues plaguing not just this country but the planet. The problems are not that different from the ones she addressed on the radio for decades, though the immigration issue seems to be worsening. “All people want is a safe place to raise their children,” she said, shaking her head.
As for women being ordained as priests, the 92-year-old nodded. “It’s going to happen,” she said, smiling widely. “But probably not in my lifetime.”
