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.  

Apostles of Charity

Saint Vincent de Paul
model of Christian Charity

Yesterday I had some thoughts pertaining to Saint Vincent de Paul because of the homily at mass that triggered me to reflect on Paul VI’s great line that if you want peace work for justice and Mother Teresa’s equally important insight that justice is founded on charity.    But as the day went on my thoughts turned from Saint Vincent de Paul and the work he did in Paris to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.  I haven’t heard of the Saint Vincent de Paul society for years, but I remember that when I was young it was one of the key societies in our parish and I believe most parishes.  My grandfather, an immigrant from Ireland, was devoted to the Society and every Monday evening was out at Church with the other men who belonged.   I sort of recall that the Holy Name Society—to which my father belonged—was for younger men and the old men of the parish all belonged to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.  That may explain why one doesn’t hear of them anymore.  A society that becomes an old men’s club (or old women’s club) is doomed to extinction—something to which religious communities today had better pay attention.
      Frédéric Ozanam is generally credited with beginning the society and in the strictest sense of the matter, he should be so credited.  However there was a Daughter of Charity, Sister Rosalie Rendu, who worked among the poor of Paris in the cities slums and it was Sister Rosalie who guided Ozanam and his associates in the project of organizing poor relief in Paris.  At the time (1833)  Frédéric Ozanam was a young man of only twenty years of age studying in Paris!  He would go on to become a noted lawyer and a professor at the Sorbonne and was beatified by John Paul II in 1997.  His family were of Jewish origin and he was actually born in Milan.  Ozanam and his fellow students organized the Conference of Charity to help the poor of Paris.  The Society really understood the mission of Vincent de Paul and continued the work he had begun of motivating the urban bourgeois of looking with compassionate interest on the poor who so often were not only suffering materially but also spiritually as too often the Church was doing far too little for their needs.  The French Church of the nineteenth century was linked inextricably to the moneyed classes—blue-blood and Bourgeoisie — and too often indifferent to the needs of the poor.  Clergy and many Religious were not interested in serving the poor.  The Catholic Church in France had become like the State Church of England—the ‘Conservatives at prayer.’  But at least in England one had the Methodists and the Baptists to keep the Gospel giving hope to those at the bottom of the social heap; in France they were left without any real access to faith. 
     Oznam and his associates, at the urging of Sister Rosalie and in the example of Vincent de Paul went into the homes of the poor and discovered what they needed—medical care, food, clothing, schooling for their children—and worked to provide it for them.  They did this on a one-to-one basis—not as some sort of charitable program but as a fraternal relationship with the poor.  And they used the relationships that developed not merely to provide material needs but to catechize the poor and reconcile tens of thousands to the Church.  They stood godfather to infants and sponsor to those being confirmed.  They provided wedding dinners and trousseaus for those wishing to marry.  They pleaded with the Jesuits and the de la Salle Brothers and the Madames of the Sacred Heart to take the children of the poor into their schools and give them an education.  Too often charity means writing a check but these men knew that true charity is always one to one.  True charity is far more than giving, it is a relationship.  In this way they anticipated the theology of Solidarity long before the writings of John Paul II.
    The Society spread from Paris to other French towns and cities and then across the channel to England and Wales in 1844.   Shortly thereafter it came to the United States, a country in which many of the Catholics were immigrant and poor.  But no one is ever more dedicated to helping the poor than those who are themselves poor.  The Saint Vincent de Pal Society  has always been part of the Vincentian Family, like the Daughters of Charity, the Vincentian Priests and Brothers (also known as the Congregation of the Mission, or in Europe, the Lazarists), The Ladies of Charity, and the Sisters of Charity of the Seton heritage.  Non-Catholics may join and many have come into the Church through their cooperation with the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.  Today the Saint Vincent de Paul Society comprises almost a million members in over a hundred and thirty countries!  I don’t know why we don’t hear more of them here in the United States—or at least in the part of our nation where I live.  There is as much a need as ever for such an organization today when so many in our nation are without work.  When countless immigrants are being lost to the faith because the institutional Church is not capable of supporting sufficient ministries to Hispanic and Pacific Rim Americans and when many parishes—and parish priests—see liturgies and catechetics for Hispanics, Haitians, Vietnamese, and other immigrant Catholics an inconvenience.  And it is not only the immigrants, or the Catholics, for that matter who need to be on the helped end of a helping relationship.  Our “new translation” or restored communion rails or keeping women out of the sanctuary is not the greatest need of the American Church today—fulfilling the Gospel of Christ to bring Good News to the Poor is, always has been, and will be forever our first priority if we are to truly be the Church of Jesus Christ.       

