The nuns (old) story:
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy THE NUNS' (OLD) STORY ENCOUNTERING OBSTACLES IS NOTHING NEW IT SEEMS to be an unhappy fact that our American sisters have been frightening churchmen in Rome...
...They will become aware of the direction in which God is calling us," says a former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious...
...By the 1920s religious women were being educated to take their places on college faculties in the great universities abroad like Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Munich, and Louvain as well as the finest universities in this country...
...In America the first bishops, anxious to have an instructed laity, welcomed the idea of sisters teaching, but the difficulties with Rome continued...
...Yet, if "ecclesiastical authority" had really held sway-if the bishops had been left to coordinate the church's energies, as the pope puts it- none of the teaching sisters who did this work in the past would have been available...
...Today they sponsor the majority of women's colleges in the country and eighty coeducational institutions...
...They should remember that our sisters are neither pets or children to be taken out on yearly outings to circuses or ball games and treated to ice cream and cotton candy...
...Since the sixteenth century religious women had been banding together to teach young girls and to visit the sick and poor-and again and again had been forced behind walls and into the cloister...
...Still others, like the first Sisters of St...
...In Emily Taft Douglas's book, Remember the Ladies, The Story of the Women Who Helped Shape America, she notes, almost as an aside, that immediately after the Revolution an American seeking "solid training" for his daughters would have to send them to certain sectarian schools "such as those of the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans...
...Yet the truth is that the convent in New Orleans of which she spoke-the first school for girls within the boundaries of what is now the United States-was in 1727 itself the result of decades of struggle...
...But it is not at all certain that discovery is the real interest of the Vatican...
...With quiet persistence, sisters who felt a calling to an active apostolate found ways around the difficulties put in their paths...
...Their religious communities would not have existed...
...It seemed to be the mind of the church that teaching was worldly and incompatible with the vow of chastity...
...The writer is speaking primarily of the teaching sisters who have staffed our schools, academies, and colleges from coast to coast...
...It is a fascinating history...
...According to one historian it was two hundred years after the sisters adopted active apostolates before Rome approved their doing so...
...Catholic France," she wrote, ". . . . had never suppressed its women as had the Puritans...
...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy THE NUNS' (OLD) STORY ENCOUNTERING OBSTACLES IS NOTHING NEW IT SEEMS to be an unhappy fact that our American sisters have been frightening churchmen in Rome half to death...
...Taken together they are the most highly educated group of women in the world, and the group of women with the longest continuous documented history...
...Elizabeth Ann Seton-even she, the famed Mother Seton, our first American saint-felt that she had to justify adapting the rule of the Sisters of Charity to include the work of education by urging it as a way for the sisters to support themselves and "because it would extend the benefits of religious instruction to a class of society which has the greatest influence on public morals and which [at the time] found very few schools in the United States where a solid and virtuous education might be secured...
...Catholic: "it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the contribution that the nuns have made and are making to the flowering of American Catholicism...
...They are mature women in a period of transition...
...Why is that threatening...
...No doubt many misguided Americans have complained about our sisters...
...By World War I they had established ten very good colleges for women...
...As soon as a group was sufficient in number for local needs, another autonomous group was established in a village or town "a carriage ride away'' to do the same work...
...There is in the pope's letter to the religious a sense of' 'going back," of returning to the original work of a community, of returning to life lived in big convents, of a resumption of the habit...
...I hope that they will rediscover the work of education as one of the most valid ways of empowerment...
...Joseph, sought to remain strictly local so that they would not attract the adverse attention of "ecclesiastical authority...
...But not everyone is called to that work or to the running of institutions...
...They hear different calls-the most compelling of which is "to be with the poor...
...The unique service of religious . . . lies in the total and public nature of their vowed Christian living, according to the community founding gift approved by ecclesiastical author-ity...
...Rome acts on complaints from the local churches...
...We must let them find their own way...
...The undervaluing of community may be one of them...
...They achieved these things in spite of hampering and archaic rules which forced them into sometimes ridiculous garb, forbade communities to eat and worship together, and hindered scholarship and study by imposing outmoded hours of rising, retiring, and religious exercises...
...We owe them that...
...Vincent de Paul, who found a way outside the cloister for the Daughters of Charity by having them take only simple vows...
...In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries alone fifty such congregations were founded with the purpose of educating girls and were either suppressed or compelled to accept cloister...
...One of her biographers tells us that St...
...Undoubtedly they will make, and have made, mistakes...
...It is clear in a later context that Douglas ascribed to such convent schools the preparation of the "accomplished French ladies" who so impressed Benjamin Franklin and John Adams during their stays in France...
...To sisters and their friends who know the history of religious communities the answer is abundantly clear...
...Let us take only one example...
...To quote an editorial in U.S...
...It is certainly hard to overestimate what they did to preserve the faith of an immigrant people from dozens of different countries and to lift them into the mainstream of American life...
...Others followed the example of St...
...It gives us an opportunity to let the Vatican know what we are doing and how our situation differs from that of sisters in other countries," says the president of a Catholic woman's college...
...Those who have chosen to remain sisters today in a period of great change are dedicated women as sisters have always been...
...The Ursulines formed a fine system of education within the cloister...
...What the American sisters have done is prodigious...
...The sisters and the members of the bishops' commission studying American religious (at the behest of Rome) are putting a brave face on the study ordered by Rome (or investigation, depending on one's point of view...
Vol. 110 • November 1983 • No. 20
