BY MEG LAUGHLIN

 After three weeks of silence, Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin has decided to tell exactly why she
 abandoned her position of neutrality and became an advocate for those who believe that 6-year-old
 Elian Gonzalez should stay in the United States rather than return to Cuba.

 O'Laughlin now says that the night Elian met with his grandmothers in her home
 in Miami Beach, she learned that one of the grandmothers wanted to defect.

 She says she learned that the father and his family knew about Elian's mother's
 plan to bring him to Miami on a boat 10 days before they left.

 And finally, she says she learned that Elian's father had been physically abusive
 to the boy's mother.

 ``I've decided to talk,'' O'Laughlin told The Herald late Friday. She said Miami
 lawyer Roger Bernstein, who is fighting to keep the boy here, had visited her and
 persuaded her to tell what she knew to help his case. She said she had not done
 so previously because she did not want ``to endanger the family in Cuba.''

 ``But this is more about that little boy than anyone else, and I have to do whatever
 I can to help him,'' she says.

 Senior U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday
 in a lawsuit brought by Elian's Miami relatives, seeking to force the Immigration
 and Naturalization Service to grant Elian the right to request political asylum.

 The hearing is on the narrow issue of whether Hoeveler has jurisdiction in the
 case -- the INS argues he does not -- and it is unlikely that O'Laughlin's
 revelations will influence those discussions on points of law. But it is certain to
 reignite debate on her role in the Elian case.

 Since taking a stand three weeks ago, O'Laughlin has been at the center of
 international controversy. Her house had been chosen as a neutral site for the
 reunion between the grandmothers and Elian. But the day after the meeting,
 O'Laughlin told reporters that the meeting had changed her mind about where
 Elian should live.

 ``The laws of this nation always support the bond of a parent and child unless
 there is a dramatic circumstance,'' she said then. ``This is a dramatic time.
 Because, as I found myself imagining the child growing into manhood, the fear
 that seemed to be emanating made me question the environment this child has
 come from.''

 The reasons she gave, both in her public comments and in a later article written
 for The New York Times opinion pages, were vague: She believed Elian had
 bonded with his 21-year-old cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, and she sensed fear
 emanating from the grandmothers, which she believed was caused by the Cuban
 government.

 QUESTIONS RAISED

 But her explanations only raised more questions: How could she have formed a
 credible conclusion about the child and his cousin after being with them for less
 than hour? And how could she say that the grandmothers' nervousness during the
 meeting was caused by Cuba rather than demonstrators outside her house? Had
 her role as president of Barry University influenced her pronouncement?

 ``Sister Jeanne has to live in the neighborhood,'' was the reaction of Bob Edgar,
 the director of the National Conference of Churches, which sponsored the
 grandmothers' trip.

 Even as recently as Tuesday, in a three-hour interview with The Herald, O'Laughlin
 refused to detail her reasons. ``I had to be vague, and I know I sounded flaky,'' she
 said during that interview.

 But she continued to decline to be more specific until Friday, after she talked with
 Bernstein.

 She now says that at the end of the meeting at her house, after Elian and his
 Miami family had left, she had about five minutes alone with both grandmothers
 and then a few minutes with the mother of Elian's mother. In that time, she says,
 she got convincing information.

 ``I am not fluent in Spanish,'' she says. ``But I understand most of what is said to
 me in Spanish. And I clearly understood what was said to me that night.''

 CHANGE OF DEMEANOR

 Maj. Steve Robbins of the Miami Beach Police Department, who was in the house
 when O'Laughlin talked with the grandmothers, says he was standing at the
 bottom of the stairs when she went upstairs to see them.

 ``She was happy and relaxed when she went up, but when she came down after
 talking to them, she looked terribly distressed,'' he says.

 He says he thought something had happened that shocked her, and he asked her
 about it.

 ``But she would not answer,'' he says. ``She just looked terribly preoccupied.''

 O'Laughlin then walked out to the gate of her house and spoke about the meeting
 to the press and hundreds of people gathered there. Her comments were neutral:
 ``I believe in hope. It has been an informative day. I am so thankful for this
 opportunity to host this meeting and to touch lives.''

 But O'Laughlin says now that she was in fact devastated. When she went back
 into her house, she wept and prayed for most of the night.

 Early the next morning, she called Sister Janet Capone, the prioress of the Adrian
 Sisters in Adrian, Mich. Capone is O'Laughlin's superior.

 `SOMETHING IS WRONG'

 ``I know something is very wrong, and I can't be specific,'' Capone says
 O'Laughlin told her. ``So, I'm going to make a vague public statement that will be
 very controversial.''

 Janet Capone: ``I told her to follow her conscience.''

 But before she did, O'Laughlin called Maj. Robbins and asked him to come to her
 house to discuss the meeting with the grandmothers. Robbins says she asked
 him whether he had heard anything and he said no. He asked her what she had
 heard, and she said she could not tell him. He told her he had noticed how upset
 she was after talking with the grandmothers.

 ``She nodded, but she said nothing specific,'' he says. ``But I thought something
 big must have happened.''

 ``I did not tell anyone what I really knew until today,'' O'Laughlin said Friday.

 According to the version of events O'Laughlin now recounts, one of the
 grandmothers was present when her husband called Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian's
 great-uncle in Miami, and told him that Elian and his mother would be making the
 journey to Miami. The conversation occurred 10 days before Elian and his mother
 left Cuba.

 After hearing that, ``I thought that the boy must have come with his father's
 blessing,'' she said.

 NEW VIEW OF FATHER

 She also said Friday that information from one of the grandmothers that the father
 had been abusive to Elian's mother made her question how good a father he
 would be to Elian. And finally, she says, one of the grandmothers speaking to her
 about defecting made her question whether the child should go back.

 ``This talk of defecting got me to thinking; if one of the adults wanted out, perhaps
 it was not a good place for the child,'' she says.

 She says that the grandmother who wanted to defect spoke of a secret video in
 which she said she wanted to leave Cuba and that it would someday become
 available.

 The credibility of O'Laughlin's account may hinge on the level of her understanding
 of Spanish. Sister Leonor Esnard, who served as an interpreter at the meeting
 with the grandmothers, said she was not present for O'Laughlin's private moments
 with the grandmothers. ``I translated nothing they said to her,'' she said.

 O'Laughlin, 70, says she studied Spanish in college for four years and passed her
 language competency exam for her doctoral degree. She says she has read
 novels in Spanish. Sister Peg Albert, Barry's executive vice president, says
 O'Laughlin often interprets what people say in Spanish. ``She doesn't understand
 everything, but she gets the gist,'' Albert said Saturday.

 NOT A SPEAKER

 O'Laughlin is not known for speaking Spanish in public. She says she doesn't
 because she is embarrassed. ``I just don't have the tongue for it,'' she said.

 Ever since she met Elian, O'Laughlin says, she has lain awake at night thinking
 about him: because he is such a small child and she has always been a sap for
 small children, and because he lost his mother at the same age at which she lost
 her mother and she identifies with him.

 ``My father raised me and was wonderful,'' she says. ``I'm not opposed at all to
 any child being raised by a loving father.''

 And because she found the child's eyes so haunting: ``He is too young to have
 such old, tormented eyes,'' she says.

 ``It may be too late for him,'' she says. ``If he had gone back immediately before
 so many people on both sides wanted control of him, he would have been better
 off. But as it is now, I pray every day that whether he stays or goes back, he can
 survive this.''

 And, she says, she prays for something else: ``That I do what I believe is right
 and survive this, too.''