Faithful Women

A few entries ago I mentioned that I wanted to differentiate between Nuns and Sisters as I think this clarification will help us see that the women of the LCWR are indeed being faithful to their foundresses and their charisms.     Sisters were not meant to be nuns.  
    A nun is a Religious woman under vows who belongs to a contemplative community that practices some form of cloister or enclosure.  A Religious Sister is a woman, normally under vows, who is not bound to cloister or enclosure so that she is free to engage in the public ministries of the Church.  Women  become nuns for the life of prayer.  Women become Sisters to collaborate in the apostolic life of the Church.  Sisters are not un-cloistered nuns--they are and were originally meant to be--lay women who consecrate themselves to Chirst's mission in the world. 
      Nuns normally come from the monastic orders—Benedictines, Cistercians, Carthusians—or the Mendicant Orders—Carmelites, Franciscans (Poor Clares), Augustinians, Dominicans.  Some of the later religious congregations—the Passionists and Redemptorists to mention two—also have communities of enclosed women affiliated to them.  Several communities of women founded at the time of the Council of Trent who, according to the norms of Trent and its Reforms, practice some degree of enclosure are also nuns, e.g. the Visitations.  The Ursulines were organized as companies of lay women, consecrated virgins, by Saint Angela Merici,  but were forced to accept enclosure in the late sixteenth century, by becoming nuns.  Their enclosure was never as strict as that of the mendicant or monastic nuns and by the Second Vatican Council they had been able to return to the original vision of their founder and so should be considered as Sisters. 
        Religious Sisters were never intended to be cloistered and date, for the greater part, from the seventeenth century.  Two of the first communities of Sisters were Mary Ward’s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Loreto Sisters) founded in 1609  and Vincent De Paul and Louise de Marillac’s Daughters of Charity founded in 1633.  Mary Ward had tremendous difficulty having her community recognized by the Church because they refused to accept enclosure.  The community was suppressed in 1630 but the women did not disband and within nine years had revived, but it did not receive papal approval until 1703 and canonical status until 1877.  Mary Ward intended her Sisters to have the same freedom to respond to the needs of the Church, especially the education of women, that Ignatius had given the Jesuits.  To that end the Sisters did not originally wear distinctive garb or adopt various monastic customs.
        The Daughters of Charity—because they stayed in France and flew under Rome’s radar—had a bit more success but they faced the same challenge of Mary Ward’s group in as that Canon Law at the time required women under religious vows to be cloistered.  Vincent de Paul’s solution was that the Daughters of Charity would not take perpetual vows but make their vows for only a year at a time.   They still renew thier vows annually.  This provided the required canonical loophole.  Vincent de Paul explicitly did not want his Daughters to be nuns and he gave them the following admonition:

for a monastery, only the houses of the sick,

for cell, a rented room,

for chapel, the parish church,

for cloister, the streets of the city,

for enclosure, obedience,

for grille, the fear of God,

for veil, holy modesty

Boy wouldn’t that drive the boys over in Rome crazy today—no veils, living in apartments, coming and going as they need.  Well, actually most of the boys in Rome have gotten used to it as Italian Sisters are, for the most part, not unlike their American counterparts.  It is some Americans—both living in Rome and here in the U.S.—that aren’t happy with the Sisters.  

      Other congregations were founded on like models of communities of women founded not for the purpose of prayer or monastic observance, but for apostolic work—especially among women.  One of the most significant of these groups was the Sisters of Mercy founded in Dublin in 1831 by Catherine McAuley.  McAuley also saw her community as a group of lay women banded together to provide assistance to women and children but it was Archbishop Murray who insisted they become a non-cloistered religious institute. 

       Other women were recruited to communities who, like nuns, were affiliated to the mendicant communities but whose purpose was for education or nursing.  Thus various congregations such as the School Sisters of Saint Francis, the Amityville Dominicans, or the Carmelite Sisters of the Aged and Infirm—to name only three of literally hundreds—were formed.  The Sisters usually wore a religious habit similar to that of the nuns affiliated to the Orders but they were not nuns, and were not thought of as nuns, because they did not have enclosure. 

