Of Catholics, Socialism, May Day, and Catholic Workers

I had missed in the Sunday Times the editorials by Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof supporting the nuns of LCWR in their Vatican-initiated struggle.   I never got to the editorial page Sunday; fortunately while having dinner with friends Sunday evening the subject came up and the newspaper was produced and the essays read.  I would encourage you to go on line and read them too.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/kristof-we-are-all-nuns.html?_r=1 (Kristof) and http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/dowd-bishops-play-church-queens-as-pawns.html?ref=maureendowd (Maureen Dowd).  But that is not what I want to write about today.  The article I did catch in the Times celebrates the 79 years of the Catholic Worker Movement led by Servant of God, Dorothy Day.  The “Servant of God” title comes from her cause for sainthood—something she never wanted and actively disdained—having been introduced into the Catholic Church.

      Day is a most improbable saint—which is how she saw herself.  It is not that she wasn’t a holy woman but more that her holiness doesn’t easily fit into the institutional packaging of John Paul II/Benedict XVI Catholicism.  If today’s Vatican has issues with today’s good nuns, I can’t imagine how it would cope with Dorothy Day.  

       Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was born into a middle class WASP family with very little religious interest.  Her father was a journalist—as she herself would later become.  While still in her teens she would be reading socialist and communist authors.  (There is a difference between socialism and communism, something of which many semi-literates of the modern right seem to be ignorant.  That is not to cushion Dorothy’s views—Day would move far to the left of main-stream socialism even in her Catholic years.)   Returning to New York before she was twenty, she wrote for a number of socialist newspapers and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘Wobblies.’)  That wasn’t the worst of it; this was the time of World War I and Day was an ardent pacifist as well as working for women’s suffrage. 

       Day’s family was nominally Episcopalian but rarely attended Church. nevertheless, Dorothy herself showed a curious interest in religion from an early age.  She was fascinated by the bible and while still a young girl began attending Episcopalian services and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church.  What she loved and what drew her was the liturgy.  She was not one to buy the party line, however, however, and although she attended Church she considered herself an agnostic.  In her New York years she became increasingly bohemian in her lifestyle entering into a common law marriage and having at least one abortion.  Her partner, Forster Batterham, was, like her, a social activist, but he was also a scientist and had an intemperate contempt for anything religious.  Though deeply in love with Batterham, Dorothy found herself drawn to religious practice.  As so many of the immigrant poor whose cause she championed were Catholic, she found herself attending Mass when she wanted to attend church.  She remembered the psalms and canticle from the Episcopal liturgy of her younger days and found herself praying them again.  She was given a rosary and began to say it.  Her spiritual growth put her at odds with Batterham and the relationship become somewhat on-again, off-again.  When she became pregnant and refused to have another abortion, Batterham left her,  He tried to come back after the birth of their daughter, but Dorothy refused him. 

       Dorothy met a Sister of Charity (one of the groups now affiliated with LCWR), Sister Aloysius, on the street and spontaneously asked about how to go about having the child baptized.  Sister Aloysius arranged for the baptism (see, even in those days the Charities were radical) and Dorothy named her daughter Tamara Teresa.  Dorothy had read the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—at that time the spiritual best-seller of the day—while in the maternity hospital and this increased her bond with the Catholic Church.  Dorothy herself was received into the Catholic Church in December the following year (1927). 

      In 1932 Dorothy met Peter Maurin, a vagabond French immigrant who had briefly been a de la Salle Christian Brother.  Maurin was without much formal education but had a brilliant mind and was widely read.  He knew the Fathers of the Church, the papal encyclicals of the previous half-century, and had a natural bent for sociology.  He was even more radical than Dorothy.  Maurin also had a deep spirituality very much modeled on the radical vision of Saint Francis of Assisi who had renounced the comfortable life-style of his family to live among the poor as one of them in order to preach the Gospel with credibility.  Day and Maurin began publishing a penny-newspaper, The Catholic Worker, 79 years ago today, May 1, 1933.  Building on the foundation of papal social teaching and Christian pacificism they opened the first Catholic Worker House, a “house of hospitality,” a voluntary community  of Catholics who lived in poverty welcoming the poor to share what little they themselves had.  By 1941 and the outbreak of World War II, there were over thirty of these communities across the United States.  Today there are several hundred in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.  

