Let's Hear it for the Ladies (Again!)

Margaret Anna Cusack
in her days as a Sister
of Saint Joseph of Peace. 

I drove down to hear a talk by Sister Teresa Koernke IHM the other day—Sister Teresa is a theologian (Ph.D. Notre Dame) who teaches and lectures in various places around the United States and her focus is Eucharistic theology.  She is the sort of scholar that gives CDF a collective headache but who educated and thinking Catholics find stimulates not only ideas but prayerful reflection.  Her talk was on the Eucharist, or rather Eucharistic Celebrations, and how the liturgy can be manipulated in some ways that are very foreign to the gospel, precisely how they can be used to allow an individual, or a class of individuals, to hold power over others.  Now remember, and this is me writing, not Sister Teresa—I don’t want to put words into her mouth—but Jesus was not a fan of power.  In fact he warned his disciples to eschew it.  There is a difference between power and authority—authority is a charism which draws the listeners and makes them want to follow; power is manipulation that forces people to follow or obey.  In a side comment to her remarks on different “styles” of different priests and how they use or abuse their position to serve or to dominate—and again this is my assessment of Sister Teresa, not a direct quote (you may remember that old adage quidquid recipitur recipitur in modo recipientis recipitur, so this is my modo and not her quidquid)—Sister said what is driving the Vatican crazy about the LCWR is that the nuns have evolved a different model of authority for themselves and it is a model that undercuts the authority (or power) of the hierarchy.  Unlike the hierarchy who have become used to a model of downward decision making, the Sisters have evolved a process of decision making that is dialogical and brings obedience through consensus.  She didn’t say this, but it reminds me of some material I have read on feminine versus masculine ways of relating. 
       The Holy See is concerned about feminism in the ranks of Religious Women, but at the risk of being anachronistic, we have to say that Religious Life was always a place of refuge for women who weren’t about to subordinate themselves to male authority.   Back in the third and fourth centuries when those first monastics began to drift out to the desert and establish themselves as hermits or in small communities, people thought that this was fine for the guys but women were supposed to stay home under the authority of their husbands or fathers or older brothers.  It was much more difficult for women to uproot themselves and flee to the desert.  Those women who embraced the monastic life were rejecting the patriarchal structures of Roman society to live in all women communities led by women.  And just as the monks put themselves on the fringes not only of society but of the Church to escape the bishop’s authority, so too did the women monastics, choose life in the desert where they were free of clergy interference.  I am avoiding the words nuns here as these were really female monks.  Even linguistically—while English has a clear distinction between monk and nun, in Syriac, Greek, and Latin, (and most of the modern romance languages) the difference between the words for “monk” and “nun” are the same root with a gender-particular suffix.   Relationships with male monastic communities were lateral—interdependent—but not subordinate.  While the women monastics may have supplied the male monastics with cloth, wine, beer, garden and other domestic products, the male monastics seem to have often helped the women with heavier projects such as clearing land, construction of buildings, and the heavier farming as well as supplying priests to celebrate the liturgy for them.  Later, say eighth century through the High Middle Ages, there are examples of “double monasteries” of female and male monastics, but most often the superior of such a house was the Abbess, not a monk.  In fact, the more usual pattern was a small community of monks or canons attached to a monastery of nuns precisely to be the chaplain staff for the nuns. 