        Then there were monastic women who came to this country as nuns from the great Benedictine Abbeys of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.  Usually recruited from those abbeys by monks who had made foundations in America, the nuns arrived and found that they were needed for teaching or nursing.  Consequently, while they came from cloisters in Europe, they were not cloistered here and gradually—especially with the 1917 Code of Canon Law—slid over from being nuns to being Religious Sisters.  Several groups of Dominican nuns who had come from Europe also gave up the cloister and became Sisters to undertake needed apostolic work in the United States. 
       A final category of Sisters are groups such as the School Sisters of Notre Dame or the Religious of the Sacred Heart who were organized in Europe for educational work in the late 18^th or in the 19^th centuries.  They too were never meant to be nuns but Sisters but, influenced by the romantic revival of the early 19^th century and the love for all things medieval, adopted many of the monastic customs of the enclosed Orders and sometimes a watered down version of monastic spirituality.  Monastic or mendicant nuns’ customs such as the wearing of a wedding dress and veil on the day one received the habit (and thinking of oneself as a “bride of Christ”—a monastic characteristic), or the covering of the face with a veil during communion, the sitting in choir stalls in chapel, even the breaking of sleep for a “midnight office” in chapel were borrowed by some of these communities to give their Sisters a sense of being set-apart from the laity.    
        A particularly interesting community of Religious Women are the Daughters of the Heart of Mary who were established in France in 1791—in the middle of the French Revolution—when the Church and its institutions were being dismantled by the anti-clerical government.  Consequently the members of this Society dressed in ordinary clothes and went by the title “Mademoiselle”  (Miss) rather than by “Mère” (Mother) more common among French nuns and Sisters.  The Daughters of the Heart of Mary never adopted either a habit or a religious title and yet they were canonical religious.  
       I hope by this we can see that all this nonsense about wearing habits and not living in apartments  and the dropping of the vestiges of monastic customs that never were proper for Religious Sisters is just so much hooey.  These good sisters who are under attack these days by the likes of Cardinal Law and Archbishop Lori and Fat-Cat Anderson of the Knights of Columbus are what they should be and were founded to be —good and generous lay women who have given their lives to the service of women, of children, of  the poor and of those who have no one else to serve their needs.  You go girls.  

Sing a New Church Into Being



Sister of Mercy Betty Campbell welcomes

visitors to the house of refuge she runs for

women in Ciduad Juarez, across the border

from El Paso.  Catherine McCauley would

be very proud of how her spirit is kept alive

by women like Sister Betty. 

  

“Sing a New Church” by Delores Dufner, OSB
Tune: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”

Summoned by the God who made us
Rich in our diversity,
Gathered in the name of Jesus,
Richer still in unity:

Let us bring the gifts that differ
And, in splendid, varied ways,
Sing a new church into being,
One of faith and love and praise

Radiant risen from the water;
Robed in holiness and light,
Male and female in God’s image
Male and female God’s delight:

Trust the goodness of creation;
Trust the Spirit strong within.
Dare to dream the vision promised
Sprung from seed of what has been.

Bring the hopes of every nation;
Bring the art of every race.
Weave a song of peace and justice:
Let it sound through time and space.

Draw together at one table
All the human family;
Shape a circle ever wider
And a people ever free.

I was at Mass this morning with a group of Religious Sisters (one affiliated with the LCWR) and as they sang the hymn “Sing a New Church into  Being” I could not but help see the connection between Rome’s “crackdown on the nuns” and the issues surrounding Father Guarnizo and the refusal of communion to a woman at her mother’s funeral because the woman is in a same-sex relationship.

Summoned by the God who made us
Rich in our diversity,
Gathered in the name of Jesus,
Richer still in unity:

Let us bring the gifts that differ

and in splendid varied ways,

sing a new church into being

one of faith and love and praise

Songs like this point out that there are two Churches today and that the Sisters have a radically different idea of “The Church” than do the clerics who are taking them to task.  It is not so simple as to talk about Magisterium and “rebels.” Now I am not going to make theological claims here, but as a historian I have to speak about differing theological opinions and how they play out.  Just as in the ninth century Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus held conflicting theologies of the Eucharist, so too we have to talk today about the conflicting theologies of Church held by some who belong to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and some who are members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 

      “Well,” some will object, “there really can’t be a conflict—CDF has the final word on the faith of the Church and so any opinions they judge erroneous are just that—erroneous.”   Well, you might think so, but that is precisely the problem.  The one theology of Church is top-down and “the faith” is determined by what the magisterium declares it to be.     The other theology of Church is “ground-up” and the faith of the Church is what the people actually believe.  While for the last century and a half or so the “top-down” model has prevailed, throughout the history of the Church’s two millennia there have been times when the faith has been a matter of “top-down” and times when it has been a matter of “ground-up.”  In the Arian controversies of the fourth century, for example, orthodoxy was not defined by the bishops (the majority of whom were Arian) and magisterium, but of the rank and file faithful whose faith in the divinity of Christ put them in opposition to an alliance of hierarchy and Emperor. In fact even Pope Liberius faltered in orthodoxy, acceding to a semi-Arian formula proposed by Basil of Ancyra that did not accord the consubstantiality  of the Divine Nature to the Holy Spirit.  It was the dogged faithfulness of the faithful themselves that maintained the orthodoxy of Trinitarian belief against the “magisterium” of the day.  