      Day became a Benedictine oblate—that is a lay affiliate of the Benedictine Order of monks and nuns and this anchored her spirituality in an ancient tradition.  In many ways the Benedictine charism is stamped into the identity of the Catholic Worker Houses.  Her radical ideas—the renunciation of private property and advocacy of what might be called a Catholic socialism, her pacifism, and her independence of Church authority made her highly suspect in many Catholic circles of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, but the Second Vatican Council vindicated her vision of what the Church is called to be.  Cardinal Spellman had tried to force her to drop the word “Catholic” from her newspaper and movement since they were not under ecclesiastical supervision.  (Today, I must admit, I would probably back Spellman on this issue and I guess I need to give this some thought when I say that Michael Voris should be forced to drop the word “Catholic” form his internet-television project.  Blades have to cut both ways.  At the end of the day, I think Voris’ claims of Catholicity forces me to side with Spellman.)  However, Paul VI invited her to be among the lay observers for the final session of Vatican II in the autumn of 1965. 

      Day’s final years were a time of recognition for her prophetic words and action in the Church.  Ironically, fifty years ago she was far to the left of these “radical nuns” of LCWR yet the Church came ‘round and the Gospel won out.  It will win out again.  The Holy Spirit always has to swim against the current when She is forced to deal with Church bureaucracy but in the end God Triumphs and men surrender. 

     Dorothy Day died in 1980 in New York City and Cardinal Cooke introduced her cause for beatification in 1983.  She had always declared that she did not want to be “trivialized” by being made a saint.  And she was much better in flesh and blood on the streets with the poor and she could ever be in plaster in a darkened nook of some suburban church.   

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?          

Brava for the Brave Ladies of the American Civil War--the Battlefield Nuns

When the Civil war began with the shelling of Fort Sumter on April 12^th 1861, there were Sisters with nursing training and experience—Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Saint Joseph, Sisters of Mount Carmel, and various other congregations both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.   At various points in the war Union and Confederate officers alike asked Church officials for Sisters to nurse the sick and wounded  in army hospitals, barracks, transport ships and hundreds of improvised field hospitals set up along the shifting battle fronts.   

Nuns—or actually Religious Sisters—had advantages that most laywomen, Catholic or Protestant, lacked.  Not having families of their own (other than their respective religious communities) they had a freedom to leave and go where they were needed.  They were used to a Spartan life and the hardships accompanying a military force on the move were no more demanding—and probably much more exciting—than the convent life they were used to.  Many of them, especially those whose communities maintained hospitals,  had professional training and experience in assisting with surgical procedures in addition to post-operative care as well as the care of disease infected patients.  And probably most important they didn’t feel constrained by the societal norms that regulated the lives of Middle Class and Upper Class “ladies.”  They weren’t above getting their hands dirty or bloodied, living in a tent or crowded into a barn or cabin, not being able to change their clothes or bathe for days on end, and dealing with the grit of camp life.  And so Sisters of various congregations—but most notably the Charities—could be seen at Antietam, Natchez, Richmond, Harper’s Ferry, Gettysburg, Frederick, Holly Springs.  And whichever side brought them to the battle, in their work they made no distinction between the Blue and the Grey. 

One of the most noted-by-history nursing sisters was Mary O'Connell  (Sister Anthony) (1814-1897) known as the “Angel of the Battlefield.”  Born in Limerick Ireland  she migrated to the United States where she entered the American Sisters of Charity at Cincinnatti.   During the Civil War she served at Camp Dennison (OH) and at the battlefields or hospitals  of Winchester VA, Cumberland Gap (TN), Richmond (VA), Nashville (TN), Gallipolis (OH), Culpeper Court House (VA), Murfreesboro(TB), Pittsburgh Landing (TN) and Lynchburg (VA).  She later received recognition for her work in the yellow fever epidemic of 1877.