      By the Central Middle Ages there were abbeys where the Abbess was not only independent of the authority of the local bishop, but she herself exercised Episcopal authority over a quasi-diocese called an Abbey Nullius.  In such an arrangement, the Abbess was not, of course, the bishop, but she was the Ordinary of her quasi-diocese.  There might be any number of towns and even a hundred or more parish churches under her jurisdiction.  She confirmed the nomination of pastors (we need to do an entry on Advowsons and how pastors were appointed in the Middle Ages), gave dispensations, granted annulments, wrote dismissorial letters for ordinations, granted faculties to the clergy of her diocese just like any bishop.  She had to hire a bishop to come in for the ordinations and confirmations, of course, but she was the Ordinary.  As late as the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) there were over a hundred such jurisdictions ruled by Abbesses, though some had Protestantized at the Reformation.  (That is another entry we have to do—the survival of religious life in Lutheran territories.)   Some of these Abbacies lasted even longer—the Abbess of Los Hueglos in Spain, who was by right a Princess as well, lasted up until the time of Vatican II as head of her small diocese—down to twelve parishes if my memory serves me.        
        As religious life continued to evolve during the so called Counter-Reformation (I hate that term and would prefer to call it the Tridentine Reformation), women continued to create forms of religious life that exempted them from male control.  The most spectacular of these was Mary Ward who founded the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1609.  Modeled on the Jesuits, Mary and her sisters wore ordinary clothes, rejected most of the monastic practices that would have hindered them in their “underground” work in Protestant (and persecuting) England, and were self-governing.  Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t their freedom from hierarchical control that made Rome slow to confirm the work—it was their rejection of cloister which at that time was required for all religious women.  Cloister, by the way, was no indication of male supervision as the great reformer, Saint Teresa of Avila showed. Teresa too was a remarkably independent woman who played authorities—the Holy See, the Carmelite Order, the King—off one another in order to preserve the independence of her nuns.  Another woman of the time who founded a religious community that was structured to be self-governing was Saint Angela Merici whose Ursulines was autonomous communities working fully in the mission of the Church but in ways that they—not bishops or Curia—determined.  We could go on.  Jane Frances de Chantal worked very closely with Francis de Sales in the communities of the Visitandines they established but it was a collaborative work together and not one in which Francis dominated.  Likewise, Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac was a collaborative effort in establishing the Daughters of Charity, perhaps the most radically different form of religious life in the Church up until our own day.  Vincent’s guidance told the Daughters:  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 grill, the fear of God, for veil, holy modesty.   What would Rome say about this today?  Hard to think that Rome was more open-minded in the 17th century than today but apparently it was.   
      And then there is the case of Saint Mary MacKillop in Australia and her Brown Joeys—the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart.  Mary actually incurred excommunication rather than subordinate her sisters to outside (i.e. male) authority.  A more tragic story is that of Margaret Anna Cusack, a convert to the Catholic Church and the famous “Nun of Kenmare.”  Having left the Poor Clares where she had been a famous writer, Cusack with the approbation of Leo XIII founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Peace.  But when Archbishop Corrigan of New York tried to force the Sisters in to subordination to his authority, she too was excommunicate and returned to the Anglican Church.  Corrigan was one of the most morally righteous but nevertheless  evil men to hold an American episcopate—and that is quite a distinction.  His sin was power and his example should be a warning to current hierarchs.  He was never given the red hat by Rome and his nemesis was Cardinal Gibbons who fought him tooth and nail precisely over the issue of whether authority in the Church should follow the European and monarchical model or the American and leadership model.  But all this is for other entries.  (Actually if you check the labels column you will see eight entries where I have written on Corrigan).   Those ladies from LCWR are more in our Catholic Tradition than the boys in Rome who want them to fall in line and be good little girls who do what they’re told.  Go nuns!

