EDITORIALS:
O'Gara, James
EDITORIALS SISTER POWER Several events of recent days have helped to dramatize the American nun as a definable new force in the Catholic Church. In Brooklyn, there was the establishment by the...
...Paradoxically, the reports reached the press as people were still digesting results of the study by Chicago sociologist John P. Koval and Sister Margaret Modde, O.S.F., former director of the Chicago-based National Sisters Vocation Conference, which showed four times as many women as men leaving religious life...
...Ambassador to Chile Nathaniel Davis as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs...
...In Brooklyn, there was the establishment by the Sisters' Senate of a "Joanne Little Fund" to aid the 20-year-old North Carolina black woman, who has been arraigned on first-degree murder charges in the death of her "rapist" jail-guard...
...Recently, the Vatican's daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, dismissed the question of women priests as a "useless" and "dangerous" preoccupation...
...And in New York, several orders of nuns—among them the Sisters of Loretto, Glenmary Home Missioners, Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother, Benedictine Sisters of Covington, Ky., and the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur—were supporting stockholder challenges to food, agriculture and strip-mining corporate interests...
...On the one hand, there is the blatant exclusion of women—notably women religious—from decision-making posts within national-level bodies of the Church, and from substantive participation in important international bodies, such as the Vatican commission on the revision of canon law...
...The new nun has emerged, and this could only be possible if many religious orders had themselves been so reoriented as to allow members to realize within them their own rising expectations as women and as Catholics...
...The recommendation is as valid now as it was then...
...she was there to register opposition to the nomination of former U.S...
...The Koval-Modde report identified a number of primary and secondary factors in the departure of nuns—ranging from loneliness and spiritual stress in personalist directions, to conflicts and disappointments in institutional areas...
...If it is not, then those matters of freedom, dignity and opportunity close to the heart and mind of today's woman undergo unfair circumscribing in the Church, and woman remains as yet a second-class Catholic...
...Ministerial objectives will be more difficult to achieve than participatory ones in administration and on commissions...
...To the extent, however, that any of the factors might seem to brand religious orders of women as being socially irrelevant and humanly frustrating, they need careful qualification...
...In Washington, there was the appearance before a Senate committee of Sister Janice McLaughlin, M.M., representing the leadership of Maryknoll Sisters who serve in Africa...
...But the Sisterhoods are not overreaching themselves in working towards and anticipating a ministerial role one day...
...Understandably, women are alive to both issues...
...On the other, there is the issue of the ministerial role of women...
...Major barriers to involvement still stand in the way of the modern nun, and her full role in the community life of the Church will not be realized until these are broken down...
...Of course it is neither...
...If anything, it seems a particularly appropriate topic for the International Women's Year currently being observed...
...In Chicago, meanwhile, there was additional support from the National Assembly of Women Religious for the Equal Rights Amendment, as a measure that will give women complete legal equality without infringement on private lives or family relationships...
...The activism featured in recent news stories does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that the emerged Sister has gone about as far as she can go, or ought to go...
...The factors point up serious problem situations...
...Within the month, a group of nuns complained to the American bishops on their lack of representation on crucial commissions affecting them personally and at decision-making levels generally...
...And just a few years ago, the National Assembly of Women Religious went on record that women be ordained deacons in the Catholic church as "a step to full participation in the priesthood...
Vol. 101 • March 1975 • No. 16
