(AP Photo/John Russell)
Last April, the Vatican issued an
8-page document addressed to the Leadership Conference of Women
Religious, the major association of American nuns. The “doctrinal
assessment” accused the nuns of “radical feminism,” of agitating for
women’s ordination, and of remaining silent in “the lively public debate
about abortion and euthanasia in the United States.” As a remedy, the
Vatican ordered a five-year rehabilitation, during which the nuns would
be supervised by a committee of three bishops. The nuns were not well
pleased; they fought back. In June, five nuns from Network, a
progressive Catholic lobby criticized in the Vatican assessment,
launched the “Nuns on the Bus” tour, traveling through nine states from
Iowa to Washington, D.C. The nuns attended Masses, held press
conferences, and protested at the offices of conservative congressmen,
like John Boehner; all the while they attacked the Paul Ryan budget for
hurting struggling Americans. Their leader,
Simone Campbell,
spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August. In September,
they gathered two hundred sisters to ride the Staten Island Ferry for a “
Nuns on a Ferry” rally. They are currently organizing protest bus tours around the country, from
Missouri to Ohio.
The Vatican, under the current conservative pope, is not irrational
to fear these nuns and their progressive ways. Among its many reforms,
the Second Vatican Council, which ran from 1962 to 1965 and celebrates
its 50
th anniversary this month, gave more autonomy to nuns.
After it ended, many nuns doffed their habits and resumed their given
names. They developed activist ministries, focused on war or poverty.
Today, many nuns are feminists who prefer Catholic teaching on social
justice to its teaching about sexual morality; they spend less time in
communal prayer and more in the neighborhood.
If the stereotypical nun was once the parochial-school teacher in a
wimple, today it might be the elderly woman in a well-worn sweater,
running a job-training program and reading liberal theology at night.
They have moved far to the left of the male Catholic hierarchy in Rome.
Their disloyalty is not imaginary, not entirely.
But this fight is about more than the Leadership Conference of Women
Religious. About 20 percent of American nuns belong to a rival
organization, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, which
split off in 1992. These sisters still wear habits, and many take new
names in the convent. They are more loyal to the church hierarchy. In
general, they are more interested in stopping abortion than in bringing
the troops home from Afghanistan, and they worry more about Obamacare’s
health insurance mandate than about the Ryan budget’s cuts to Medicaid.
The conservative convents are not getting more new members than their
liberal counterparts: each wing of American sisterhood counts about 500
women in the multi-year process of becoming nuns. But sisters joining
liberal convents are much older, often second-career types, sometimes
with a marriage and children in their past. By contrast, a majority of
women joining convents in the conservative splinter group are in their
twenties. Some traditionalist convents are getting ten or twenty new
postulants (first-year nuns) a year. And this is significant: In 2010,
there were only 56,000 nuns in the United States, less than a third of
their 1965 total. The average age of nuns is rising quickly, and many
convents are becoming nursing homes for their members.
The small renaissance of American nuns is occurring among sisters who
look like nuns from 1960 and, in their deference to the church, act
like nuns from 1960. That model is compelling to a young generation of
devout women who are more interested in purity than in the messy
intellectual complexity, and frequent dissent, that their elders
embraced. The Vatican is doubling down on this old-fashioned model of
sisterhood—no matter the offense taken by thousands of older nuns who
have spent their lives poor, single and childless, all for love of God,
if not always the church.
FIFTY YEARS AGO, the Dominican Sisters of St.
Cecilia, based in Nashville, was lucky to get four or five postulants a
year. But in the past 20 years its population has doubled, from 145
sisters in 1990 to 284 sisters today. And the newbies are overwhelmingly
young: this summer, 21 postulants entered the community, ranging in age
from 19 to 32.
In July, I visited this congregation, which belongs to the
conservative Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious. I was met
at the airport by two young women in white robes and black veils,
standing beside a sedan in the short-term parking area. I got in beside
Sister Anna, and our conversation, which began on the drive back,
continued in a stately sitting room at the convent, where we drank iced
tea as Pope Benedict XVI looked down from the wall. Sister Anna was 32
years old and grew up in the wealthy New York suburb of New Canaan,
Connecticut. She was fair, with a few blond hairs escaping her veil. She
looked like about six girls from my prep school’s lacrosse team. I
asked why she became a nun.
“I went to public school, so I wasn’t taught by nuns,” Sister Anna
said. “I was raised Catholic, but I wasn’t by any definition zealous. I
was raised as a cultural Catholic.” After graduating from New Canaan
High School, Andrea Wray — as she was then known — attended Catholic
University, in Washington, D.C. There, she happened one day upon a
Dominican friar in his robes. “I followed him to ask who are you and why
are you wearing that.” They talked, and she began attending Mass at the
Dominican House near campus. Under the Dominicans’ tutelage, she got
the instruction in doctrine and piety missing from her childhood
Catholicism. “It was the Lord giving me what I needed when I was ready
to receive it,” she said. “I would have spit it back as an adolescent.”
