Evangelical Catholicism And It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

Sister Joan Chittester OSB

I want to return for several entries to the subject of an evangelical renewal of Religious Life.  The Vatican Report on the Religious Sisters in the United States is supposedly to be released on Tuesday and I am anxious to read what it has to say, but I am not overly hopeful that the Holy See will—or, for that matter, can—do a substantial critique of Religious Life as most of those who hold key positions, other than Pope Francis himself, are not Religious and have typically shown (as have our American bishops) a gross inability to capture the substance of the vocation to the consecrated life.  I think of Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, a somewhat typical American bishop—that is to say a well meaning but dense individual who has no appreciation for the limits of his own knowledge and who, in a once-hopeful ambition for higher things (The Archbishopric of Hartford) has traded his moral compass to become nothing more than a “company man.”  Now that the “company” has had a change of direction under its new pontifical leadership, the Bishop is befuddled and confused and the Church entrusted to his care is finding its wheels spinning but unable to move forward.  Tragic.  But I digress.  The Bishop remarked to some friends regarding a community of women Religious that has to withdraw from their apostolate in his diocese for lack of vocations that “everything would be fine if they only still wore veils.”  Now I think this particular community of women is dying out in great part for reasons of their own doing, but not for lack of veils.  In fact, I think the preoccupation in the pre-Conciliar Church for how veils got pinned or how the Sisters were to keep their eyes lowered left many religious congregations totally incapable of the sort of renewal to which the Council called them. 

I mentioned in previous blogs George Weigel’s vision of an Evangelical Catholicism and while I think his treatment of the renewal of Religious Life is absolutely from Planet Qo'noS or some other distant unreality produced by a mind unaccustomed to having to confront the daily challenges faced by those who belong to the working class, I do agree with his fundamental thesis that

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

 From which thesis I have drawn the following principles to look at Religious Life.

1.   The Religious vocation, like all other vocations in the Church is rooted in the baptismal vocation common to all Christians.

2.    Therefor all Religious, of whatever tradition they belong, are called to participate in the evangelizing mission of the Church

3.    The authenticity and power of the Gospel to which they bear witness will be dependent on their integrity as human persons (human decency)

4.    Their integrity, in turn, flows from their friendship with Christ

5.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the scriptures

6.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by a rich sacramental life

7.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is sustained by a life of deep personal prayer

8.    This friendship with the Risen Lord will bring us into a profound solidarity with the least of his sisters and brothers.  

We have discussed the first three of these principles in an earlier blog; let’s look at the fourth, which by the way, I consider key.  Sister Joan Chittester in her book The Fire in These Ashes which concerns the renewal of Religious Life writes that there is one reason and one reason only to come to Religious Life and that is to find God.  A friend of mine, himself a Religious and a Professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, expanded on this and said in a homily: “There is only one reason to come to Religious Life and that is to Find God through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  To me this is spot on and I think it is what Weigel means by “to make friendship with Christ.”  It is great to want to be a missionary or to teach children or to nurse the sick or to work with the poor but these are not reasons to enter Religious Life.  And the problem with many of the communities founded in the 19^th and 20^th centuries is they copied the trappings of the monastic vocation—habits and choral prayer and kissing one’s scapular when begging pardon—but not the essence of the monastic vocation which is the solitude of the heart in search for God.   Many of these communities, both of men and women, have great pieties but no spirituality at their foundation.  The particular group of Sisters to which Bishop Loverde was referring run a retreat center where they have for years triaged the spiritually ill and comforted them with palliative care but not given them the health of a mature and genuine spirituality.  And they couldn’t because, while several of the individual sisters had discovered the spiritual life, their Congregation itself never understood the substance of Spirituality proper to their particular identity.  In fact many Religious today have nothing more to offer than the milk and cookies of the Spiritual Life.  That must change if Religious Life is to survive.       

I have to say that I am not impressed by most American Religious today.  On the one hand you get the mascara-wearing latte-sippers like Sister Sara Marks who was written about in the article that triggered this series.  On the other hand you get groups like the Friars of the Renewal or the Franciscans of the Immaculate or the Sisters of Life which groups revert back to that model where the religious are so different from the rest of the Church that they cannot effectively serve as witnesses to the universal call to holiness.  On the one hand, in a world that needs the witness of community, we don’t need Religious living individually in apartments—we need the example of people who are struggling to live in an intimate communion with one another despite the individual differences and preferences that we all have.  We need people who choose to live together in charity and to work out their differences and conflicts in mutual respect with one another so that there is an example for families—and by families I mean all the arrangements of human persons that designate themselves as families—that some sort of communal life is not only possible but an attractive alternative to the isolation of our modern culture.  In this secularized world we need examples of men and women who are educated and intelligent and professional who still gather for prayer and consider such a gathering the most important time of their day.  In a world of crass consumerism we need the challenge provided by men and women who have what they need to live with dignity and self-respect and to accomplish the work entrusted to them but who aren’t out to have the latest and the newest and the most costly of everything.

