Lizzy’s Protestant identity at the Catholic convent school

Lizzy’s Protestant identity makes her the lone religious outsider among the fifty-one girls at the convent school, but it is more than a label: it determines how she answers Mother Magdalena’s authority, interprets Catholic ritual, and questions what faith requires of the living. The distinction remains real, yet the novel places it in everyday encounters—discipline, mourning, prayer, practical care, and uncertainty about miracles—rather than treating religious difference as a simple contest of doctrines.

Identity and the School’s Authority

The school’s first explicit rule for Lizzy is that its girls must not leave the grounds without permission or roam the streets of Santa Fe. Her challenge to the rule draws on an apparent inconsistency: other girls go home at night, so she asks how they get there. Mother Magdalena is not persuaded by Lizzy’s argument. The exchange establishes the convent as an institution with jurisdiction over her movements, even though Lizzy does not share its faith.

That jurisdiction is clarified in a more personal confrontation. Mother Magdalena expects the girls to address her as Mother, explaining that the title has a symbolic meaning in The True Faith. Lizzy refuses the religious form of address because Mother Magdalena is not her mother. She is careful to say that she means no disrespect, but insists on calling her ma’am. Her refusal is simultaneously religious and intimate: a Catholic term that might be ordinary within the school cannot erase the difference between a convent’s symbolic motherhood and Lizzy’s own bereavement.

Mother Magdalena responds by distinguishing belief from obedience. Lizzy may not belong to The True Faith, and the nuns may pray for her soul, but she is still under the Mother Superior’s authority. In view of Lizzy’s recent loss, Mother Magdalena does not insist on the title; she does, however, warn that impudence and disobedience will not be tolerated. The concession does not end the conflict, but it shows that the school’s rules can be applied with some recognition of Lizzy’s circumstances.

Belief, Ritual, and Mourning

By the end of her first week, Lizzy understands that she is the only girl at the school who is not of The True Faith. She is also confronted with practices that the other girls approach with expectation: nearly all of them pray for visions of the Virgin Mary. When Lizzy compares these hopes with visions associated with Indigenous people, Elinora explains that the girls are seeking a vision of the Virgin. She describes how a girl at church might kneel very still, eyes glazed and unblinking. Lizzy’s question about whether such stillness means a vision is occurring shows her observing the practice without simply adopting its interpretation.

Her distance from Catholic belief is bound up with a longing for the Methodist church in Independence, Missouri. Its faith seems to her straight, simple, and uncluttered beside the convent’s emphasis on blood, martyrdom, flesh, and agony. She does not understand why the sisters set up demanding rules and then appear to take satisfaction in guilt. Her questions about lonely God and the babies in Limbo for Unbaptized Infants are not detached theological puzzles: they bring her mother into the argument. Lizzy wonders how God could be lonely when he has the world he created, and whether he does not have her mother. The school’s religious language meets grief that Lizzy has not resolved.

The convent’s practices nevertheless reach her through sound and repeated observance. Evening prayers, incense, Latin, and responses in the chapel become an oasis amid the school’s confusion, giving Lizzy a quiet time in which to sort through her thoughts. It is then, more than during the day, that she allows herself to think directly about Mama. Her memories still surface in ordinary moments, when she imagines telling her mother something or anticipates what her mother would think; the chapel does not remove that grief but gives it a particular setting.

Practice and Care Beyond a Simple Divide

Lizzy’s outsider perspective also makes her attentive to what religious practice asks of people in daily life. The girls regularly give things up, including sugar, meat, butter, and jam, while Lizzy is hungry and takes a second helping. She does not join their sacrifices merely to fit in. Her appetite and their disapproving looks make the difference visible at the table, where belief is enacted through small bodily choices as well as formal prayer.

At the same time, the novel gives Catholic life forms that Lizzy can recognize through their effects rather than their doctrines. Sister Roberta explains that licensed midwives in Santa Fe need approval from a municipal judge and a certificate from their parish priest confirming their ability to administer baptism. This regulation makes the religious rite part of an urgent practical concern: a woman in danger after childbirth needs proper assistance, and the baby’s baptism has consequences in Lizzy’s understanding of the afterlife. Lizzy can find the idea of Limbo troubling while still worrying intensely about the infant’s safety.

Sister Roberta’s care for Mrs. Lacey offers another kind of religious practice. She puts the woman’s medicine in a small basket and leaves sweet coffee with milk and nutmeg beside it. When Lizzy questions this kindness, Sister Roberta explains that God forgives disobedience when it helps someone in need. The episode sets compassion beside rule-following and gives Lizzy evidence of a faith expressed as practical care. It does not convert her, but it complicates her impression of a community defined by guilt and impossible demands.

Baptism, Authority, and the Limits of Certainty

The conflict between religious identity and institutional power becomes especially sharp when Mrs. Lacey is baptized Catholic while in a coma. Lizzy tells a man who does not appear to pray in church that Mrs. Lacey was Methodist and had not wanted a Catholic baptism; because she lacked papers proving her baptism, the nuns had baptized her. Lizzy also explains that Mrs. Lacey had asked her to put a bag of asafetida around her neck if the baptism took place. Her question is whether asafetida can void the Catholic rite. The request for a remedy makes the dispute concrete: it concerns what can be done for a sick woman whose expressed religious wishes cannot be settled by her own action in the moment.

The reply Lizzy receives does not validate the proposed charm. Instead, the man says that God loves everyone alike and is not a punishing God keeping account of human faults. He presents this as his own opinion, not a formal ruling on baptism. His response shifts the question away from whether a ritual can be undone and toward the character of the God who receives people. For Lizzy, whose earlier objections have centered on suffering, guilt, and her mother, that distinction offers reassurance without requiring her to claim certainty about Catholic doctrine.

The staircase episode finally places Lizzy’s Protestant skepticism alongside the school’s Catholic interpretation of an apparent marvel. After the carpenter finishes the chapel staircase and leaves, the sisters and girls gather to look at it. Sister Roberta treats the absence of a banister as a call to faith and demonstrates a cautious way down; Mother Magdalena declares that the carpenter must have been Saint Joseph. Lizzy does not accept that conclusion. She remembers the carpenter as a human being who listened to her troubles, held her kitten, advised her about her father, and spoke of the sadness of leaving his own family. Her account preserves the ordinary human encounter that the convent’s interpretation turns into a miracle.

An Outsider’s Faith in People

Lizzy’s position does not resolve into either conversion or unchanging rejection. The novel’s author’s note describes her as reluctant to accept that the beggar carpenter was Saint Joseph, while leaving open a small possibility of belief through the blind cat, which is no longer blind after the carpenter holds it. The uncertainty belongs to Lizzy’s larger religious experience: she resists being required to believe what the community believes, but remains open to the possibility that something meaningful has happened.

The author’s note also identifies people as Lizzy’s most accessible miracles, including Bishop Lamy, Sister Roberta, and, finally, Elinora; most important is the fact that her father eventually wants her. This emphasis clarifies what her Protestant outsider status does in the story. It keeps her from accepting the school’s explanations automatically, while her encounters with care and restored attachment allow her understanding of goodness to grow beyond the boundary between Methodist and Catholic. Her faith remains unresolved, but her attention to what people do becomes a way of judging religious claims without pretending that every mystery has been settled.