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.  

More on those wonderful ladies--what is the Vatican's problem?

I want to get away from the anti-Catholicism material for awhile. There is still much on that topic as we trace both the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as well as some current aspects. This anti-Catholicism series seems rather popular, but there are other topics to talk about and I want to return—just for today—to the topic of the Vatican Investigation of American Nuns. Most Catholics don’t know enough about the history of religious life to be able to put the issues the investigation is pursuing in the proper context. Those of us “of a certain age” grew up with “nuns”—they taught us in school, nursed us in the local hospital, and we would see the in the street or shops with their long dresses that swept the floor and their modest veils that hid all but their face—and sometimes a good share of that. I did some earlier blogs (January 14 and 19) to explain the difference between “nuns” and “sisters.” The ladies we saw in the street or who taught us in school were not nuns at all, but sisters. And the origins of nuns and sisters is quite different—as is their role in the Church. I spent this past week in a monastery of nuns giving some talks. Some of those nuns had, earlier in their lives, been sisters. Nuns are contemplative religious, almost always living an “enclosed” (cloistered) life while sisters collaborate in the apostolic work of the Church in a wide variety of ministries. In one of the earlier blogs I mentioned the story of the remarkable English woman, Mary Ward, who in the height of Elizabethan England and its persecution of the Church, founded a community of women who did not wear a habit, were not bound to the traditional choral prayers in chapel, and whose mission, modeled on the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and their work with young men, was to educate young women. This in a time, incidentally, when even women of the upper classes were not thought to need anything more I the way of education than reading and perhaps some penmanship, a smattering of French, some music, needlework, and how to administer a household.
Another religious community of sisters was founded just a few years later. Vincent de Paul was a pious French priest with an extraordinary compassion for the poor and suffering. This may have originated in his having been captured by Moorish pirates and forced into slavery for several years before he could escape. Monsieur Vincent traveled in some of the most exalted ecclesiastical and social circles of the day and was known for his deep spirituality and an outstanding ability to preach retreats. He avoided fame, however, and took a living in a rural parish far from Paris. In his love for the poor he organized confraternities of socially prominent women to help the poor and the sick. These women were called the “Ladies of Charity.” For most of these socialites work among the poor was a diversion more than an evangelical commitment. Their hearts were in the right place and they opened their purses, but in accord with the aristocratic tenor of 17th century France, tended to send their servants to do the actual hands-on care. Vincent met the wealthy and pious widow, Louise de Marillac sometime about 1625 and served as her spiritual director—mostly by letter as she lived in Paris and he in the rural parish of Châtillon-les-Dombes. But Vincent’s preaching and his fame as a spiritual director and a seminary administrator led to him being recalled to Paris. There he and Mde. de Marillac organized a group of poor girls into a community to serve the poor and sick. They began working at the Hotel-Dieu, the ancient hospital across the parvis from Notre Dame Cathedral. The community grew rapidly as it provided the sisters with both a mission and a deep spirituality. This spirituality, much like the one of Mother Theresa of Calcutta four centuries later—was eminently practical, uniting prayer and work, with the sisters being encouraged to see Christ in each of the poor they encountered. But Monsieur Vincent and Mde. de Marillac did not see these women as nuns. To avoid the canon law requiring enclosure, their vows were private “simple” (not Solemn Vows) vows, taken not for life but annually renewed. Contrasting their life with that of nuns, St. Vincent de Paul admonished them:
• 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
Well, isn’t it just that attitude that gets Rome to conduct a visitation? How ironic. By the way, you may—if you are old enough—remember that until 1964 the Daughters of charity wore these distinctive white starched cornettes instead of a veil. Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillace had them in grey dresses (later blue-grey) with these white starched headpieces. At the time they were founded those white winged bonnets were the typical headwear of Parisian working-class and serving women, but as with so many “habits,” lay fashions changed and what once was ordinary lay dress became a distinctive habit. When the Sisters gave up the cornette in 1964 it was replaced by a simple (but elegant) blue dress and scarf-like cap designed by Christian Dior.

The image today is a photo of Daughters of Charity wearing the traditional French cornettes they wore until the mid-sixties.