Woman Becomes a Nun at 17 to 'Fulfill' Her Mother's Wishes. She Recalls Exact Moment She Realized She Had to Leave (Exclusive) 

03/14/2025 04:00 AM

Maryanne Braverman, now 77, spent 10 years in a New York-based convent before conversations with a therapist made her rethink her direction

• Maryanne Braverman joined a New York-based convent just after graduating high school, at age 17. She was a nun for 10 years and committed for life by taking her final vows.
• Eventually, however, she met with a therapist and decided to rethink her direction. The Vatican granted her permission to leave the novitiate, and Braverman's secular life began in 1975.
• Now 77 years old, Braverman tells PEOPLE about the friends and values she kept with her as she stepped into a world beyond the Church.

To some, places of religion can be places of restriction, but when Maryanne Braverman graduated high school, she saw the church as her route to freedom.

At 17, she thought she might dig into her knack for the sciences and become a pharmacist, which wasn't a common career path for young women in 1965. Many of her female classmates went into teaching, nursing or office jobs as secretaries, but during their pursuits, they'd live at home.

"Because you stayed in that house until you were married ... We're talking the early '60s. That was the world I lived in," life-long New Yorker Braverman, now 77, tells PEOPLE exclusively. "My mother was very controlling. She was into everything, and I wanted to do something that I felt was on my own."

But her mother's greatest dream — for one of her daughters to become a nun — ended up doubling as Braverman's "way to escape" from the bounds of her home. The high school graduate opted to pivot away from her scientific inclinations. She turned down her two college acceptances and joined a convent instead, where she spent the next 10 years of her life.

"It was a very socially acceptable way for a young Catholic girl at 17 to fly the coop," she explains. "Most people don't think you'd join a religious order to do that, being told what to do. [But] we weren't told what to do. I was studying, they had college courses for us."

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On her 17th birthday, Braverman rode the train a few miles up to Peekskill, where the nuns were trained. There, she was psychologically tested to ensure that her abilities were up to the task. This, she notes, was not something they did with priests. However, Braverman feels strongly that such testing was a proper way to avoid religious figures "mishandling" situations due to a lack of understanding of human psychology.

"I look back to the order of nuns I joined and think they had their heads on straight. They knew that you had to be selective, and just because somebody grows up and they think they want to be a nun doesn't mean they're going to be the right fit or the right person for the work we do," she tells PEOPLE 60 years later. "Because it's not just [that] you go and pray. There are orders that you go and you pray most of the time for the world and whatever. But that was not my thing."

Unlike cloistered nuns, Braverman went to live in an active convent that worked with unwed mothers and troubled children, who were either considered "delinquent or PINS, which means [a] person in need of supervision," she says. She was also taught classes in what was known as the "House of Studies" at the religious property in Peekskill, which was affiliated with Fordham University.

"It was college-level classes. I remember English and history, and then priests would come to teach theology or philosophy, not so much math and science there," she says. It took her about eight years to complete her course load, between working and studying.

Braverman underwent three years of training after entering the novitiate, where she was surrounded by women of all ages, some also fresh out of high school and others who joined later in life. At first, the convent operated an institution outside of the city, and "PINS" would come to live with others their age.

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"They'd learn activities, crafts, playing guitar, singing all kinds of different things they would do to keep occupied, and then have psychological counseling of the counseling they needed so they could be productive citizens," Braverman recalls.

Eventually, the nuns decided to relocate their institution to Brooklyn, where they could be on-site to help the neighborhood. They offered counseling and family therapy in the hopes that their services would be more effective in the actual environments where the children lived. They'd also house kids who'd been in family court, giving them a place of sanctity after years of parental neglect or even abuse.

For a while — 10 years in fact — the work was rewarding and the lifestyle made sense to Braverman. She was actively helping her community, and she was a leader in doing so, what they called a "group mother."

"I loved it. Well, I loved it until I was just burned out," she tells PEOPLE. "It's very intense, and it's also physically exhausting."

At a certain point, Braverman made her final vows, meaning theoretically she was committed to lifelong service in the church. And Braverman wasn't a quitter, in fact, quite the opposite. She was determined by nature and rarely left things unfinished, but looking back, she admits that she wasn't necessarily "building the religious grounding for staying" with her fellow nuns.

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"I loved the work, I loved the people I worked with. It was all good," Braverman reflects. Then she was offered more administrative work within the order, the type of job one might do in a secular office. She would be applying for grants to run the programs and dealing with employee payroll. As she geared towards generally secular work, Braverman decided to meet with a therapist to discuss her future.

"I'm a big believer in therapy because I find as you talk, you answer your own questions," she says. Recalling their conversations, she adds, "One week I said, 'I could really leave the community if I'm going to work in an office. There's lots of offices in this world.'"

