Wanted: Sound Leadership

Hilda of Whitby,

a match for any

bishop today

I was at a talk several weeks ago by Father John O’Malley SJ, a Georgetown professor who is a historian and who has written extensively about the Second Vatican Council.  Father O’Malley was asked about the role of women in the Church and he pointed out that until recently the Catholic Church has been seen as a champion of the cause of women.  He mentioned—as I always make a point in my classes—that sixty years ago the only women in the United States who were College Presidents or Hospital Administrators were Catholic nuns.  (Even the famous “Seven Sisters” women’s colleges had men presidents!)  Catholic sisters had broken any number of glass ceilings in the professional and academic world.  (Of course, this was an America in which few women worked outside the home.)  One can go further back in history and see the medical work done by Sisters on the battlefields of our Civil War as well as some of the horrible European wars.  Educational opportunities were open to Sisters that were not open to laywomen of any faith.  Catholic women like Mary Ward and her Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Angela Merici with the Ursulines, established schools for women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when education was not available to women.  And of course in the Middle Ages the great Abbeys of nuns such as Barking, Gandersheim, Helfta, or the Paraclete were centers of learning for women that rivaled the great monastic schools of men.  There were remarkable women intellectuals such as Hildegard of Bingen, Roswitha of Gandersheim, Hilda of Whitby, Gertrude of Helfta, Heloise, Gertrude of Hakeborn.  In addition to these scholars there were the great women mystics of the medieval period—Hadewijch of Antwerp, Beatrice of Nazareth, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Genoa, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Brigitte of Sweden and others who wrote books about their spiritual experiences that shaped the lives and spirituality of countless people. 
These women were not people who let others—even priests and bishops—think for them.  There were souls filled with grace and shaped by the faith of the Church but who had the courage and intellect to make up their own minds and be true to their own inner lights—or rather, to be true to the grace of the Holy Spirit within them.  And why do some people think that women—and men—should let the bishops and the priests think for them today? 
What we need are bishops and priests who themselves are intelligent, well-read, clear thinkers and articulate who can explain the principles of our faith in a intellectually convincing way. We don’t need fools like Bishop Daniel Jenky who use intelligence-free rhetoric or Bishop Thomas Olmstead who speaks without researching his subject.  We don’t need a Francis George who is brilliant but so tightly wrapped in his intellect that he inarticulate.  We don’t need a Donald Wuerl who with a second-class academic degree and no professorial experience thinks he can take on a far superior and more practiced intellect such as Elisabeth Johnson.  Hearing someone like Father O’Malley talk, I know there are people in the Church who know their stuff, see the connections between the historic faith of the Church and contemporary life, and can explain the faith at a level when people can make the connections for themselves and make rational and responsible decisions for themselves.  Is it too much to ask that bishops and Church leaders be selected from among the ranks of such men?  The day of a laity who will follow directions of a hierarchy and clergy are over.  People today need to be convinced and we need leaders in the Church who can make their case and not merely expect to impose their will. 

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!