On September 17, 1862 the Maryland authorities petitioned the help of the Sisters of Charity, Mother Seton's origional foundation, at St. Joseph's, Emmitsburg, Maryland after the Battle of Antietam. When the Sisters went to the battlefield, they found wounded of both armies on the ground; many were moved to hospitals. "For six days, the Sisters went from farm to farm, seeking wounded and sick and risking their own lives because of unexploded bombshells" Courage and commitment to duty were a few of the solid characteristics of the Sisters.

Emmitsburg is so close to Gettysburg, that when the war moved to that theatre the first day of July 1863, the sisters could hear the cannon of the battle.  When the fighting ended on the evening of July 3^rd  the skies opened and  it began to rain and rained through the night and all the next day. This didn’t daunt Mother Seton’s daughters who came up to the site in wagons and borrowed carriages with nursing supplies and a readiness to care for the wounded.  The scene which greeted them was a hell-on-earth

"Finally we reached the scene of combat. What a frightful spectacle met our gaze! Houses burnt, dead bodies of both Armies strewn her and there, an immense number of slain horses, thousands of bayonets, sabres, wagons, wheels, projectiles of all dimensions, blankets, caps, clothing of every color covered the woods and fields. We were compelled to drive very cautiously to avoid passing over the dead. Our terrified horses drew back or darted forward reeling from one side to the other. The farther we advanced the more harrowing was the scene; we could not restrain our tears" 

Over a hundred field hospitals were established quickly at Gettysburg and the surrounding areas.  What patients could be transported back to Emmitsburg were.  In Gettysburg itself every available building was used . At one point they ran out of supplies. When the Sisters appealed for supplies, they were told that there would be no more. "Is that your final decision?", Sister asked the officer. "Then I shall speak to the President." Before the day ended, supplies were delivered and the soldiers cheered.  The Sisters "knew that they had a sincere friend in Lincoln

Gettysburg, because of its proximity to the Motherhouse at Emmitsburg, saw the most activity by the nuns, but it was not only the Emmitsburg Charities who stepped up to the needs created by the War.   “ By the end of the war, more than 280 Mother Seton's Sisters of Charity from a variety of the diferent congregations that had their roots in Emmitsburg , had nursed both Union and Confederate soldiers in military and local hospitals, on transport boats on the Atlantic coast and on the Mississippi, and at temporary military encampments. Many soldiers forgot about their anti-Catholic feelings because of the Sister's devoted care.”  This last point is very important as much of the anti-Catholic bias was overcome by the gentle and compassionate nursing of the Sisters.  

Among the other Religious Congregations that helped out with battlefield nursing were the sisters of Charity of Nazareth—founded by Mother Catherine Spalding, not by Mother Seton, who maintained four military hospitals in Kentucky during the Civil War

The nursing needs of the Civil War opened a role of independence for women that had not previously existed in our society.   With the exception of Catholic Sisters, relatively few women stepped into the new roles available to them.   For almost a century more, the only women in the United States who took key administrative roles in public institutions—particulalry hospitals and women’s’  colleges were Catholic Religious Sisters.  Religious life was an area where the Catholic Church helped women break through the “glass ceilings” that put men in charge and left the work to women.  That, of course, has changed in the last fifty years as women have been able to enter the professions and sidle up the bar with the old boys. 
The image today is the plaque on a monument to the various Sisters who stepped up to the challenge of nursing the soldiers of both armies during the American War.  Each Sister in the plaque wears the habit of one of the various Congregations who supplied nurses.  This picture is not as clear as one might wish it be, but if you double-click on the photo you should get a larger (and more clear) version.   

Those Lovely Ladies, the American Nuns (and why is the Vatican so worried?)

I want to find my way back to the topic of the American Civil War so that I can do a blog on the nursing Sisters who played such an important role in winning the confidence of Americans towards the Catholic Church in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Before I treat of the sisters who nursed the wounded and sick soldiers of both the North and the South, however, I really need to give a brief history of the American Sisters of Charity as they played such a major role in this work and so this brings us back to the series “Let’s Hear It For the Ladies” where we have been treating of American Religious women in light of the “Vatican Investigation of American Nuns.”

