Witness to Integrity by Anita M Caspary
Cummings, Kathleen Sprows
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL Witness to Integrity The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community of California Anita M. Caspary The Liturgical Press, $21.95, 287 pp. Kathleen Sprows Cummings Eyewitnesses,...
...Fortunately, she has both an appreciation of irony and a sense of humor...
...According to Caspary, the cardinal was a rigid traditionalist who could not tolerate change and a champion of hierarchy who could not abide dissent...
...She remembers her dismay at being assigned Sister Humiliata as her religious name (which she notes is literally translated "humiliated one...
...Caspary served as mother general of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters from 1963 to 1969...
...Shortly after that, Caspary helped form an ecumenical, intentional Christian community of lay women...
...Other light-hearted moments include her list of the absurd questions that investigators asked the IHMs during an archdiocesan visitation, such as, "Do you want to look like a floozie on Hollywood Boulevard...
...As a result, Mclntyre's disapproval of the IHMs- and their refusal to acquiesce to his demands-had severe consequences for the congregation...
...She describes, for example, the accusatory letter in which the diocesan vicar for religious complained that he had never been notified of the IHMs' 1967 chapter meeting, and her own tactful reply in which she reminded him that he had in fact celebrated the chapter's opening Mass...
...As mother superior, she chafed against her onerous duties as "dispenser of permissions...
...Caspary maintains that since many other congregations of women religious had already successfully challenged such prescriptions, the Vatican saw the IHMs' conflict with Mclntyre as an opportunity to teach American religious an object lesson in obedience to authority...
...According to Caspary, the meeting ended abruptly with the cardinal's order to prepare for the IHMs' departure from diocesan schools in June 1968...
...As a result, Caspary is so close to the heart of the conflict that she essentially fails to see the big screen, never connecting her own experience to the broader questions about authority in the church, the meaning of Vatican II, and gender conflict in American Catholicism and society...
...By the 1960s, she was more than ready for women religious to deepen their engagement with society, to use their given names, and to experience greater individual freedom...
...The showdown between the IHMs and Mclntyre is much too important to be left to mere memory...
...Fifty IHMs agreed to live under the pre-1967 rule, while others joined other congregations or left religious life entirely...
...Kathleen Sprows Cummings is associate director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame...
...As a pontifical order, the IHMs were responsible to the Sacred Congregation of Religious in Rome rather than to Mclntyre, but their motherhouse was located in Los Angeles, and most of them taught in diocesan schools...
...Concerning the proposed modification of habit, Mclntyre vowed that women religious would not wear "street clothes" in his classrooms...
...By the time the conflict ended, Caspary and the majority of the IHMs had resigned their teaching positions, petitioned for a release from vows, and formed an independent, noncanonical lay community...
...She intimates that, having followed very different paths to Vatican II, she and Mclntyre were destined to collide in its aftermath...
...Kathleen Sprows Cummings Eyewitnesses, as trial lawyers know, are notoriously unreliable...
...Witness to Integrity provides a necessary counterbalance to discussions of the crisis that are overly sympathetic to Cardinal Mclntyre...
...Listening to Caspary's memory, the reader senses that her entire life had been spent awaiting Vatican II...
...As Richard White put it rather bluntly, "History is the enemy of memory...
...The pivotal moment occurred soon after the IHMs' Ninth General Chapter meeting in 1967, during which the sisters adopted a series of decrees designed to modernize the community rule...
...Even after the passage of some thirty years, Caspary still feels the grief acutely...
...Not simply an account of the crisis itself, Witness to Integrity is heavily autobiographical, and as such it provides a fascinating example of how a life story is constructed-a process which historian Jill Ker Conway recently described as what happens "when memory speaks...
...A pontifical commission ordered the IHMs to accept the four points or seek a dispensation from their vows...
...Good historians know this as well...
...Caspary has waited a long time to tell her side of the story, and I suspect the delay has to do with the depth of pain the conflict caused her...
...Nor does the book shed much new light on crucial points of dispute...
...At a meeting with Caspary, Mclntyre took issue with two changes that directly related to the IHMs' service in diocesan schools...
...Caspary and her sisters believed that they were following Pope Paul VI's command "to work seriously for renewal...
...Indeed, the cardinal emerges as a candidate in need of angermanagement counseling...
...Caspary maintains that it was the cardinal, and insists that the sisters never intended to present him with an ultimatum...
...The cardinal also objected to the IHMs' resolution to withdraw from any institutions that could not accept their new standards for teacher preparation and limits on class size...
...The archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal James Francis Mclntyre, interpreted their actions quite differently...
...She begins with his education at New York's seminary, Dun-woodie, in the early part of the century, and charts his climb up the hierarchical ladder...
...and "Do you think the sisters' sex life is affected by reading novels...
...Unfortunately, Caspary's tendency to chronicle events in great detail and her inclusion of lengthy excerpts from other sources turn what could be a gripping narrative into a clumsy one...
...The central issue-who initiated the departure of the IHMs from the schools-is particularly unclear...
...Recalling the eve of her reception as a novice, she describes her anxiety over the prospect of detachment from her family and "from the reality of suffering and struggle" in the world...
...Witness to Integrity is controlled and contained by its author's memory, a trait it shares with all insider accounts...
...Caspary contrasts her experience with Mclntyre's...
...In January 1970, Caspary and roughly 350 IHMs professed loyalty to the decrees of renewal and left the order...
...Yet the language in one of the IHM decrees could arguably be interpreted as such, and in a bizarre revelation, Caspary hints that it was actually Antoniutti who first suggested that the sisters should threaten to resign their teaching positions...
...In one memorable incident, an attempt at mediation on the school issue was foiled when Caspary appeared at the chancery office in a modest, tailored black suit, thus rendering Mclntyre apoplectic with fury...
...In what is known as the "Four Points" letter, Antoniutti affirmed the necessity of the habit, the requirement to live and worship in community, the commitment to education, and the authority of the local ordinary...
...In addition to the unflattering portrait of Mclntyre, the book offers enticing glimpses into other personalities, most notably the gifted artist, Sister Corita Kent...
...It would be worthwhile to keep this observation in mind in reading Anita Caspary's reminiscences about one of the most dramatic clashes of the post-Vatican II era...
...Caspary's hopes that the Sacred Congregation for Religious would intervene on the IHMs' behalf were dashed in February 1968 when its prefect, Cardinal Ildebrando Antoniutti, announced the Vatican's decision on the matter...
...A good history of it demands to be written...
...Under her leadership, the IHMs revised their community rule to allow for secular dress, relaxation of strict schedules in convent life, and opportunities for apostolic work aside from the traditional occupations of teaching and nursing...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 20
