Posted on 08/25/2006 7:43:16 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
Kenneth Briggs, former religion editor of The New York Times and author of Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns, shares the fruits of an eight-year study which brings to light possible reasons for the diminishing numbers of American sisters in our time. Tracing a detailed history of events from the 1950s until the present, Briggs provides specific examples of typical religious communities and interviews with individual sisters.
Well documented and fairly presented, the book describes the struggles and misunderstandings between the church's hierarchy and the sisters who took seriously the mandate for renewal directed to religious by the Second Vatican Council.
Briggs' thesis is that when U.S. sisters enthusiastically responded to the call for changes in their customs, dress and lifestyle, they ran into opposition by the clergy. A financial crisis concerning retirement, health care and survival soon compounded the problem. The author suggests that if church authorities had encouraged and supported sisters, their numbers may not have dwindled, nor their future become so uncertain.
Evidence of the "betrayal" began with events predating Vatican II, according to Briggs. Although religious women were earlier exhorted to adapt to the modern world by both Pope Pius XII and Belgian Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens, one of the council's four moderators, the hierarchy objected to changes made after the council. Many clerics held to the idea of a "higher state" for religious, whereas the council had abandoned the idea.
Vatican officials attempted to control the Sister Formation Conference, a program for educating the sisters intellectually, psychologically and theologically. Social justice, put forth by the council as a great world need, also became a problematic issue when many sisters engaged in that work became aware of major injustices not addressed within the church itself.
Following Pope John XXIII's proclamation that justice for women is one of the major signs of the times, well-educated sisters began to wonder if patriarchy was really a teaching from Jesus or the creation of a hierarchy which developed later. Having followed the mandate to return to the truths of the gospel, many American sisters felt torn between Jesus' model of a discipleship of equals and a vertical, stratified authority structure.
Many questioned the disparity between the council's concept of "the people of God" and the exclusion of women from the council itself. When sisters questioned not being allowed to attend the meeting of the committee on religious life, Briggs reports that the cardinal in charge remarked that perhaps they could try again at the Fourth Vatican Council.
Because of substandard compensation for many years of service to the church, sisters eventually faced a future without health care or retirement funds. An appeal to the bishops usually met with the rebuff that the sisters had voluntarily chosen to sacrifice themselves for God through the system and now were on their own. Briggs' study shows that although a yearly appeal was allowed through the parishes, it barely met one-tenth of their needs.
Although the author shows the hierarchy turning a deaf ear to the voices of many U.S. sisters, he also states that neither side had begun with animosity. One of the major factors creating controversy, he feels, was the lack of any directive from the council to the priests and bishops themselves for change. Had the clerics been directed toward a searching analysis of their own origins, gospel truths and the nature of their authority, a better understanding might have emerged and a more complete renewal in the church would have been possible.
Despite its inflammatory title, some typographical errors and misuses of Catholic terminology by Briggs, a Methodist, the book is informative and insightful overall.
This some kind of agenda for you, Alex?
Pray tell, what sect do you belong to? You're so hell-bent on posting every inflammatory article you can find on the Catholic Church, you'd think you'd proudly proclaim the name of your "confession" (as the mod calls it).
So, so sad. I was lucky to have been taught by nuns. God Bless Them All.
Retired nuns’ care costly crisis
There was also a post of a similar nature about nuns fighting to receive Social Security. (Elderly nuns press U.S. for full benefits) Seems like it's, "Thanks for the service. You took an oath of poverty, now live it." Very sad throwing these people onto government assistance.
The early church was the one to establish care for those inside the church (1 Tim 5:8-10). We have lost this concept it seems.
What, the only good leftist is an anti-Catholic leftist? A grip should be gotten here, I think.
Nonsense. Had the sisters not lost their faith en masse and become of the world, their numbers wouldn't have dwindled. Had the religious orders and secular priests not abandoned their discipline (habits/clericals, prayer life, etc.), they wouldn't have accepted the worldly view so willingly.
As for "suporting and encouraging" sisters, the Church does do that, just not in the way the feminist nuns want it to. There are many thriving communities that I'm sure this Methodist author didn't even search out for the other side of the story.
Check Alex's "In Forum" comments and you'll find that he makes no secret of what he believes. Presbyterian/Calvinist model, I think.
