The Nuns Are Still Here and So Is the Vatican

The boys in the Vatican are better dressed,

but God bless the Sisters for the great work

they have done and continue to do--by the
way, the picture is stolen from the NY Times
Thanks, Times. 

Traditionally the religious orders, both of men and of women, have had their independence from the authority of the local bishops.  In times past when communication with Rome was long and difficult, that meant that monks and nuns were virtually a Church within the Church—answerable to no one outside their own monasteries or their Order.  While some small congregations of religious are in only one diocese and therefore  “of diocesan right” and thus do report to the local bishop, most are part of larger organizations with a Superior General who reports directly to the Congregation of Religious in Rome.   Such religious communities need the permission of local bishop to come into a diocese and establish a community there, but once in the bishop has little or no say over them,.  If that community is involved in an apostolic work that is under the bishop—such as religious priests serving in a parish or religious men or women who teach in a diocesan school (note: a diocesan school, not a private school owned by the religious congregation) they are accountable to the bishop for matters that pertain to their ministry but not to matters of their religious life.  In matters of religious life they answer to their own superiors who, in turn, answer to the Congregation for Religious in Rome. In Europe it is even typical for many religious communities of men, and even some of women, to have their own churches where the faithful gather to hear mass.  The friars—the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Carmelites—in particular run many public churches that are not parish churches but offer a full range of Sunday and daily masses.  The liturgy and in particular the preaching is often better in these churches than in the local parishes and often the laity choose a “friary church” as an alternative to their parish.  But even in the United States many bishops are slow to interfere in a parish run by a religious order—even though, if it is a parish, it has to obey the bishop’s guidelines.  Some bishops see a parish run by Benedictines or Franciscans or Dominicans as a “safety valve” that provides a place for people who are disaffected by the more conservative parishes to worship.  During the Civil Rights era or the Vietnam War era the religious priests often were more outspoken than the diocesan clergy felt safe in being.  In some dioceses such as Los Angeles where the Archbishop—then the dreaded Cardinal Francis McIntyre—forbad the clergy to speak about Civil Rights, the religious clergy dared to speak out when the diocesan clergy could not.   

     But this independence gives many bishops agita.   The bishops often get complaints from the laity, especially right-wing ones, who want the nuns in habits or who resent the freedoms that many religious have in the years since Vatican II.  Today many sisters have gone on for graduate degrees and teach and lecture in colleges, do social work, are involved in lobbying on behalf of the poor and minorities, work with immigrants or abused women and engage in works that more conservative Catholics resent.  Those opposed to the nuns’ liberalism appeal to the bishop to rein in the nuns and the bishops are powerless.  While religious men tend to be more conservative than religious women, in many more conservative dioceses, parishes run by religious men are still more progressive than those run by local diocesan clergy.  The religious men often work better with women, give women—both lay and religious—more decision making roles and leadership in ministries, and speak up more on women’s issues.  Religious priests often tend to be less clerically oriented than diocesan clergy, especially the “new crop” currently coming out of seminaries.  The religious priests and brothers are more inclined to wear ordinary clothing when not in the habit of their congregation or order.  They also more often go simply by their name and do not bother with titles.  This too drives many neo-traditionalists crazy, especially when the laity flock to their parishes.   Now I need to make sure that the reader doesn’t let me generalize because I myself can think of many fine diocesan priests who are keeping  Vatican II Catholicism alive and well and I know some religious, even in progressive communities, who are, well for the lack of a better words, nuts.  (For emphasis I would use a Joe Biden expletive here if I could).
      The tradition of religious exemption is nothing new and, in fact, ever since the 1917 Code of Canon Law, is actually more restricted than it had been in times past.  In the Middle Ages some of the great Abbeys of nuns were not only exempt from all authority except that of their own abbess and the far-away-in-Rome (and in the days before  modern communication that was far away indeed), but their abbesses ruled dioceses (called abbeys nullius) where they granted annulments and dispensations, appointed pastors,  wrote letters dimissorial,  convoked clerical synods and all the other things bishops did except for administering the sacraments (for which they had to hire a priest or bishop). 
       Even today many religious houses of women report directly to the Holy See bypassing not only the local bishop but the control of their order.  Among them is Mother Angelica’s Monastery of Our Lady of the Angels in Hanceville Alabama.   The good Lady Abbess (Poor Clares have abbesses) took her monastery outside the jurisdiction of the bishop and of the Franciscan Order and made it directly reportable to Rome. 
       Religious foundresses  such as Saint Mary MacKillop of the Australian Sisters of Saint Joseph and Mary Theresa of Jesus Gerhardinger of the School Sisters of Notre Dame were bound and determined that their communities would be self-governing and not under the authority of the bishops.   But today many bishops want to change that. 
      One of the issues, of course, is that these congregations of sisters sometimes own considerable property  and as the congregations get smaller and will die out, the question is –who will get control of their properties.  Now many of the Sisters’ groups have not planned well for the future and depend on our generosity for the support of the older nuns, but some groups have been very provident.  You can imagine that they are not going to let whatever survives them fall into the hands of the men who have persecuted them.  Part of the agenda of the Holy See and the bishops is to get sufficient control over the sisters that their properties will transfer to the various dioceses in which they stand.   
       A major factor in this  nonsense between the American Sisters and the Vatican now has to do not with their “doctrinal aberrations”  but with their independence.  It is American bishops (and Supreme Knight Carl Anderson of the Knights of Columbus) that are behind the stir up.  Many bishops are frightened of the nuns as today’s nuns are highly educated and articulate women, many of whom have better theological training than most priests, indeed more than most of the bishops themselves.  Sisters such as Sandra Schnieders or Elizabeth Johnson are a theological match for the best educated bishops.  Moreover, at a time when the bishops have lost their moral credibility, the nuns inspire great confidence among the laity.  The powers that be are frightened and that is the hidden issue—or one of them—behind this current nonsense out of Rome.   It will be interesting to see how it plays out. 

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.