我不认为我想成为一名修女

 

几十年后，在国会大厦二楼的套房里，南希-佩洛西对那些自信地断言她从小就渴望当官的人表示愤慨。

"那不是我，"她说。

"我甚至没有看到自己是那种角色。

" 她告诉我，反驳这种误解是她写回忆录的主要动机。

有趣的是，她将2008年的书名定为《认识你的力量》。

Decades later, from her suite on the second floor of the Capitol, Nancy Pelosi expressed exasperation with those who confidently asserted that she had yearned for office from childhood. “That’s not who I am,” she said. “I didn’t even see myself in that kind of role.” Countering that misperception was her chief motivation in writing her memoir, she told me. Interestingly enough, though, she titled the 2008 book Know Your Power.

 

她精力充沛的母亲确实为她的独生女儿考虑了职业，但这是在当时对女性开放的少数领域之一。

她希望她的女儿有 "自由飞翔，以我自己的方式体验生活"，但她也想 "保护我免受世界的影响，以及所有潜在的痛苦和失望，"南希-佩洛西说。

"而在她的心目中，这个两难问题的答案很简单。

我应该成为一名修女"。

Her energetic mother did have a career in mind for her only daughter, but it was in one of the few fields then open to women. She wanted her daughter to have “the freedom to fly away and experience life on my own terms,” but she also wanted “to protect me from the world, with all its potential heartaches and disappointments,” Nancy Pelosi said. “And in her mind, the answer to this dilemma was simple: I should become a nun.”

当民主党在2006年赢得对众议院的控制权，为她成为第一位女议长铺平道路时，当她走上讲台接受民主党核心小组对该职位的认可时，当时伊利诺伊州的议员拉姆-伊曼纽尔给了她一个吻。

他在她耳边说："你的父母会感到非常自豪的"。

她想，"在那一瞬间，我被带到了巴尔的摩，来到了我们的家，我想，好吧，我的父母会非常自豪的。

" 然后她把伊曼纽尔的评论告诉了她的民主党同僚，并作了澄清。

"他们没有把我培养成众议院议长，"她说。

"他们把我培养成圣洁的人，培养成善良的人，这就是他们衡量自己是否会感到高兴的标准。

"

When Democrats won control of the House in 2006, paving the way for her to become the first female Speaker, then-congressman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois gave her a kiss as she made her way to the podium to accept the endorsement of the Democratic Caucus for the post. “Your parents would be so proud,” he whispered in her ear. She thought, “In that instant I was taken to Baltimore, to our home, and I thought, well, my parents would be so proud.” Then she told her fellow Democrats about Emanuel’s comment, and offered a clarification. “They didn’t raise me to be Speaker of the House,” she said. “They raised me to be holy, to be good, and that was their measure of what they would be happy about.”

 

大南希在家里放着圣母雕像，床头放着宗教书籍，她毫不掩饰她对女儿未来成为修女的计划。

这种野心在当时的虔诚的天主教家庭中并不罕见。

南希-达莱桑德罗在三一学院的朋友和同学珍妮-林奇告诉我："你知道，她的母亲真的想要一个女孩--[在]五个男孩之后，"。

"我一直有这样的印象，她的母亲向上帝承诺，'给我一个女孩，我将为你把她送进修道院'。

小南希的高中班级中有相当一部分人在1958年毕业时将进入修会，尽管并非所有的人都会留下来。

"她的母亲认为她会成为一个好修女，"玛丽-安-坎帕内拉，一个来自小意大利的邻居和小南希的童年玩伴，告诉我。

Big Nancy, who kept statues of the Blessed Mother in her home and religious books on her bedside table, made no secret of her plan for her daughter’s future as a nun. That ambition was not uncommon for devout Catholic families at the time. “You know, her mother really wanted a girl—[after] five boys,” Jeanne Lynch, a friend and classmate of Nancy D’Alesandro at Trinity College, told me. “I always had the impression that her mother promised God, ‘Give me a girl and I’ll put her in the convent for you.’” A fair share of Little Nancy’s high school class would enter religious orders when they graduated in 1958, although not all of them would stay. “Her mother thought she would make a good nun,” Mary Ann Campanella, a neighbor and childhood playmate of Nancy from Little Italy, told me.

 

不过，在早期，小南希决定宗教生活不适合她，至少不是她母亲心目中的那种生活。

"我不认为我想成为一名修女，"她多年后告诉《国家天主教记者》。

"但我想我可能想成为一名牧师。

那里似乎有更多的权力，对教区发生的事情有更多的决定权"。

Early on, though, Little Nancy decided the religious life wasn’t for her, at least not the one her mother had in mind. “I didn’t think I wanted to be a nun,” she told the National Catholic Reporter years later. “But I thought I might want to be a priest. There seemed to be a little more power there, a little more discretion over what was going on in the parish.”

 

南希-达莱桑德罗从小就对自己的信仰很认真，受到家庭的庇护。

Nancy D’Alesandro grew up serious about her faith and sheltered by her family.