This particular article is a book review. I don't see it as particularly inflammatory. It's a fact that we are 40 years into a big upheaval in the Church that occurred after the last council. Hardly the first in the history of the Church and not likely to be the last. This book isn't definitive on the subject. The Tidings is carrying a review that speaks about the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Mr. Briggs doesn't make any connection to the decline and the upheaval going on throughout society at the time:
The Introduction lays out the startling figures: "In 1965 sisters numbered 185,000 in more than 500 orders." By 2005, the total had dropped by more than half, to 68,963, and of those fewer than 6,000 were under 50. Anyone even slightly interested in nuns' stories must question the meaning of this drop in the population of convents as well as the succeeding changes in ministries, especially in education in elementary and secondary schools and in the broad fields of nursing and hospital administration.
Briggs traces the problem of the dramatic drop in the number of nuns to the process of renewal initiated by the Second Vatican Council followed by the opposition of some members of the U.S. hierarchy to this process. Abandonment of habits, changes of prayer schedule, more flexibility in the understanding of obedience --- these and other new factors of religious life were looked upon as dangerous and life threatening to the sisters: This was the fear of some bishops, priests and lay Catholics as well as some of the sisters themselves.
All this is clear and fairly well known by readers of post-Vatican II literature on U.S. sisterhoods. Are these changes the cause of the dramatic drop in the number of religious women or are there deeper more complex hidden causes? There are no doubt further studies to be done on this subject, hopefully by the sisters themselves who lived through the period.
Meantime, Briggs is to be thanked for recounting the service the Sister Formation Conference (SFC) gave to the education of U.S. Roman Catholic sisters. The tragic circumstances surrounding the demise of the SFC is accurately written. Such names as Sister Emily Penet, Sister Ritamary Bradley and Sister Annette Walters are credited for their frontier and struggling work.
The phenomenal study of the Sisters' Survey headed by Sister Marie Augusta O'Neill is recalled as well as the continuing work of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. All of these programs met with opposition from some of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy who wished to control women's lives as they had before the Second Vatican Council.
Yet Briggs does not include the more obvious cultural and sociological issues prevalent at this time --- for example, the women's movement and the civil rights confrontation. As a former religion editor of the New York Times, Briggs fails to include a more nuanced and researched analysis of the period to supplement his account of the renewal.
And what about the Immaculate Heart Community of Los Angeles? Briggs' account of the IHM efforts of renewal and Cardinal McIntyre's defense of the status quo is succinct but inadequately researched. The ultimate choice of the IHM's status as non-canonical is explained by Briggs as an alternative community, a middle way born of "strife, grit and integrity" (p. 116). A more extensive record of this unique part of American Catholic history would provide an accurate account for the reader.
Briggs' book is not an outstanding rendition of the post-Vatican II exodus of sisters from the convent. However, its readable style and the interest generated by the central thesis will contribute to the ongoing discussion of this period of U.S. religious life.
Anita Caspary, IHM, was the Mother General of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and founding president of the Immaculate Heart Community. She is the author of "Witness to Integrity: The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community" (Liturgical Press 2003).
I went to a Catholic grade school, and attended a Catholic high school for one year, then transferred and graduated from my local public high school. Consequently, I became acquainted with two separate Orders, the Sister of Mercy, and the Sisters of St. Joseph. I don't think (and this applies to priests too) that all who hear the call are really chosen. Both the priesthood and the nunnery could also be places of refuge, in which refuge was never to be found.
The best priests I knew are no longer priests, and those poor nuns having to live with one another, day in and day out, without even having a room of their own.
Our rectory was a very large and beautiful old brick building. Each priest had his own room to retire to, they didn't have to share. The nuns did have to share rooms, and they had to for years and years. I can't imagine having no small, tiny corner to myself that I could retire to for privacy, etc. Living with 10 or 12 other women, without the ability to retire to one's own quarters, when things got tough or went wrong, must have been very, very hard.
They worked diligently all the time. Right now, I can still summon up the pleasurable memory of the smell of the convent. They brought much to the table as far as academics, and discipline were concerned.
To show you how much things changed, I lived in an apartment house in the early 90s, and was sitting on the front porch as a moving truck pulled up, and a couple of women got out and began to move stuff in. I offered my help, and they accepted. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I found myself joking with them about the merciless Sisters of Mercy (I always had a way of sticking my foot in my mouth), to which they replied they were part of the Order, they were nuns. They were in shorts, t-shirts; I had no way of knowing. They laughed at what I said, because I didn't say it with any anger, I was serious, but still kidding around more or less. As my new neighbors, they promised to change my opinion of the Sisters of Mercy, which never happened because they were lesbians. Moral of the story being, even though I suffered at their hands, I prefer the Sisters of Mercy who taught me, then the Sisters of Mercy who roomed above me.