The Aftermath of the Charlestown Convent Burning

Looking through my notes several days ago, I realized that I had not posted my concluding blog on the Burning of the Charlestown Convent in 1834. As you remember a mob, enraged by anti-Catholic propaganda and rumors--and the growing number of Irish Catholic immigrants and how they were undermining the employment of local Protestant workmen--sacked and burned the Ursuline Convent School in Charlestown MA in August 1834. The story concludes (but the prejudice lived on as we have seen in Philadelphia and other cities). (For details, refer to the postings of January 26 and 27.)
The morning after the convent burning the mayor of Boston Theodore Lyman, convoked a public meeting at Fanueil Hall to discuss what that happened. The meeting adopted a resolution which mandated an investigation of the riot and events leading up to it. it also named member of an investigative committee. The meeting also resolved that the Diocese of Boston should be compensated for the loss of property and offered a reward to anyone providing information about who was responsible for this event The same day the selectmen of Charlestown convoked a public meeting and passed resolutions condemning the violence and setting up a Committee of Vigilance to investigate the affair and to solicit information about the perpetrators that would lead to their arrest and prosecution. These steps were a remarkably generous response to the convent burning and show that the more responsible citizens abhorred the sort of violence that the Charlestown Convent burning represented. Indeed the whole affair, including the relationship of the nuns with the Selectmen and Mr. Curry prior to the riot show that the more responsible sectors of society were not buying into Lyman Beecher’s pulpit pyrotechnics and the anti-Catholicism they represented.
The Catholics on their part kept a cool head about the whole event. Bishop Fenwick convoked a meeting of the Catholic citizens in the area and admonished them that any acts of vengeance would be incompatible with the “religion of Jesus Christ.” On behlf of the Catholic population, the Bishop thanked the Boston and Charlestown authorities for their stand against the violence and expressed his trust that the civil authorities would offer the protection and civil order that would insure this sort of event would not reoccur.
Despite the efforts of civic leaders to defuse the situation, the mob was again on the roll. That very night a mob assembled at the arsenal and moved off in the direction of the Cathedral. Fortunately the mayor had ordered police and military guards to be stationed at the Cathedral and the Catholic church in Charlestown as well as several civic buildings. Finding the Cathedral under guard, the crowd returned to the convent grounds which, curiously, had been left unguarded. The mob destroyed the grounds—tearing down fences and walls, uprooting shrubbery, ravaging the gardens and setting bonfires wherever they could.
In the end, the investigative committee met for three weeks and finally ordered thirteen arrests, eight for burglary or arson which were capital crimes. But that is not the end of the story. The Committee, the Selectmen, the Mayor were of one sort of Bostonian, but these thirteen alleged criminals were to be tried, as law requires, by their peers. All but one were acquitted even though the evidence against them in most cases was indisputable and indeed, the ringleader had admitted out of court, that he had played a pivotal role. The one person found guilty and condemned to life at hard labor, was a sixteen year old boy who had participated in burning books the night the convent sacked. At the request of a public petition signed by Bishop Fenwick and the Superior of the Charlestown Ursuline Sisters, the governor gave the boy a pardon,
The Charlestown Convent burning was early in the revival of anti-Catholicism. The 1840’s and 1850’s would be much more turbulent. The responsible action of the “better sort” of citizenry contrasted to the working class rioters indicates that—as is typical—prejudice generally exists among the less educated and those who feel themselves increasingly emarginated from society. But it is too simple to say that prejudice is limited to the underclass. History shows us something quite different. Lyman Beecher, one of the voices in Boston that was fanning the flames of anti-Catholicism, was a highly educated man with upper-class background. While a demagogue he may have been, a more astute analysis would see him as a man ahead of his time. Two decades after the convent burning some of the best names in the American Republic would be associated with rabid anti-Catholicism. As prejudice progresses it grows in respectability. The Jews in Germany would see this same progression from demagoguery to respectability with far more tragic results. Americans today should look carefully at how totally outrageous things that would once have been said only at White Supremacist rallies or American Nazi Party gatherings are said on cable networks and mainline political gatherings. This time it isn’t the Catholics, at least qua Catholics, who are the objects of vilification—but having been the victims of it in past history we certainly need to distance ourselves from it today.

Today's image is the Revernd Lyman Beecher, a famous Boston Clergyman, who was notorious for his anti-Catholic preaching and writing that contributed to the anti-Catholicism of nineteenth century Boston.