At the same time, we need to have men and women who embrace a simple life freely and whose lack of life’s frivolities are their own mature choices and not because someone else has determined what they need and what they don’t need.   We need mature men and women who can make sound decisions for themselves in in how best to serve God and his kingdom and not be at the whim and prejudice of a “superior.”    We need a Religious Life that brings out maturity in its members, demands of them a responsibility for their choices and actions, and permits them to respond to the graces that God has given them individually and not expect them to conform to some cookie-cutter “ideal” that a founder or a bishop has/had for them.  A mature spirituality will evoke this psychological autonomy  balanced with a free desire for self-emptying (kenosis) from Religious that will enable them to serve as examples of mature Christian discipleship.  I admire the enthusiasm of the various new congregations that are springing up; they are a welcome breath of spring after the burned out and tired old souls who no longer have the passion for radical commitment but I at the same time I am afraid that the enthusiasm will shortly be quenched by unhealthy structures of power copied from pre-conciliar days and a lack of roots due to the shallow pieties that characterize the devotional life of these new communities.  A genuine renewal of Religious Life will find a via media that will both provide a depth of the Spiritual Life and a psychologically healthy model for communal living.  To be cont.  

Evangelical Catholicism and It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

I recently saw an article on YAHOO entitled “What’s It Like To Be A Thirty-Something Nun” (http://waysify.com/a/225086/what-its-like-to-be-a-30-something-nun)

Here is the opening paragraph:

Sara Marks is a 31-year-old nun. But, put away all your preconceived notions of how a sister should be — she'll defy all of them. Marks wears mascara and Calvin Klein dresses. She loves the Back to the Future trilogy and watches reality TV. She couldn’t live without a hair straightener. She loves to dance and wander around Manhattan ducking into adorable coffee shops. She travels and goes to the beach. She’s a photographer. She writes music and plays the guitar. She’s funny and warm and loves her life.

I wish I could say that the interview gets better from there, but it really doesn’t.  It’s not bad, mind you, it’s just—well—superficial.  About the best is

"We are normal people leading normal lives who happen to be committed to living simply, promoting social justice, and speaking out for those who are poor and marginalized. We are centered on God and faith, and we do pray, but we also sit down and watch television and go to the movies, just like anyone else."

This is good—but you know this is something that should be able to be said about every baptized Christian.  You don’t need to be a nun or a monk or even a priest to promote social justice or to speak out for those who are poor and marginalized.  Same about this quote about the vow of obedience:

It is really obedience to God’s word, to really listening to the other sisters, your friends and your family to learn what God is calling you to do. That is all fluffy and wonderful and sounds great on paper, but living that is hard. It is a balance.

I am not writing to denigrate what Sister Sara aspires to be—to the contrary, I only want her and others like her to aspire to be more.  but first let me defend her against some of the katholik krazies that write things like

Sorry to inform the readers, but these women aren't Catholic nuns. The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia is a New-Age cult that has nothing to do with Catholicism or Christianity. They worship an entity they call the "Cosmic Christ" which is NOT the Jesus of the New Testament. This article gives no information to the person who would truly like to know what the life of a Catholic nun is like.

Sister Sara’s community, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, are a recognized community of Religious women in the Catholic Church.  The are part of the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities, a federation of Franciscan communities founded by Saint John Neumann, Bishop of Philadelphia, in the nineteenth century.  They are recognized as Catholic Religious by the Holy See.  Furthermore, all Christians  who hold to Christian orthodoxy worship the “Cosmic Christ” who is no other than He Who is described in Colossians 1:15-20.  

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness^* was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether those on earth or those in heaven.

Now I want to put all this in the context of the theme we have been touching on occasionally which is a response to George Weigel’s book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21^st Century Church.  Weigel’s Thesis, with which I could not agree more, is

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

 But when he unpacks his thesis into what this Evangelical Catholicism looks like, Weigel tries to force a far more free Vatican II evangelical foot into a very narrow John Paul II shoe.  And when it comes to the place of Religious in a Vatican II Church, Weigel wants to return the nuns to veiled servitude and locked into the motherhouse at 5 pm for rosary, prayers, and a penitential supper of 2 day old bread, watery soup, and rancid cheese.  Nevertheless there has to be a via media between scrubbing the floors a la Audrey Hepburn in The Nuns Story and the somewhat vapid life of mascara and finding a Calvin Klein dress at the Goodwill that Sister Sara describes. 

I am not worried about whether nuns wear habits or whether monks catch a movie at the local ten-plex from time to time, but what I want of Religious is for them to blaze the trail for a more evangelical life for all of us.   I want people that can stop and make us question if we are on track towards the kingdom of God.  I see too many people around me, and around me at Mass, not concerned about whether or not their life style negatively impacts the lives of others.  When it comes to poverty I want to know how to have less so that other might have enough.  Can somebody show me how not to get caught up in the materialistic whirl that surrounds me with having to drive a gas-guzzling SUV or spending 200.00 on a pair of sunglasses?  Can someone show me how to love someone else without needing to control them?  Or show me how to love without becoming preoccupied that I am loved back? Or show me how to live life for simple pleasures and not constantly feed my id?  Can someone show me how to live for others, to empty myself in service for others as Christ emptied himself and took on the nature of a slave for me?  Can someone show me what the freedom is to live and do for the sake of pure love rather than to achieve or possess or control?  And above all, can someone show me how to “pray constantly” and live in that sort of relationship where all is God and God is all?  I think it is great that Sister Sara drives old ladies around and, from compassion for them, digs into her own near-empty purse to buy them a hamburger at McDonalds, but frankly, Sister, I expect even more of you.  Mother Theresa gave me more.  Saint Francis gave me more.  Most important, Jesus gave me more.  Show me how to receive what they have given us!  Don’t be good enough, be as good as you can be and show me how I can follow. 