I think I wanted to be a nun when I was about 8 years old. I remember thinking I wouldn't even have to change my name. My second grade nun, Sister Joan-Marie, was an angel, but she joined a cloistered order the year after she taught me, and she was the last angel in a habit that I was to encounter.
A guy, writing for America's #1 Stalinist apologist, with so little understanding of Catholicism, he cannot even bother to LEARN Catholic terminology, tries to nonetheless diagnose the collapse of the institution of female religious, and turns it into a hotheaded polemic.
I read recently of how a community of 700 sisters invited a team of psycholgists , recommended by the diocese. Within 5 years, there was not a single sister left in the community.
"THROWING THESE PEOPLE ONTO GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE???"
Much of SS is actually government assistance. But the core of the program is purchased. The Catholic Church, which provides more private education than all other providers combined, and dominates the not-for-profit, non-governmental caretaking fields, is in financial crisis. Yet no-one is being thrown onto government assistance.
When you go to collect your social security, we;ll see whether you consider it "government assistance."
Do you also have an Anti-Catholic, Catholic bashing robe?
>> Abandonment of habits, changes of prayer schedule, more flexibility in the understanding of obedience --- these and other new factors of religious life were looked upon as dangerous and life threatening to the sisters <<
Yeah, that's the problem... not enough nuns kicked the habit. By that reasoning, of course, the orders which did kick the habit immediately should be the ones flourishing. Strange though: I meet lots of young nuns in the DC area. Never met a nun under 50 who wasn't in a habit; and I've met precious few over 50 who were.
Apparently, the "betrayal" is that the nuns weren't allowed to work at abortion clinics or San Francisco's hot tub indutsry.
The real reason for the disappearance of American nuns is that the ministry lost all religious significance. Why do union organizers, non-profit laborers and school teachers have to be poor and celibate?
You may be thinking of Colson and Rogers. They helped empty out convent after convent.
One of the two was still alive several years ago and was spending much of his time traveling around the country apologizing. No joke. This outfit has a video or DVD of one of those presentations:
http://theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/ShpMl/00ShpMl.htm
Here's the video name: NON-DIRECTIVE EDUCATION - a FAILURE -- (Video, 1 3/4 hr) Wm. Coulson, Ph. D., a founding father (with Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow) of non-directive, "self-esteem" psychology, explains why the non-directive methods he helped develop are destroying our school systems. Suggestions for remedy. ($22) NOTE: videos being remastered and not currently available.)
The NOTE saying the video is being remastered has been there for TWO YEARS or more so I would call and ask. It is not a high quality video in terms of film production, but there is some real dynamite information there. It was fascinating.
my experience as well. The sisters who still wear habits you will see at daily mass and adoration, but the t-shirt/business suit sisters seem to be too busy for adoration. Sad.
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
I read that article, too. I think it was the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
This is a personal thing -- it's religion, after all.
In the your world is it OK for political points of view to be expressed without identification of the point of view from which the person is speaking?
You actually consider demanding that someone identify what "confession" they belong to constitutes a personal attack?
Sheesh!
I'd heard that Anglicans were rather "interpretive," but...
Quite so! Others have alluded to Carl Rogers, so I thought it would be instructive to cite E. Michael Jones' analysis: Carl Rogers and the IHM Nuns: Sensitivity Training, Psychological Warfare and the "Catholic Problem". It's a long read, and only part I is available online, but quite instructive.
With regard to the retirement situation, I can't speak to the national state of affairs, but, at least in my diocese, there is an annual special collection to help replenish the funds. My parish is reputed to be quite generous in our donations.
Despite all the shortcomings, these women served us when we needed them, and we do not shirk our responsibility to care for them, now that they need us.
I'm not quite sure what in the world people were thinking when they urged nuns to get out 'in the world' and be something like the laity. Perhaps, in truth, not many of those in the old orders were really suited for religious life. It is very demanding. It's quite startling after all these years to see new orders being established and doing things the 'old way' and apparently flourishing because of it. No one can say the women who choose religious life have limited options these days, those who choose a more rigorous order know exactly what they are doing.
I still have some contact with the Sisters of Mercy through my parish and it is sort of sad to me to see what they have become compared to what they were.
Hey Alex,
I've noticed you spend far more time posting articles about the Catholic faith lately than you do the Protestant faith. Don't you think it's about time you drop the pretense and come on over to our side? You know you love us!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.