      And this is an issue not to overlook in this conflict between Rome and “the nuns”—the alliance of hierarchy and Emperor for the preservation of power.  True, there may be more Emperors these days but rank power has taken on other, more modern, incarnations.  It is very significant that the Sisters have been criticized for being “too involved in Social Justice,” as if one could be too involved in proclaiming Good News to the Poor.  What is going on here if this is the criticism?  Who has the true faith?

      The nuns, in their commitment to social change through groups like Network, represent a challenge to the existing power structures not only in the Church but in society.  One has to ask oneself these days if the hierarchy is being true to the Gospel or is it, as it was in the days of the Byzantine Empire,  “in bed” with the powers-that-be of the saeculum, (the fancy Latin name for whatever constitutes the current socio-political-economic  distribution of power.)  The nuns are on the side of the powerless—the poor, women, minorities.  I can’t help but wonder if the internal persecution of the nuns isn’t about their prophetic voice being raised for those who have no voice.  True, bishops—and the Roman See as much if not more than most bishops—have to worry about support from big donors while the nuns depend on their own work and the appreciative nickels and dimes of those whom they have helped over the years, but that makes me wonder all the more how much Rome sings to the tune of those ”devout” Catholics  such as Carl Anderson, the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus or Tom Monaghan, former CEO of Domino’s Pizza,  and other fat Cat’licks on whom the Holy See depends for the substantial donations that keep it out of the “red.”  (Or, depending on how you look at it, keeps them in those red dresses.)  As we all know nullum prandium gratuitatem—just to put it into ecclesiastical Latin—“there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

      Look at this song: “diversity,”  “male and female in God’s image,” “we’ve a song of peace and justice,” “drawn together at one table, all the human family,” “Shape a circle ever wider, and a people ever free”—my God, this is the stuff of Les Miserables; this is a world upside down.  This may be “Good News to the Poor, freedom to captives, sight to the blind,  liberty to the oppressed, and a time of God’s favor” but it surely is a song that threatens the saeculum.  Of course, read the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) and be even more shocked about God’s plan to cast down those in power and to send the rich away hungry, but this is the heart of the problem.  These women take God seriously at his word.  As I pointed out in Monday’s blog—this is the crisis of spirituality today when so many of the men responsible for leadership may  be deep in piety  but have never matured in their spiritual life.  If they had the Church which they have been called to lead would be truly an evangelical Church rather than a faltering institution bleeding members who have been so disillusioned by the failure of faithful leadership that they can no longer stomach the pretense that this institution is the spotless bride of the Lamb.   