Convent Burnings and Anti-Catholicism

In 1820 the Bishop of Boston, Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus invited the Ursuline nuns from Montreal to send a community of sisters to open a convent and school next to his Cathedral in Boston. The Ursulines had a fine reputation for the education of young women both in Europe and in French Canada. In fact this was there second school in the United States as they had operated an academy in New Orleans—originally French and only recently acquired for the United States—since 1727. The Boston convent and school moved to Ploughed Hill—now renamed Mount Benedict—seven years later. Most of the students came from upper class Protestant families who found the idea of sending their daughters to a “convent school” quite fashionable. (Georgetown Visitation similarly had a large population of upper class Yankee Protestant students at this same period.) All this was well and good during the lull in anti-Catholicism in the early years of the Republic but it would change as the embers of anti-Catholicism were fanned back into flame by the mass influx of Catholic immigrants in the 1830’s and 1840’s and by the anti-Catholic preaching of rabid demagogues in the pulpit, preachers like the Reverend Lyman Beecher, father of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Beecher is probably best known for his abolitionism—his preaching and writing against slavery, but abolitionism is only a small part of a much larger picture. Abolitionism was certainly a noble cause but not all causes associated with American liberalism of the early nineteenth century were so idealistic. Yesterday we talked about the Whig party and the Whigs were the political expression of liberalism. The Whigs split, north and south, on the slavery issue but Whigism was primarily a Northern movement. The Whigs were anti-immigrant because they believed that the democratic ideals of the young nation could only be preserved by people of British ancestry since our Republic was founded to preserve the liberties granted to Englishmen going back to the time of Magna Carta. Representative Government came from the British Parliamentary heritage and while England itself still had a monarchy, its powers were severely limited by Parliament, particularly by the People’s House—the House of Commons. Whigs also saw and wished to maintain that Protestantism was rightfully seen, if somewhat unofficially, as the religion of this Republic. Catholicism was highly suspect. It owed allegiance to a foreign prince,—the Pope—who was an absolute monarch. Priests were agents of the Pope. These immigrants were coming—especially the Germans—from monarchial government. The Irish were worse. They were an inferior race, kept ignorant by their priests, and rebellious against their English masters. Nineteenth century “liberals” tended to be as prejudiced as any Grand Inquisitors of medieval Spain. The fact that most of the immigrants, and the Irish in particular, gravitated towards Jackson’s Democratic party only increased the Whig hatred of anything Immigrant, anything Irish, and anything Catholic. In addition to preachers like Beecher, and perhaps inspired by him, there was a rash of anti-Catholic literature with lurid stories about priests and nuns, vaults filled with the murdered babies of unholy liaisons, the dangers of a papal takeover of the American Republic, the suffering of Protestants in Catholic dominated lands, and other inflammatory prose.
A young Episcopalian student in the School, Rebecca Reed, converted to Catholicism and entered the Ursuline convent. It wasn’t a good fit and she was dismissed towards the end of her postulancy. Reed wrote a book Six Months in a Convent. The book was only published after the Charlestown riots, but drafts of the manuscript had circulated widely among Boston Protestants. The disgruntled would-be nun did not have a lot of good to say about her experience and her book was of a certain “escaped from the convent-genre” popular at the time for its sensationalism.
There was much social unrest in Boston and surrounding towns, especially among the laboring classes. The immigrants—in Boston mostly Irish—were cheap labor. Working class Protestants were finding it hard to compete for jobs. This added to the tension in the city.
On the evening of July 28th 1834, a distraught nun—Sr. Mary John (aka Elizabeth Harrison) knocked on the door of a Protestant Gentleman, Edward Cutter, in Charlestown and asked for help to reach an acquaintance in Cambridge. Mr. Cutter obliged. The next day Mr. Cutter went to the home of the acquaintance to inquire after the nun and was told that she had returned to the convent in the company (custody?) of her Mother Superior and the Bishop of Boston—now Benedict Joseph Fenwick. Rumors began to spread. Was Ms. Harrison being held against her will? Rebecca Reed’s monograph would certainly lead one to think this was a possibility. As the agitation spread, placards were posted around Boston declaring:
"To the Selectmen of Charlestown!! Gentlemen: It is currently reported that a mysterious affair has lately happened at the Nunnery in Charlestown, now it is your duty gentlemen to have this affair investigated immediately. If not the Truckmen of Boston will demolish the Nunnery Thursday night—August 14."

The nuns and the bishop did the utmost to head off trouble. Mr. Cutter and the Charlestown selectmen (town council members) were allowed to come to the convent and interview Sister Mary John, the sister whose flight to Mr. Cutter’s home had started the incident. The nun said that she was free to leave the convent at any time of her choice; she was not being held against her will. A few days later the selectmen were admitted to the convent and Sr. Mary John—not the superior, but again the nun whose notoriety had brought attention to the convent—gave them a thorough tour of the buildings. The Selectmen released a statement to be published in the press that Sr. Mary John was in good health, she was not being held against her will, and that the convent was in every respect a fit place for nuns and students.
That very same night, however, August 11, 1834, a mob of Protestants gathered outside the convent door, calling for the release of any being held there against their will. When a nun came to the window and asked them to disperse, declaring that the nuns and children had all retired for the night, the mob offered her “protection” if she wanted to flee. The Superior, Mother St. George, appeared and made what was probably the greatest mistake in the event, declaring “the Bishop has twenty-thousand of the most vile Irishmen at his command and you may read your riot act till your throats are sore, but you’ll not quell them.” This did not intimidate the mob in the slightest; it served only as a challenge. They dispersed only to come back about two hours later and about two thousand strong. The ringleaders set fire to barrels of pitch on the convent grounds. Fire companies came, but the firemen only joined the crowd. The mob, growing restless, broke into the convent through battered doors and shattered windows ransacking the place. The nuns and students fled to the gardens behind the school through back doors. The mob then torched the building. More to come

The image today is a sketch of the ruins of the Charlestown Convent