At the time of our independence from Britain, there were no convents for women Religious in the original thirteen States.  If a woman wanted to pursue a religious vocation, she had to go to Europe and enter a monastery there—as approximately thirty-five colonial Americans had, all from Maryland, in the approximately century and a half between the Catholic settling of Maryland and our Revolution.  It was in 1790 that Bishop John Carroll brought four Carmelite nuns, three Americans and an Englishwoman, from the Netherlands and settled them on an estate in Port Tobacco, Maryland—not far from modern Washington DC.  This was the heart of Catholic Maryland and three of these women were related to each other and to many of the local plantation owning families.  We are not going to focus on this monastery however as they were “nuns”—that is cloistered religious—and we are focusing on “sisters”—that is women religious who are not monastics and enclosed.  (We will do a blog on these women at a later time—I am fascinated by their story.)

With few clergy and no religious women—other than the small monastery of cloistered Carmelite nuns—Bishop Carroll was well used to depending on the laity to take an active and collaborative role in the necessary ministries of the Church.  Meanwhile, a widowed convert to the Catholic Church, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Seton, had met the Rev. Louis Dubourg, SS, an émigré from the French Revolution.  The Abbé Dubourg was one of those brilliant souls who travels fast through life proving the axiom “still waters run deep.”  In other words, Dubourg razzle-dazzled  his contemporaries with his accomplishments without laying good foundations for his work.  He was better at starting projects than following through on them.    

Seton came from a socially prominent family in upper-crust Manhattan society, but her husband had gone bankrupt shortly before his death and her conversion to Catholicism lost her the support and friendship of most of her relatives and practically all of her social set.  In an effort to support herself and her five children, she had opened a hospital in New York but it failed—in great part due to her being ostracized from New York Society for her becoming a Catholic.  She heard Dubourg preach in New York and was deeply impressed and at his suggestion she moved with her family to Baltimore where Dubourg had established a seminary for Archbishop Carroll.  Mrs. Seton opened a small school and was joined by five other women whom Dubourg thought should be organized into a sisterhood based on the model of the Daughters of Charity, the community founded by Saints Vincent DePaul and Louise de Marillac.  Dubourg guided the small group along the paths of the Vincentian spiritual life and on March 25, 1809, Elizabeth Seton professed her vows—renewable annually on the Vincentian model—to Bishop Carroll.  The Sisters—like their French counterparts—did not adopt the guimpe and veil of nuns but wore the black dress and bonnet typical to widows.  (The French Daughters of Charity had originally worn the highly starched bonnets of serving-women of their day.)  Several months later the Sisters relocated to Emmitsburg Maryland where a benefactor had donated 269 acres for the establishment of a school.  The school, St. Joseph’s, opened the following February and the Sisterhood itself grew remarkably fast despite the hardship and consequent illness and early deaths of some of the Sisters.  By 1814 Mother Seton was able to send sisters to Philadelphia to open an orphan’s home.  In 1817 Sisters went to New York at the invitation of Bishop Connolly to make a foundation and take care of orphans.   In 1829 a foundation was made in Cincinnati.

In 1847 Bishop John Hughes of New York—a bishop noted for his autocracy as you might remember from earlier blogs—insisted that the Sisters of Charity in his diocese become independent of Emmitsburg and he named his sister, Mother Angela Hughes, their superior.  Other bishops followed suit, either breaking the sisters in their various dioceses off from the jurisdiction of groups in other dioceses or, as in the case of the Sisters in New Jersey, recruiting candidates from their own dioceses, sending them to an established group for their formation, and then bringing them home to establish a new Congregation.  Today autonomous congregations of Sisters of Charity in New York, Convent Station NJ, Halifax NS, Cincinnati, and Greensburg PA, all trace their origins back to the Seton heritage. The original community at Emmitsburg, affiliated themselves with the French Daughters of Charity, in 1850, at which time they traded Mother Seton’s widows’ bonnet for the starched cornette of the French Daughters of Charity.  In 1964 that was exchanged for a simple modern habit designed by Christian Dior.  Meanwhile, some of the daughter congregations had traded the bonnet for a more traditional veil. 

