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R e v i e w s
LAST NUN OUT, TURN OFF THE LIGHTS
I am sitting in the dining hall of a large Kentucky convent where three of us from Nashville are making a retreat. The director of the retreat center, a sister famous for spiritual direction, is at the table with us. I am astonished to hear her tell another sister that she’s lately had her horoscope done. "It was very in-depth—and it only costs fifty dollars!" The other sister expresses a yearning to have her stars read. She admits the price is reasonable.
When I go up to receive Communion, the sister who is extraordinary minister balks at placing the Host in my mouth. She keeps jabbing it at my folded hands; I keep standing there with my jaw hanging open. Eventually, and with obvious distaste, she slaps the Body of Christ on my tongue. She behaves as if I have offended her.
In a convent, I find the Blessed Sacrament chapel—it’s in a basement room off a busy corridor. Some aged sisters in habits are heroically attempting to pray despite the noise.
Trying to discern a possible religious vocation, I make an appointment to see the only sister in my rural area. In her office at the retreat center she runs, she asks, "Have you done the enneagram? You haven’t? Well, you certainly can’t make a decision about religious life until you have!" She offers to sign me up on the spot for the next workshop. Embarrassed, I give her the ten-dollar deposit she asks for. I don’t go back.
Visiting another convent to see if "this is the place," I enjoy meeting the sisters and am especially impressed by the vocation director, who is prayerful, personable, and intelligent. When I ask her how one can make a vow of obedience, yet disobey the Church’s doctrines (such as wearing the habit), she urges me to "Stay focused on what’s important." Later, I see the schedule for the retreat center: enneagram, of course, and all sorts of self-help programs; nothing much about Christ or Mary or prayer. As I go to the small Blessed Sacrament chapel to pray, I catch a glimpse of the retreat center staff in La-Z-Boys watching television across the hall. The chapel is empty.
My dear friend has been attending Mass weekly with me since my own conversion. She (a former Presbyterian minister) is wrestling with her decision to enter the Church. On an out-of-state trip, she stops in a Catholic church to pray. In the parking lot, she runs into a sister and explains her dilemma: "I don’t know if I should convert." "Oh, we don’t use that word any more," says the sister. "If you are already a Christian, there is no reason to change." My friend goes back to the Presbyterians, later falls into New Age practices, dies suddenly at fifty-two.
At compline (night prayer) in a Benedictine monastery, I am startled when the sisters address God as El Shaddai, then use feminine pronouns to refer to him. When I ask about it, I am told that, unfortunately, the sisters "haven’t done a very good job of educating lay people" about such changes.
At last I am realizing my dream of visiting a Carmelite monastery. But I am shocked that these "cloistered" nuns wear no habit, go out to dinner with friends, and allow lay people into the nuns’ choir for prayer. They are busily remodeling their monastery to eliminate all traces of enclosure.
These experiences, and many others, rushed to mind as I read Ann Carey’s Sisters in Crisis: The Unraveling of American Religious Life. If only, I thought, I had read this book a few years ago! At best, it might have saved me several fruitless trips. At least, I’d have understood how and when and by whom religious life in the United States had been dismantled over the past thirty years.
Carey details the collapse with painful thoroughness. Drawing mainly on primary materials—letters, reports, minutes of interminable meetings—she documents how a radical feminist-leftist contingent hijacked many active religious congregations and even the superiors’ conference to which they belonged. Beginning with the Sister Formation Conference—a good idea derailed—and ending with the We Are Church petition drive, Carey reveals the agents behind the mutation of many Catholic sisters from brides of Christ into sloganeering social activists. Even critics admit that the author has done her homework; indeed, the most damning evidence comes from simply quoting the extremists themselves:
"The 1984 annual conference in August attracted 225 participants, one-quarter of whom were lay women, according to an article in the National Catholic Register. The Register reported that at the meeting, Sister Theresa Kane, former president of the LCWR, ‘called for feminist liturgies, "new rituals of Eucharist," where women can remember each other’s stories of pain and oppression.’ While Sister Theresa advocated non-violence, NARW board member Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz disagreed, saying, ‘I want to be aggressive about taking power. This talk of non-violence is problematic.’ Another board member, Maureen Reiff, declared that ‘The institution [the Catholic Church] is dying and the Vatican is making desperate moves in its throes of death’" (249).
Those who admire the ideal of consecrated life will find the book distressing, as is any work that chronicles a headlong decline. Yet there is also a curious hopefulness about Sisters in Crisis. For one thing, the fact that the book has been written indicates that the dissident bandwagon is screeching to a halt. Carey is reviewing and summing up. Even the "change-oriented" sisters themselves admit they’re getting no vocations, while their communities are aging and often falling into financial trouble.
These sisters seem content to preside over the demise of their institutes, which, after all, only existed to serve a horrid patriarchy anyway. These elderly firebrands (who are, as Mark P. Shea says elsewhere in this issue, "on the cutting edge of the 1960s") are fast turning ashen.
Another hopeful sign: Traditional communities are getting vocations, and new, orthodox communities are blossoming.
