Audrey Thorney entered the Rosaline convent in 1960, a year recognized as a watershed by historians of women's religious life in America. The postwar vocation surge was at its peak, and the exodus in which two of every three nuns would leave their convents still lay ahead. As Sister Emmanuel, she was under the direction of a novice mistress considered harsh even by the standards of the era. After two-and-a-half years in Sister Wulfram's novitiate, Sister Emmanuel was sent to a college for nuns and then was assigned to teach in her order's schools. As the Catholic Church in general was...