As a collegian, Wray drank it down. The Dominican monks directed her
to the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, a teaching congregation that
sends sisters to work in 34 primary and secondary schools, from
Nashville to Australia. It felt right. Immediately after graduation, in
2002, she moved to Nashville to become a postulant.
Sister Anna had recently finished three years teaching at a nearby
Dominican high school, per the decision of her superior, and she was
about to return to Catholic University to finish a master’s
degree — also per her superior’s orders. She may visit her family only
once a year; they stay in touch by mail. She and the other sisters eat
breakfast and dinner in silence, although one sister reads to the rest:
sometimes the Vatican newspaper, often a biography of St. Dominic.
Sister Anna is chatty and gregarious, very not-contemplative-seeming —
she would be the captain of that lacrosse team — but she insists that
all this structure liberates her.
“When we talk about sacrifices, we are talking about things that make
us more free,” Sister Anna said. “We are not radically independent,”
she said. “We’re not 280 women who happen to be living together. We live
a common life. As the world becomes more and more focused on the
individual, on self-sufficiency, on being an expert in your own field,
that can bring down a community.” The Dominicans make a countercultural
statement: against individualism, against modernity.
Afterward, Sister Catherine Marie, who was the vocation director from
1990 to 2005, and so oversaw the congregation’s boom, gave me a tour of
the Motherhouse, or convent, a large 1862 brick building that
originally operated as a boarding school for girls. “There’s no
recruiting,” Sister Catherine Marie told me. Curious women, including
many college students, stay with the Dominicans for short retreats;
otherwise, the sisters’ outreach is just existing, publicly. “It’s about
being visible and available,” she said. “We usually get two master’s
degrees, one in theology and one in the field of education. So we have a
lot of contact with young people.”
After a sit-down lunch with three sisters, 32 women filed into our
small private dining room, in the basement. Nineteen were novices and
thirteen wore the garb of postulants. One had a guitar, another had a
violin. They introduced themselves by name and hometown: Cincinnati,
Oklahoma City, Melbourne. Then they sang two songs: an original
composition they had written about St. Cecilia, and “Prodigal Son,” by
country star and Nashville resident Dirks Bentley. They were as
exuberant as a collegiate a cappella group, if not quite as tuneful.
After lunch I sat in a living room and talked with about a dozen
young sisters. They resisted my insinuation that they cared only about
the church’s “conservative” positions. “If you don’t care about the
dignity of the human person, it makes no sense to talk about education
or war in Iraq,” said Sister Hannah, an African-American woman who
majored in philosophy at Notre Dame. “So pro-life is foundational that
way. But we do care about other issues.”
They got animated when I asked about the habit. “At the hospital, I
can’t tell you how many times I’ve been approached,” said Sister
Catherine Marie. “A woman once asked me, ‘My mother just died. Will you
pray over her body?’ They unzipped the body bag right there. If I
weren’t wearing the habit, that wouldn’t happen.”
But what of their cloistered existence, their regimented prayer life,
their periods of mandatory silence, their jobs chosen for them?
“Kids today have a thousand friends on Facebook, and they feel
totally isolated,” said Sister Ann Dominic, who was completing her
second, or novice, year, a year spent of no interaction with outsiders.
“I’ve been cloistered all year, and I’ve never felt freer.”
THE SAME WEEK I WENT to Nashville, I visited the
Sisters of St. Joseph, in Holyoke, Mass., a congregation that belongs to
the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. They had arranged for me a
program almost identical to the Dominican treatment: a tour, lunch,
casual chats. These women were as articulate as the Dominicans, as
mirthful, as indifferent to worldly goods. Their simple, sensible-shoe,
old-lady garb was, in its way, more modest than the bright white habits
of the Dominicans. Many of these sisters were teachers, too, although
they were permitted other careers, and some worked in parish houses, in
charities, or as social workers. There are 257 Sisters of St. Joseph,
about as many sisters as in Nashville.
But the Sisters of St. Joseph were old: they range in age from 53 to
100. This summer brought one new member, a once-divorced, once-widowed
woman of 54. The halls of their home, Mont Marie, are filled with
walkers, wheelchairs and canes, congregating in loose formation outside
the chapel, the living rooms, the dining hall.
Over lunch, I talked with a group including Sister Maxine Snyder, the
current president. She joined the congregation in 1960, right after
graduating from a Sisters of St. Joseph high school in North Adams,
Mass. Four years later, her twin sisters also joined — her parents gave
all three of their daughters, and any hope of grandchildren, to the
Sisters of St. Joseph.