Finally, as Carey describes, the Vatican in 1992 approved a new conference of superiors of women’s congregations—it parallels the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the superiors’ group that was taken hostage by a radical element in 1970. Now communities that cannot, in conscience, support the dissident stands of the LCWR have their own representative organization.
There remains the real tragedy of faithful, mostly elderly, sisters, who suffer in communities that are dying because of ill-considered "reforms." When one visits motherhouses, one sees them, the only nuns still wearing veils and often the only nuns still living in the convent, the others having moved to apartments. These are the lucky ones. In other communities, fanatic leaders sold off motherhouses and convents to show "solidarity with the poor." Older nuns in such congregations must either live in apartments or go to nursing homes. In some cases, they must take outside jobs to support themselves, Carey says. These sisters have endured a real martyrdom of ostracism and hostility as they tried to remain faithful to the vows they made.
To make matters worse, some of these orders exploit the plight of their elderly sisters: "Some elderly sisters resent the fact that, as one sister put it, ‘the elderly are used as bait’ in general fund-raising efforts for their communities . . . [S]he noted that this is the only time the leadership of her community sees any benefit to the religious habit" (299).
Not to despair. Religious life, like the Church itself, will survive the crisis of the last thirty years. God still calls many men and women to live the counsels of perfection. When needed, he will raise up reformers and founders to help them answer that call.
-- TERRYE NEWKIRK
Sisters in Crisis: The Unraveling of American Religious Life
By Ann Carey
Our Sunday Visitor
367 pages
$19.95
ISBN: 0879736550
NEVER-NEVER LAND
The seventies and early eighties was the period of great debate in the United States over "women’s issues." Much Catholic writing on the roles of men and women occurred in that context. Recently more authors have been moving from a consideration of issues to a consideration of the initiating force behind the raising of those issues in Catholic contexts—feminist theology. Of these treatments of feminist theology, the most useful is Manfred Hauke’s God or Goddess? It contains a survey of the development of feminist theology that covers the main writers in the United States and Germany and the key positions held by feminist writers. It compares feminist positions to Catholic doctrines and indicates points of difference and their significance. The result is a summary of feminist theology by theological topic (something hard to find, even in feminist writings).
God or Goddess? is a clearly written, well translated, fair, non-polemical treatment of feminist theology in its various forms. The discussion covers the main issues of concern to theologians and theology students while remaining accessible to educated laity. It has the advantage for American readers of providing not only an overview of American Catholic feminists but also of important German-speaking writers often unfamiliar to Americans. In addition, it traces many of the European antecedents to American feminism.
Manfred Hauke is professor of dogmatics in the yheological faculty at Lugano, Switzerland. He is the author of Women in the Priesthood: A Systematic Analysis in the Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption (Ignatius Press, 1988). This is probably the leading study by a Catholic theologian of the question of ordaining women. Women in the Priesthood contains a thorough investigation of men and women as understood in social science, Scripture, and Tradition, and would be a useful complement to God or Goddess?
While some journal articles provide an overview and critique of feminist theology, Hauke’s is the only book-length treatment available. Donna Steichen’s Ungodly Rage (also Ignatius Press) gives a very useful survey of feminism, but it mainly describes feminism in practice in the Catholic Church and does not seek to provide a full theological analysis. For some, God or Goddess? may be revolutionize their understanding of the contemporary Catholic Church. In an eirenic way, Hauke is making clear that we are dealing with an extensive and influential group of people who usually call themselves Catholic, who identify their writings as Catholic theology, and who occupy many Church positions. These "Catholic" feminists are, however, not only heterodox but, for the most part, not Christian in any recognizable sense. We must confront this movement; it is entering Christian teaching "from within" and subtly modifying it so that it incorporates an alien ideology at the cost of emptying Christianity of its primary content. It would be a mistake for any of us to be unaware of what is going on.
-- STEPHEN B. CLARK
God or Goddess? Feminist Theology: What Is It? Where Does It Lead?
By Manfred Hauke
Ignatius Press
343 pages
$17.95
ISBN: 0898705592
TRUSTWORTHY TESTIMONY
Much verse trading, between Catholics and Evangelicals, ends up accomplishing little. Since the Bible is not a theological treatise and gives only a fragmentary look into early Christianity, verses can be interpreted in opposing ways. Are the "brethren of the Lord" Jesus’ more distant relatives, or are they Mary’s children? Proof texts can be found for either position. Even though the scriptural case for the latter position is weaker than for the former, it is strong enough that one can hold it in good conscience.
How to get beyond such an impasse? I like to appeal to neutral judges, the earliest Christian writers. I base my appeal on the idea that in all likelihood they preserved the faith intact—the earlier the writer, the more true this is likely to be—and point to the consistency of their teaching. If all of them thought of Mary as ever-virgin, with only one child, our Lord, and if they all identified the "brethren of the Lord" as Jesus’ cousins or other relations, then they must have been handing down the original understanding of the text. The only alternative is the paranoid position that there was an immediate and total apostasy and that the writers included in this book conspiratorially promoted a new religion of their own fashioning. If you believe that, let me take you to Roswell, New Mexico.
-- KARL KEATING
Early Christian Writings
By Maxwell Staniforth, trans.
Penguin
199 pages
$9.95
ISBN: 0140444750
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