In 1945, Melissa had a religious experience in the church of St. Jean Baptiste in Manhattan that changed her life forever. From that moment on, she would say in later years, she got to know God. “I became a Catholic on my own when we moved back from Mexico to New York. It was a very, very deep experience. To say it quite openly, I fell in love with God at a very young age, and that’s been a very strong influence in my life ever since,” Melissa told the ADST Oral History website.
She became a devout Catholic and studied in Catholic schools and universities for the rest of her academic life. Her faith guided her actions, her career and relationships until her last days.
Late in life, she wrote to her son Christopher, “As you know, my deep religious experience came about because my mother sent me to a Catholic school because it was only two blocks from where we lived. The stories of saints and the catechism lessons exposed me to ideas, but that powerful gift of faith was knowing and communicating with a Supreme Force called God. As I was learning the ideas, that faith took hold of me deep inside and has never left me. Remember also, that I had had absolutely no exposure to religious thought up until the Catholic school – None!
I consider most religions more than just “clubs” with their special rules. They are trying to learn the reality of The Force, some do a better job than others. Catholicism, in my opinion has gotten the most complete version, but it is still incomplete. And then remember, that all religions have suffered from the frailties of their human leaders.”
In 2002, she took her family to the pew in the church where she had this religious experience.
For the twenty years after she retired in 2001, she lived in a small village, Agulo, in the Canary Islands, next to a Catholic church, which she would visit often.
She was a great fan of paleontologist and Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who viewed evolution not just as a biological phenomenon but also as a spiritual one. She read all of his books and wrote comments all over them. When in her old age she was no longer able to read, she kept these paperbacks in a special corner, with their dozens of tattered pages marked up from decades earlier.
Her ashes and those of her husband Alfred, who was a Quaker, are buried in a Catholic cemetery, Gate of Heaven, in Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.