Now as for that nut-case who whines Sorry to inform the readers, but these women aren't Catholic nuns…, honeychile, bless your black little withered heart, but when you give up your avocation as a Pharisee and are half as faithful to your vocation as a Christian as Sister Sara is to hers as a Sister of Saint Francis, I will take you seriously, but the criticism you level at her and her Sisters not only show your hypocrisy but your lack of basic Christian Doctrine and Catholic Church polity.  

And Now I Know Why They Are Afraid of the Nuns!

Sister Nora Nash OSF and Spiritual Advisor

Recently while having lunch with some friends during a conference, we were joined at our table by a petite older nun who happened to know several of the others in our group. Sister had just the slightest trace of an Irish brogue and initially was quite deferential to the other guests at the table, but as the conversation proceeded onto the topic of Pope Francis and his teachings on economic justice in Evangelii Gaudium, she became more and more opinionated—and knowledgeable of what she was saying. 
I have to admit that while historians are supposed to be able to discuss economics intelligibly, it has never been my strength—and contemporary global economics are far too complex for my understanding and analysis.  But not Sister Nora Nash.   She had a grasp on issues from C.E.O. compensation to the complexities of Tax-free industrial zones in developing nations where children, women, and men are held in virtual slavery producing everything from the screen on my computer on which I am writing this entry to the sneakers I am wearing. 
Sister is one of the driving forces of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. The ICCR is a coalition of 275 faith-based institutional investors that advocates for corporate responsibility and files shareholder resolutions while leveraging corporate management on a variety of issues from human rights and corporate governance to global warming and consumer protection.  While there are dozens of organizations pursuing socially responsible investing, ICCR is the one that is seen as having the most moral integrity and social credibility.  Among the faith-based organizations comprising ICCR are the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Unitarian Universalist Association, Quakers, and dozens of Religious communities of Roman Catholic Sisters.  Catholic dioceses and their bishops have been more reluctant to get on the moral bandwagon.  ICCR has taken on issues with Coca-Cola, Pfizer, the Gap, and Wal-Mart. 
Sister Nora is very much the heart and soul—and face—of ICCR.  Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once flew his helicopter to Nora’s convent in Aston PA to meet with her in an effort to defuse a conflict that would have embarrassed GE before its investors.  No one wants an old nun to show up at a stock-holders’ meeting with her proxy vote and moral high-ground.  Nora has taken on Nestlé over labor policies, McDonald’s over childhood obesity, several grocery chains about farm-worker exploitation,  and Wells-Fargo over lending policies.  She has exposed child labor in the chocolate industry and gone after big-oil on environmental issues. 
Sister Nora, of course, does not wear a floor length robe tied with the white Franciscan cord—nor does she wear a wimple and veil.  I have always liked nun-drag.  I had a great aunt in Sister Nora’s community and I have great memories of the Sisters in their traditional garb bringing us milk and cookies when we would visit her.  On the other hand, not only were those clothes uncomfortable, they were psychologically dis-empowering.  One of the Franciscan priest-chaplains at Sister Nora’s convent explained: “When you dress everyone the same, 18 hours a day, seven days a week, every week of the year, a person loses his or her sense of individuality—and thus both creativity and personal power.  It is different for us men (he was in his brown Franciscan robes), we put the habit on and take it off—and beneath it we wear what shirt and slacks we choose.  And we don’t have to wear it all if we so choose.  But for the women it was a means of control—whether consciously done so or not—and as long as the women were in their habits they stayed in their traditional roles of third-grade teachers or nurses or cooks or seamstresses.  Now that they dress as they choose they are lawyers, journalists, physicians, social workers, potters, artists, or Nora Nash.  They dress simply and economically—and you will notice that these sisters all wear a San-Damiano Cross around their necks or pinned to their jackets as a sign of their Consecration and their Franciscan Commitment.” 
Now I see more clearly what is really behind this persecution of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.  Too many Nora Nashes will bring down the house upon the bishops and their powerful friends.  The women need to be put  back, if not into their veils at least into their cookie-mold roles, and told to keep their eyes lowered and their mouths shut.  Of course, maybe if we took bishops out of their uniforms and let them dress like men we might get some bishops who would take on the prophetic roles and speak the Truth in this world of lies.  But then Pope Francis seems to be able to do that regardless of wearing his pope clothes so maybe at least in this situation it is not the clothes that make the man.  In the meantime most of us are looking to the nuns, not the bishops, for moral guidance.  You go girls!!!