Sisters
Fialka, John J.
BUILDERS & SHAKERS Sisters Catholic Nuns and the Making of America John J. Fialka Kathleen Sprows Cummings In 1985, an Arthur Ander-son survey revealed a $2-billion gap between avail-able funds...
...Certain aspects of convent life arguably prefigured feminism: religious communities provided an alternative to marriage and motherhood, offered opportunities for education, and allowed women to wield power and authority...
...Fialka uses the Sisters of Mercy, a congregation founded in Dublin and instituted in Pittsburgh in 1843, as a lens for exploring the history of the four hundred orders of American women religious...
...Of course, the Sisters of Mercy were not alone...
...Squeezing sisters into the paradigm of "great man" history produces a colorful and entertaining narrative, but one that largely distorts the experience of women whose vows committed them to the pursuit of obscurity...
...Glorifying the past prevents us from fully understanding the complex transformations that have occurred in women's religious life...
...Fialka is clearly wistful for the days when sisters looked and acted like sisters...
...But by definition feminists oppose any hierarchy based on gender, and women religious did not question their subordination within the church until the 1960s...
...As their median age approaches seventy, it is indeed time to ensure that American women religious receive adequate pensions, just as it is surely time to praise their historical contribution...
...Although personal considerations influenced his choice-the book is in many respects a love letter to the Mercies who taught him in the 1950s-the focus makes sense...
...Certainly many sisters were women of strong character, and their lives were not without spectacular moments...
...In a front-page story, Wall Street Journal reporter John J. Fialka alerted American Catholics to this problem...
...containing romance, the ever-present threat of danger, high drama, mar-velously nutty moments, seemingly impossible dreams...
...Rather than explore the theology, sociology, and ecclesiology behind these changes, he attributes them largely to the negative influence of the secular culture of the 1960s...
...feminism as we know it did not exist before 1910...
...He observes that the vast infrastructure of schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions that operated under Catholic auspices would simply not have existed without the energy, vision, and underpaid labor of these women...
...In the discussion of the power struggle between the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles and Cardinal James Francis Mclntyre, which resulted in the sisters' removal from the diocese in the late 1960s, the IHMs' grievances against the cardinal, such as woefully inadequate salaries, are flippantly equated with clamoring for the "right to wear pedal pushers...
...For example, militant feminists are blamed for the decline in new vocations and for the departure of many women from religious life...
...a simple lament for the good old days will serve neither...
...Even more questionable is Fialka's characterization of nineteenth-century nuns as "America's first feminists...
...Fialka succeeds in demonstrating the enormous contribution women religious have made to both the church and the nation...
...Fialka suggests that resisting the upheavals of the 1960s would have prevented the dramatic decline in the numbers of women religious and the corresponding closing of schools and hospitals...
...serve neither...
...Sisters represents part of his crusade to convince Catholics of their moral obligation to correct it...
...Despite their widespread presence, women religious remained largely invisible in American history...
...For example, he chooses a dubious framework in casting his story as one of "spirited women" as an "American adventure...
...A nuanced assessment of where sisters have been and where they are going would serve both purposes...
...Yet, in his eagerness to remind Americans of the debt they owe to sisters, he has also romanticized their past and thus misrepresented them historically...
...Yet, since one of the requirements for women religious was the avoidance of "singularity"-the appearance of standing out-organizing the book around celebrities does not allow for the most authentic rendering of history...
...The selfless service of the nuns, he argues, helped to dispel anti-Catholic sentiment in antebellum America...
...Today, this community is enjoying a small resurgence in vocations...
...Women religious from many different congregations became pervasive influences in American life...
...it accepted eighteen postulants in 2001...
...A Sister of Saint Francis helped open the Mayo Clinic, for example, and a Sister of Charity collaborated in founding Alcoholics Anonymous...
...The Sisters of Mercy established communities across the continent, engaged in a variety of ministries, and evolved into one of the largest orders in the United States...
...But in sketching the future of women's religious life, it would have been worthwhile for Fialka to devote less space to the veneration of traditional congregations and more attention to how women have creatively adapted the Mercy tradition to the reality of life in contemporary America, such as the sister whose urban renewal project has revitalized a section of north Philadelphia...
...BUILDERS & SHAKERS Sisters Catholic Nuns and the Making of America John J. Fialka Kathleen Sprows Cummings In 1985, an Arthur Ander-son survey revealed a $2-billion gap between avail-able funds and the projected financial needs of retired American women religious...
...Nonhistorians may dismiss these criticisms as immaterial, but even general readers will recognize the most serious consequence of Fialka's romanticization of history: his failure to explain the sudden near-collapse of female religious orders after the Second Vatican Council...
...Following the Sisters of Mercy through a typhoid epidemic in Pittsburgh, a yellow fever siege in New Orleans, a cholera outbreak in San Francisco, and to countless Civil War battlefields, Fialka shows how they routinely provided expert nursing care without regard for either their own safety or their patients' religious affiliation...
...Saint Cecilia's is described as a "time warp" where visitors encounter "a vision of life as it was in the fifties...
...For starters, this claim is anachronistic...
...So Fialka deserves high praise for his efforts...
...that is, when they stuck to teaching and nursing and did not abandon "time-honored customs" by wearing street clothes and renting apartments...
...Since 1985, the shortfall in the sisters' retirement funds has ballooned to $7 billion...
...One of his heroes is the leader of the Nashville Dominicans of Saint Cecilia, who refused to be a "copycat" in the 1960s and persuaded her sisters to retain both the habit and monastic traditions...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 5