When Sister Maxine talks about her decision to become a nun, she
still sounds enraptured, just like the young Dominicans. It was the
example of her high school teachers, she told me. “My mindset was, ‘I
cannot imagine doing anything more meaningful, or more compelling, than
what I’m choosing to do,” Sister Maxine said. “I’ve seen in people here
this energy, this joy, this wide perspective.”
When Vatican II called on sisters worldwide to “renew” their
religious lives, every congregation began internal evaluations to
consider which traditions they should keep and which they might discard.
These were arduous deliberations, taking years. Thousands of nuns left
their orders. Some congregations emerged fairly unchanged, like the
Nashville Dominicans. Others changed a lot, seizing what seemed an
opportunity to become real citizens of the 1960s, with all that era
promised. The Sisters of St. Joseph developed a consensus model of
leadership; most of them began to dress in civilian clothes, identifying
themselves only by a cross worn on the breast or around the neck; and
many took jobs outside of education, their traditional field. They
became more mobile, and prayer lives became less regular and less rigid.
These changes allowed them, among other advantages, to move more easily
among the people.
The Vatican’s doctrinal assessment, Sister Maxine noted, tells the
nuns to spend more time fighting abortion even as it “contains nothing
about the Gospels.” But if you read the Gospels, Sister Maxine said, “so
many times Jesus Christ says the poor will always be with you, and
there are so many stories about Jesus’ ministry to the poor.” Sister
Maxine was implying, quite clearly, that the Vatican’s emphasis on
certain hot-button political issues, at the expense of more general
concern for the least among us, is a distortion of the Gospels.
That is also the view, I suspect, of Sister Jane Morrissey, a Sister
of St. Joseph whom I met in her office at Homework House, several miles
away in Holyoke. Sister Jane became a nun in 1964, and in 2005, she
founded Homework House, an after-school program and summer camp for the
mostly poor, mostly Puerto Rican kids of Holyoke. I asked her why young
women were attracted to conservative congregations, rather than
congregations like hers.
“For the same reason women were attracted to our order when it was
like that!” Sister Jane said, then referred me to the Bible: “John says
that it’s easier to love the God we do not see than the neighbor we do. I
understand that. When I was young I wanted to go into a contemplative
order. There was a kind of safety and solace in the silence…. It’s
tougher to live in the North End of Springfield and be awakened by
mopeds. I have no doubt that I was called to do this—but I wouldn’t have
known that when I was 18.”
The freedoms of Vatican II permitted Sister Jane a more varied life
than she could have predicted. Several years ago, she spent a summer as
an intern at Shakespeare & Co., the famous theater in the
Berkshires. The Dominican sisters tend to limit their reading to
Catholic texts, I was told, but Sister Jane just finished Solzhenitsyn’s
“Cancer Ward.” For fun she memorizes Emily Dickinson. In the small,
cushion-filled room on the third floor of her group home in Springfield,
where she and four other sisters pray every morning, I saw copies of
“The Te of Piglet” and works by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han, in
addition to Francis of Assisi.
The Vatican looks at Sister Anna, the Dominican, and sees the future;
it looks at Sister Jane, and her fellow Sisters of St. Joseph, and
figures their only hope is to emulate the Dominicans. The Vatican is
right, up to a point: the liberal, more elderly congregations are dying.
But then again, so are the vast majority of conservative groups. Five
or ten youthful, growing congregations will not reverse the geriatric,
and ultimately mortal, trend. And forcing some liberal groups to become
more conservative won’t necessarily increase the number of women
interested in being nuns. Church conservatives “want to give you the
sense that if all groups went back into the habit, they’d all have the
success the Nashville Dominicans are having,” Patricia Wittberg, a nun
who teaches sociology at Purdue University, in Indianapolis, told me.
“Not true!” A few young women “would just all be flowing into more
orders. It’s a very small pie.”
For the Dominicans, Catholicism functions as a boat, one with high
walls that protects and carries you, while for the Sisters of St.
Joseph, the church is a life jacket, something that travels easily and
lets you look around. But although they use their religion in different
ways, the nuns were all among the best people I had met in a long time.
They were smart, cheerful, and authentic, not vain.
And brave. Sisters in both congregations told me their parents were
shocked by their decisions—even those who became nuns back in 1960, when
all good Catholics were supposed to want to give a daughter or a son to
the church. At least for a middle-class girl from a proper New England
town, whether Sister Jane or Sister Anna, it was always unusual to
commit so much to the church. It was never an ordinary calling. Even
those nuns who eschew left-wing politics are radicals indeed, for in our
age it has always been a bit radical to be a nun.
Mark Oppenheimer writes the Beliefs column for The New York Times
. He is the author of a new e-book about the life of sex columnist Dan Savage, available here. His website is markoppenheimer.com, and he can be followed on Twitter @markopp1.