After that breakthrough, Braverman truly started grappling with her motivations for entering the church. 

"I really entered to fulfill my mother's wishes," she explains. "That's really what it was, and I got caught up in the life, which was satisfying until it wasn't."

After a decade of work, Braverman had completed it all. She took her final vows, but now what? Something seeped in when her sense of accomplishment diminished. 

And her sisters saw it too. In fact, they were the ones who urged her into therapy. "I was living with three or four other nuns, and they just observed a change in my personality," she explains. "I guess they were seeing depression. I was just dragging along."

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Once she decided to leave, she found an office job in a law firm, working in the accounting department. Some friends helped her land an apartment in Brooklyn Heights. And by the time she was ready to enter life beyond the convent in 1975, the church had evolved in a way that didn't make Braverman feel trapped. Even the nuns' attire had progressed past ultra-conservative frocks and full-coverage veils. The church was giving everyone more room to breathe, and in Braverman's case, she felt enough space to change her mind.

"I probably left within a couple months of deciding I wanted to, because they don't want you there if you don't have the right mindset," Braverman explains. "And not that I would've been an obnoxious troublemaker, but if somebody wants to be somewhere else, they're not going to say, 'Well, no, you've got to stay till everything is finalized.'"

Plus, she wasn't the first sister to stray. 

"Many nuns who'd been in before me were gradually leaving, and fewer women entered because you didn't just have three or four choices as a good Catholic woman [anymore]," says the New Yorker. "There's tons of jobs that are open to women now that really you wouldn't even get an interview for certain things back in the day."

Because Braverman had taken her final vows, leaving was still a fairly involved process. She had to write a letter to the nun in charge of her sect in New York, and then that woman had to write a letter to Rome.

"I had the job, I had left, but I was technically still under my vows," says Braverman. Then one day she got a call summoned up to Peekskill, where her journey first began at 17. There, 10 years later, the leading nun handed over a letter written in Latin. It was a note directly from the Vatican, releasing Braverman of her final vows.

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"She handed it to me kind of saying, 'In case you ever have to prove you're not a religious sister anymore,'" Braverman recalls with a laugh. "I think people would mostly believe it if I said it. It's a little harder to prove you are one. I just look like everybody else. But I kept my smile to myself and thanked her."

Though she was leaving behind the church at large, Braverman didn't necessarily have to say goodbye to her sisters. They were deeply bonded, having worked so hard together to help kids and adolescents, then sitting down for a cup of tea at the end of the day. They were her coworkers, then on the other side of the church, they became her friends. Eventually, some of those confidantes followed and pursued a secular life as well.

Indeed, Braverman's life was truly secular, and she was constantly adjusting in those early days after leaving. It was a new adventure, and she was excited by her work in the law first. Then she began dating, "and that was a whole new world too," Braverman remembers.

Getting birth control was also a major deal. She didn't waste time before knocking on the door of Planned Parenthood in Downtown Brooklyn. Having cared for "unwed mothers" in her early years in the novitiate, Braverman was "certainly aware of young people having unplanned pregnancies," she says. "Got to be responsible. I knew that."

Naturally, her religious inclinations waned, and Braverman stopped going to church. She no longer participated in the kinds of ceremonial practices that so dominated older, traditional Catholic life. 

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Then when she married, Braverman married a Jewish man, though she notes that he wasn't particularly religious either. "He felt more culturally Jewish than anything," she adds.

Marrying outside of her faith wasn't an act of rebellion, though. Braverman just wanted to expand her options after so many years outside of the dating pool.

"I felt like I was a little late getting married. I felt like there were not a lot of Catholic men hanging out waiting for me to show up on the scene," she shares. "So I cast my net wide, but I didn't regret that. That was OK."

Generally, Braverman doesn't hold any resentment towards Catholicism. In fact, she's grateful. She feels like it helped her "to transition from a child to a grown-up woman," and she learned those skills from the role model women with whom she was living. 

As for the main reason Braverman became a nun in the first place — her mother — there wasn't too much friction there either. "She didn't give me too much grief because she had come to learn a little better who I was by then. I wasn't the kid who left home," Braverman says. "There was no hostility at all."

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Her mom "got a lot of glory" from telling people she had a daughter in the convent. It was a big deal then, and religion was just that important to Braverman's mother. But now that Braverman has gained her own maturity and wisdom, she's developed a deeper understanding of her mother's attachment to religion.

"I get out in the morning to do a yoga class, but for my mom, it was going to church every day," Braverman tells PEOPLE. "She had her friends and she talked to them after mass, and it was just part of her life."