Mother Seton was not the only foundress of a congregation of Sisters of Charity.   Only three years after her taking vows, Catherine Spalding, the daughter of a prominent Catholic family from Charles County, Maryland and two friends were encouraged by Father (later Bishop) Jean-Baptiste Marie David, another émigré priest, to form a Sisterhood near Bardstown Kentucky—a Catholic stronghold in the Ohio Valley to which settlers were streaming in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Spalding was only nineteen when she undertook this project, but she, like Seton, modeled her Institute on the French Daughters of Charity.  Their original outreach was education, but they soon took on the care of orphans and nursing.  Like Seton’s Charities, the Kentucky women, known as the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, did not adopts nun’s habits but a plain black dress and bonnet. 

In the midst of an 1829 cholera epidemic, Irish born Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina—one of the most progressive prelates in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States—established a congregation of sisters, also based on the Vincentian model, and known originally as the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. (In the twentieth century they changed their names to the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy.) 

The same year as Bishop Ireland established the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, Father James Nicholas Joubert, like Fathers Dubourg and David, a Sulpician, encouraged an Afro-Caribbean resident of Baltimore, Ms. Elisabeth Lange and a companion, Maria Balas, who were teaching Haitian children in Baltimore to establish a religious community for women of African descent to minister to children of African heritage.  Thus began the Oblate Sisters of Providence.  These sisters too originally wore the black dress and white bonnet common to African-American women servants.  Only later in their history did they adopt a monastic style habit with wimple and veil.  Their original convent was a rented house in Baltimore; their first motherhouse, a row-house so typical of the Baltimore neighborhoods.     Their work traditionally focused on the education of African-American children but they undertook whatever work the Church needed at the time, including domestic service at the Baltimore seminary. 

The Vincentan Rule adopted by the various congregations of American Sisters of Charity was particularly well adapted to American life as it was decidedly and deliberately non-monastic with Vincent dePaul’s   famous admonition to the Sisters: for a monastery, only the houses of the sick, for cell, a rented room, for chapel, the parish hurch, for cloister, the streets of the city, for enclosure, obedience, for grill, the fear of God, for veil, holy modesty.  This gave the sisters a freedom of movement to respond to the needs of their neighbors and it would come in very handy during the American Civil War
The image today is Mother Catherine Spalding, foundress of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. 

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.