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 II

One of the first religious women to successfully avoid the canon law requiring vowed women to be enclosed (cloistered) was Mary Ward (1585-1645). Mary was raised in a devout Recusant family in Ripon and at the age of fourteen went to live in the home of a wealthy gentleman, Sir Ralph Babthorpe, and his family. This was a common practice at the time when a young woman or man of the gentry learned the responsibilities of their class in a socially prominent household. It was often where marriage connections were made and there was a strong network of Recusant (Catholic) families that helped Catholics marry within the faith. Yorkshire, particularly rural Yorkshire, being far from Protestant London, had a relatively strong Catholic community among its populace. Mary, however, did not find herself interested in a husband but felt drawn to the religious life, and for that she had to leave England as the open practicing of the Catholic faith was prohibited by law and thus there were no monasteries or convents. She crossed the channel in 1606 to the Spanish Netherlands to become a lay sister in the Poor Clares at St.Omer. The following year, using her dowry, she established a Poor Clare monastery at Gravelines in what is today the very northern edge of France. The monastic live was particularly severe. The nuns wore habits made of rough wool, were meatless except at Christmastime, slept on straw mattresses and practiced other disciplines common to the reformed orders of the time. None of that unsettled Mary, but the enclosure did. She felt very drawn to the religious life, but recognized the need for an apostolic community based on the spirituality and mission of the Society of Jesus. She left the monastery she had founded and gathered a group of like-minded women around her and formed the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary Ward recognized that one of the primary needs in early modern Europe, and the Church in early modern Europe, was the education of women. English Recusant experience showed her that the survival of Catholicism depended on women knowing their faith. In England, among the Catholics of means, the husband and father of the family often had to “conform” to the Church of England to avoid the legal and monetary disabilities imposed on Catholics by the royal government, leaving the practice and handing-on of the faith to the wife and mother. This made it imperative that Catholic women be educated in a Catholic environment, something quite impossible to do publically in England. What was needed was a religious community of women, independent and self-governing like male religious orders, without religious habits or other public marks of identity, who were themselves educated and independent-minded ladies. Their religious practices had to be discreet and simple, forgoing the elaborate choir ceremonial typical to enclosed orders of both men and women. The Ignatian influence on her own spiritual development—and so much recusant spirituality was formed by the Jesuits—stressed the interior life and mental prayer. But this created a very different model of religious life—like the Jesuits, totally non-monastic.
There were no formal ties between Mary’s group and the Jesuits—the Jesuits have always, following Ignatius’ explicit mandate—rejected a female branch of their congregation. Nevertheless, there were strong spiritual bonds. That was often to the detriment of the Sisters however as many in the Church resented the Jesuits for their non-iconic ways and were even more alarmed when women showed such independence. Bishops were often particularly put out as they expected religious, especially women religious, to be dependent on their authority and under their control. Consequently Mary Ward and her Institute attracted quite a bit of negative attention.
The new Institute worked not only covertly in England, but spread from Flanders into the Austrian Empire and Italy and Catholic regions of Germany. Its educational work among women won it many admirers from the upper classes and the nobility—and even the Holy Roman Emperor. In addition several popes expressed their admiration. Nevertheless, the Institute was suppressed by a commission of Cardinals in 1630 when asked by the Pope to evaluate the new community. Curiously enough, and somewhat inexplicably to moderns with a canonical mindset, the Pope (Urban VIII), an admirer of Mary Ward and her work, invited her to Rome where she and a community of her sisters lived and worked under his protection. In 1639 the pope wrote a letter of introduction for Mary Ward to England’s Catholic Queen Consort, Henrietta Marie, wife of Charles I. In 1642, just as the English Civil War was beginning, Mary returned to England and established a community at Heworth in Yorkshire. She died three years later and was buried in the Anglican churchyard at Osbaldwick, Yorkshire.
The Institute survived—initially and for a long time without canonical approval. In 1703 Pope Clement XI approved their Rule of Life and the Institute itself was given papal approbation in 1877 by Pope Pius IX. It leaves us with this question—why do we think that “nuns,” or actually apostolic communities of women—have to wear habits, live in convents, spend long periods of time at formal prayers in their chapels? No one is saying that monastic life—for women or for men—is not a valid form of religious life, but is it the only form? Perhaps the real issue, now as in Mary Ward’s day, is how much can women religious (or lay, for that matter) be trusted to make decisions for themselves? On the othe hand, Pope Benedict did name her Venerable. Prophets are not recognized in their own day.

The image today is a painting of the seventeenth-century religous founder, Venerable Mary Ward.