Thoughts for the Feast of Monsieur Vincent

Ah, the old days when we knew what it was to be
Catholic

Today is the Feast of Saint Vincent de Paul, founder of the Daughters of Charity (the nuns who used to wear those incredible white winged bonnets before Vatican II came along and stole all the fun out of religion) and the Vincentians—known more formally as the Congregation of the Mission and—outside the United States—called the “Lazarists.”  (I always wondered how they got the name “Lazarists” and then I found out that they are called Lazarists because when they were founded in the seventeenth century they had taken over the old Augustinian Priory of Saint Lazarus in Paris.)  In any event, I went to Mass this morning with the Daughters of Charity (minus the winged bonnets and, for the most part, not wearing the Christian Dior designed habit that replaced the old coif and blue-gray gown) and heard the gospel of the Beatitudes which is proper to the feast.  The homilist, referring to the first reading “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those heralding the gospel of peace” (Isaiah 52:7, what a great scripture), reminded us of the saying of Paul VI: If you want peace, work for justice.  He then went on to say, quoting Mother Theresa, that if you want justice, seek charity since justice—God’s Justice (not ours which is retributive justice)—is the product of charity.  He defined justice not as “fairness” (“life is not fair nor is it meant to be” he declared) but as the virtue of seeing that God’s Will is carried out in as that each is given possession of that which God has willed for him or her.  That is an interesting concept, certainly not one that we usually hear in our contemporary world.   Conservatives, or self-proclaimed conservatives at least, speak of justice as pay-back.  The pseudo-“evangelicals” also fall into this retributive theory.  Liberals, on the other hand, keep confusing justice with some sort of egalitarian fairness—the naïve assumption that everybody should enjoy the same mindless middle-class comfort-bubble in which they have been raised.  The first idea (that God’s Justice is retributive Justice) is repugnant to the foundations of Christian orthodoxy while the second is just plain stupid.  If wealth was doled out equally to all within ten years or so we would be right back where we are today.  The trouble with liberalism is that liberals don’t believe in original sin.  Neo-Cons not only believe in original sin, they make it work for them—voila, Reaganomics and its fruit—Enron and associates, the Savings and Loans Debacle, Halliburton-Iraq, and the world economic implosion of 2008.  But I stray.  Back to the homily.  To summarize to this point: Peace is founded on Justice, Justice is built on Charity.  He then went on to say that charity is not handing out goodies to those in need or even appreciating my neighbor for his good qualities or in spite of his bad.  Charity is the love that fills the heart of God and we are called to the love of God which makes God’s love our own so that we can love others with the love that fills the heart of God.  He quoted John of the Cross about transformative union or something—the idea being that prayer brings us to love God in such a way that our union with God empowers us to love others with the same love that God has for them.  Boy, talk about not believing in original sin; can you even conceive of loving with the love that fills the heart of God? It sort of blows one away.   Why don’t we get this stuff in Sunday Sermons instead of the thoughtless crap about “try to be a better person” or why “only men can be priests” or “Catholicism is the only true religion”?  I tell you, it would be a lot easier to believe that the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ if we got a little more John of the Cross and a little less “Foxe News Catholicism” on Sunday morning.  In fact, I would be happy with a  little more Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.   It all boils down to the old chestnut:  “By this will all know that you are my disciple: that you have love, one for another.”  Hmmm.  Ya think that might be the key?          

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.