A lull in Anti-Catholic America

Continuing with the theme of a history of Anti-Catholicism in America, Catholics in the newly independent nation fared quite well. While society in general and political power in particular remained in the hands of the old English-now-American gentry who were, with the exception of the Marylanders, all but universally Protestants of the Congregationalist or Unitarian types in New England or Episcopalians (New York, Virginia and the Southern States), Catholics had at least been given the freedom to build churches and openly practice their faith. Catholic communities sprang up in Boston, New York, and Charleston. Philadelphia had a Catholic community even before the Revolution and indeed the Continental Congress had, on at least one occasion, repaired to Old St. Joseph’s Church for public prayer. Catholicism was long accustomed to being publically acknowledged in Maryland. Moreover many Marylanders were among the most avid settlers pouring through the Cumberland Gap into the Ohio Valley settlements in what is now Kentucky. Indeed within eighteen years of John Carroll’s being named first Archbishop of Baltimore, his See would be named an archdiocese with four suffragens—Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown Kentucky. A few years later dioceses were created in Charleston, Richmond, and Cincinnati.
John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop, was well known to the leading figures in American politics. He was a Carroll, of the Maryland Carrols. His cousin Charles had signed the Declaration of Independence. Another member of the family was Daniel Carroll who served in Congress. Several Carrolls, including the Bishop’s Mother, Elizabeth Carroll, and the aforementioned Daniel Carroll, were among the landowners whose estates were purchased for the establishment of the new national Capital, Washington City, on the banks of the Potomac. Daniel Carroll was the owner of Jenkin’s Hill—the site that was picked for the new national Capitol and is now called Capitol Hil. John Carroll had served on a diplomatic mission to Canada with Benjamin Franklin and Franklin was among those who urged the Pope, Pius VI, to confirm Carroll’s election as first bishop in the nascent nation.
That is not to say, however, that Franklin or others—despite their regard for Carroll personally—held Catholicism in high esteem. Many of these founders including George Washington (though not Franklin) were free-masons and free-masonry was ardently opposed to traditional Christianity which they saw as intellectually incompatible with their enlightenment consecration to rationalism. Washington was a nominal Episcopalian—indeed a vestryman in his parish—but he attended church primarily to please his wife, and his participation in Christian worship was limited to attendance at Morning Prayer. Martha would stay for Holy Communion, but the General would leave church before the Communion Service began. From various comments he made, verbally or in writing, it is clear that Washington was not committed to the doctrine of Christ’s divinity and he saw religion’s main purpose as encouraging moral behavior among the less educated populace. This view was shared by Thomas Jefferson who himself might best be described as an Agnostic and who, while baptized an Anglican in infancy and buried according to the Anglican (or technically, Episcopalian) rites, saw Jesus as a great moral teacher and nothing else. Indeed, Jefferson went through his bible and sliced out all the miracle stories (including the Virgin Birth and Resurrection) and claims to Christ's divinity, leaving only the parables and moral teachings of Jesus. Jefferson did make several contributions towards the building of Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches because he saw them a offering good moral training to the yeoman farmers of Virginia whose political cause he championed. There is no record of him ever making a contribution towards the building of a Catholic church. (Washington, on the other hand, did make a contribution towards the building of Old Saint Mary’s in Alexandria, mostly because his much favored equerry, a Colonel John Fitzgerald, was among the sponsoring parishioners.) Jefferson and Franklin had served as envoys to the French Court and saw the unattractive side of European Catholicism with the great prelates of France living in lordly splendor at the expense of the underclasses and exerting great (and usually self-interested) influence over the King and his decisions. It did not leave them as admirers of Catholicism.
In the new republic Catholics tended to be Federalists—the party opposed to Jefferson and his “Republicans.” (This will get confusing, but the “Republican Party" of Jefferson is not related to today’s Republicans—indeed, to the contrary, they are the first generation of the modern Democrat party.)
Catholics in the new republic tended to be conservative and in favor of a strong central government. They were, for the most part, Maryland slave-holding gentry farmers. Also, after 1789 Jefferson and his followers were enamored—blindly so—of the French Revolution. The Revolution’s anti-Church fervor was very off-putting to Catholics who, though they might want to see a more democratic France did not think it worth the bloodshed of its king, so many priests and religious, and its many devout laity. Men like Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington were Gentlemen, however, and it was required of gentlemen to show tolerance if not respect; while there may not have been an enthusiasm for the Catholic Church there was no hint that Catholics should not take a full role in American public life.
Catholics for their part were making a contribution to the new republic. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Sisterhood, the Sisters of Charity, was growing and its women undertook ministries both of education and nursing—needed services in the new nation that had not yet developed much of an infrastructure for these services to be provided at public expense. Only a few years after Elizabeth Seton’s Sisterhood, Catherine Spalding, a nineteen-year-old woman from an old Maryland family—and a family that would prove very prominent in the history of Catholic America—established the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in 1812. A laywomen, Teresa Lalor, opened a girl’s school on the campus of Georgetown College in 1799. The school drew young women from the best families—Catholic and Protestant—of the national capital. It was a tradition in the school's first two decades that the President of the United States attended the commencement and gave the girls their diplomas. Lalor and her companions had developed into a community of Visitation nuns by 1816. Ursuline nuns had come from Quebec and opened a convent and school in Charlestown, outside Boston. Like the Visitation in Georgetown, it drew young women from the best families and more Protestants than Catholics. This was an age of peace for the Church—but a peace that was not to last. Catholics had successfully integrated themselves into American society. They proved their loyalty to the Republic and their usefulness to the larger society. Their bishops and clergy showed themselves interested not in political clout but in building a Church that was anxious to show its gratitude for its freedom under the laws of the Republic by being the best and most loyal of citizens and making its contribution to a nation that was neither Catholic or Protestant, but granted freedom to all.

The image today is the Cathedral of Saint Joseph, Bardstown

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.