Voices Past and Present

Bishop John Carroll, the first United States

Bishop and a model for bishops who can
think "outside the box" to effectively

evangelize in new and uncertain situations

I am on the road this weekend giving a workshop in the History of the Church in the United States and don’t have access to my library so  let’s do a divergence from our saga of the building of Saint Peter’s.  I had dinner the other evening with a group of seminarians—several Catholic and several Protestant.  Each was asked to introduce himself or herself and say something about their experience in seminary and how they realized their vocation.  One young man, an Episcopalian Seminarian from the (Episcopal) Diocese of South Carolina,  mentioned in his introduction that his bishop had identified him for “church planting and evangelization.”  “Church planting” is the process of establishing a new congregation in an area where there is no existing congregation of the particular denomination that is sponsoring the mission.  We Catholics begin plenty of new parishes—especially in the south and the west of the United States where the Catholic Church is growing;  not so much in the north-east and upper mid-west where the there are often more churches than are needed and we find parishes being closed or  amalgamated with other parishes.  But we Catholics don’t usually engage in “church planting.”  We simply divide the existing parish or parishes and split off a new parish.  Church planting is something different.  It really requires beginning a new parish or congregation “from scratch.” 
     What impressed me in this conversation with this seminarian is not that he is being prepared for this challenging and creative mission.  What impressed me is that his bishop is thinking so creatively about how to make the best use of his present and future clergy.  The bishop is “thinking outside the box,” seeing possibilities that do not yet exist.  There was a time in the history of the American Church when our bishops had that sort of creative leadership.   One of the seminarians present at the dinner, a Catholic, is a recent immigrant from Germany.  He asked a question about the “chapter” providing guidance for the bishop.  The other Americans, at least the Catholics in the group, all looked at him blankly.  “Chapter?” they asked, “what is a chapter?”  He was surprised when I explained that we don’t have chapters in the American Church.  The Chapter is composed of the canons of the cathedral and they have certain rights and duties in the election of the bishop and in advising the bishop in his ministry.  Chapters are—had have been for fifteen hundred years—standard operating procedure in European dioceses.  But when the American hierarchy was established with John Carroll’s appointment in 1790,  Carroll told Rome that chapters were not practicable in the United States.  We could not afford to tie up seven or eight priests to serve a cathedral when we needed every available priest to go out and “ride the circuit,” saying mass, hearing confessions, baptizing, blessing marriages, anointing the sick, preaching, and teaching catechism in the dozens and dozens of rural communities in Maryland, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and along the Canadian border where there were Catholic settlements.  Carroll and his priests found many creative ways of meeting the challenges of a small and minority denomination in a large and then rural society.    
      It would be interesting for today’s  American (Catholic) bishops  to think outside the box how to meet the pastoral challenges of an expanding Catholic population in some parts of the nation while it is shrinking in others.  It would be great to see them come up with some creative solutions to the vocation problem and how we can keep our Catholic communities tied to the Eucharist when we just don’t have enough priests to go around.  It would be wonderful to see them address the complex problems of a Church that is so heavily immigrant and non-English speaking before there are more Latino “evangelicals” than Catholics.  If only they could repair their moral credibility and speak with authority rather than from what has become a very shaky power.  This is the time to think creatively and try new solutions.  When you know the History of the Church, creativity is the Catholic response.  Just ask Augustine of Canterbury or Innocent III or Hildegarde of Bingen, or Bernard of Clairvaux, or Charles Borromeo, or Ignatius Loyola, or Mary Ward or Vincent DePaul, or Madeline Sophie Barat, or Catherine McAuley or Mary MacKillop.  These were creative thinkers.  We have been blessed in more recent times with people like Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, and Dom Helder Camara,  and Gino Baroni, and Joseph Bernardin, and  Monika Hellwig.  Today we have among us Elizabeth Johnson, and Richard Rohr, and Thomas Keating, and Joan Chittester, and Daniel Berrigan, and Tom Gumbleton, and Ronald Rohlheiser.  It isn’t that the Holy Spirit isn’t trying to open our eyes, our hearts, and our imagination to challenges of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.   It is just that the hearts of this people has grown dull.  Let us beg for the grace to listen to the Holy Spirit with the ear of our hearts. 

Let's hear it for the Ladies

The recent “Vatican Investigation of American Nuns” has been turning into a bit of a debacle. For one thing, no one wants to pay for it. The Sisters (or at least the main group of American Religious Women, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious) didn’t ask for this “investigation” and don’t see why they should pay for it. The bishops, many of whose dioceses are having financial difficulties due to everything from lawsuits to bad financial management to a poor economy, balked when they were told that they should pay for it. And it seems that it never crossed the mind of the people in Rome who mandated the investigation that they should get stuck with the bill. For another thing, it seems like many of the Religious Sisters themselves have found ways to gum up the process by not fully answering questionnaires or sending information in a timely manner. And then too it seems that very few people—not only the sisters, but the laity, most of the clergy, and even a good number of bishops—think the whole thing is, at best, a waste of time (and money) and some even think that the investigation was not undertaken in good faith (few investigations, whether by Congress, suspicious husbands, or the Holy See are) but was dreamed up by so-called “wing-nuts” in the Church as a way to harass the more “progressive” communities. Who knows? But the investigation is not history—at least not yet and so not the subject for this blog. But it might be fun to look at the history of Religious Women to get some background. This will take several postings and I don’t intend to do them as a continuous series, but as occasional entries in this blog. After all the dear ladies are part of our title: What Sister never knew…

The first item which is important to talk about so that we can better understand not so much the investigation itself as some of the questions which the investigation wants to investigate is the difference between a nun and a sister. The investigation, as I understand it, is not looking into American nuns but American Religious Sisters. So what is the difference. Well, nuns have been around a long time—a very long time, at least since the third century and possibly even a little longer than that. We always associate them with the monastic movement in the Egyptian desert at the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century. Pachomius, the originator of coenobitic (communal) religious life, allegedly had a sister who established a community of nuns even as he established a community of monks. This makes nuns a pretty old group of women (note, note not a pretty group of old women), however Father Sidney Griffith, a professor of Syriac at the Catholic University of America (and a former professor of mine about two hundred and fifty years ago when I was studying theology) talks about monasticism originating in Syria perhaps even a century before Saint Antony Abbot whose eremitical monasticism, in turn, predates Pachomius by about thirty years. I don’t know, I wasn’t there but I think he makes a good case for it.

By the way, while the English language has two distinct words, “monk” and “nun,” most Mediterranean languages—Syriac, Greek, and Latin among them—seem to have only a common root word distinguished by gender specific suffixes. Nuns then are female monks , or—in this gender sensitive age—one could say monks are male nuns. That is actually quite important as there is gender equality in monasticism pretty much up into the High Middle Ages—12 century and after. We wll deal with that in a future blog. We need to move on.

One of the breakdowns in gender equality came in 1298 when Boniface IX, of happy memory (as we say when speaking of dead popes) issued a Bull (a papal letter, named for the bulla or leaden seals with which it was authenticated) called Periculoso (which translates loosely as –it’s too damned dangerous out there for you ladies to be roaming the streets) requiring women monastics to remain in the confines of their monasteries. Frankly, it was dangerous in the streets of most Italian cities in the Middle Ages (remember Romeo and Juliet and all the family feuding), but the letter also betrays a mistrust of women and their ability to take their vow of chastity seriously. (In the Middle Ages, the men always blamed the women for the problem of sexual seduction.) We will deal with cloistering in more detail in a future posting. Suffice it to say that nuns were required to be cloistered. This was, in much of the middle ages, more honored in the breach than in the observance, but the Council of Trent (1545-1562) clamped down on the cloistering of nuns pretty effectively (though not with total success) and the old Orders—Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans (Poor Clares), Dominicans, Carmelites, etc. found their women confined to monasteries. New orders being founded at the time—the Visitandines, Ursulines, etc. adapted to the requirement as well though their cloistering rules were usually somewhat more flexible.

Well, Vincent de Paul wanted to found a community of women to work among the poor and cloister obviously did not fit this plan. We will say more about him and his Daughters of Charity in a future posting. (I am making a lot of promises here.) Suffice it to say for now he found a way around the rule of enclosure. His Daughters of Charity did not take permanent vows but professed for only a year at a time, and thus were not subject to the enclosure. He never really wanted them to be “nuns” in a monastic sense; as far as I can discover he never called them “nuns.” They were to be just pious women, committed to chastity, obedience, and poverty, doing works of charity among the poor. This community was a huge success. It drew huge numbers of vocations, was immensely well thought of by all for the good work the Daughters did, and spread like wildfire. Various bishops, priests, and laity saw the advantage of these “walking nuns” as some were called (as opposed to “caged-up nuns” I suppose). Other groups of non-cloistered women were begun. Some started as associations under the guidance of the Mendicant Orders of men, especially Franciscans and Dominicans, and shared in their charism. Others, like Catherine McAuley’s Religious Sisters of Mercy or Saint Mary MacKillop’s “Brown Joey’s” (The Australian Sisters of Saint Joseph) or Nano Nagle’s Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary were started by strong women of vision. While some wanted to be Religious, others—like Catherine McAuley’s group—did not want to be “nuns” or even Religious, but were forced by pressure from the bishops to take on the Religious State. Frankly the freedom of these new communities threw many in the hierarchy and clergy into panic and neither the bishops nor the Holy See seemed to know quite how to handle this new form of Religious life that didn’t quite fit the canonical norms. In the United States, Saint Elizabeth Bayley Seton, at the request of her bishop, John Carroll of Baltimore, established a group modeled on the French Daughters of Charity. They wore a “habit” that was nothing more than the discreet mourning clothes of a widow (Seton was herself a widow” and, faithful to the vision of Saint Vincent de Paul, didn’t borrow a lot of the trappings of traditional nuns.

This entry has gone on far too long already and there is much more to put in future blogs, but let me conclude with the fact that until the middle of the twentieth century—yes, the twentieth century like when I was a little boy—the only women in the United States who were college presidents or hospital administrators, were Catholic “nuns”—actually Religious Sisters. These women were always the avant-garde for the educational and social emancipation of women. I am no feminist, but when you know some Church history you have to say to the modern “nuns” “you go girl.” Catherne McAuley and Elizabeth Seton and Mary MacKillop would be proud of you.

Today's image: "yes, Virginia, there are still good nuns who know their place and keep to it" Actually this photo is a group of cloistered nuns who, trust me, aren't nearly as docile as they look in this picture but are pretty lively and a lot of fun and have plenty of vocations.