The Catholic Church's Greatest Assets

by Richard McBrien on Nov. 16, 2009

Last week, I began a look at one of the Catholic church's greatest assets, namely, the extraordinary contributions over so many years of religious women to the church's missionary, ministerial, and spiritual life.
Sr. Sandra Schneiders' excellent article on ministerial religious life in the Oct. 2 issue of the National Catholic Reporter situates that contribution in its proper biblical and historical contexts.
As she points out, it was not until 1900 that noncloistered apostolic congregations of women were formally recognized as an authentic form of religious life. Pope Leo XIII did this.
However, Schneiders is emphatic in her insistence that this papal decision did not create a new form of religious life.
"It was," she writes, "the public recognition of a fait accompli, namely, that over the course of nearly 400 years a new form of women's religious life had emerged and its validity, already long recognized by the people of God and by civil governments...[only] required acknowledgment by the institutional church."
However, for 50 years thereafter women religious actually lived a kind of hybrid life; that is, they maintained "virtually the whole of monastic life at home and a full-time ministerial life in their apostolates."
Some Catholics were at least vaguely familiar with that hybrid life; most were completely unaware of it.
The typical nonstop 17-hour-day (from 5 a.m. until 10 at night) in the pre-Vatican II convent required the nuns, "dressed at all times in the restrictive fluting and pleats, floor-length gowns, starched wimples and veiled headdresses of 17th- or 18th-century peasants or nobles," to struggle to fit in daily Mass (sometimes followed by Benediction), meditation, devotional exercises (such as the Rosary and Stations of the Cross), some form of the Divine Office, spiritual reading from assigned books, daily manual work assignments inside the convent, three meals in common, often in silence, and an hour of "recreation," which usually included handwork or mending, schoolwork, or parish and community tasks.
On the same day, the nuns prepared classes and carried a full day's professional schedule in school, hospital, or other Catholic institutions.
"In short," Sandra Schneiders points out, "they carried all the burdens of monastic life with none of the leisure for personal prayer, lectio divina [meditative reading of Sacred Scripture], genuine community life, or ordinary recreation of monastics, and all the burdens of the apostolate without the professional preparation or privileges enjoyed by the clergy."
She puts that double-life in a formula: "'monastics at home' and 'apostles abroad'."
It was Pope Pius XII who launched the process of renewal that would be taken up by the Second Vatican Council more than a decade later.
As Catholic educational institutions staffed by sisters multiplied rapidly in the 1950s, the Pope urged religious superiors to begin the modernization of their congregations, including the abolition of outmoded customs, the modification of habits, and increased attention to the professional education of the sisters.
At the subsequent ecumenical council Cardinal Leo-Jozef Suenens of Belgium vigorously promoted the renewal of women's religious life. Vatican II itself urged these communities to return to their biblical roots and their founding charisms, and to develop a greater measure of engagement with the modern world.
Women religious responded with energy and enthusiasm. In a period of "barely 40 years they fairly well bridged the historical gap between their early modern European origins and postmod-ern American ecclesial and cultural reality."
Some Catholics were taken aback by what they interpreted as the speed of the renewal, but in actuality the development of non-monastic ministerial religious life for women had been underway for nearly four centuries.
The council mandated a renewal chapter (or assembly) for virtually all congregations, at which their constitutions were revised and subsequently approved by the Vatican.
Where the old constitutions had placed primary emphasis on the monastic side of religious life and only secondary emphasis on the ministerial, the revised constitutions defined religious life as having "a single, integrated end."
The most immediately visible, though hardly the most important, change was in the habit. After a period of experimentation, most renewed congregations successfully made the transition to simple contemporary dress appropriate to the now quite varied situations in their ministerial lives.
"If the habit was the emotional flash point of renewal," Schneiders writes, "the broadening and full commitment to ministry" was the "spiritual substance at the heart of renewal."
We should not trust the judgment of anyone for whom the habit issue is more important than the issue of ministry.
© 2009 Richard P. McBrien. All rights reserved. Fr. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

The Archbishop's Blog

[The following comment by Leonard Swidler, editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies and author of Toward a Catholic Constitution, among many others, is in reply to a piece in the November 8 New York Times by Clark Hoyt, “The Archbishop’s Blog.”]

Clark Hoyt notes that the American Catholic Church is "a spiritual home to a quarter of the American population." True, there are, according to the Pew survey on religion in America last year, 65 million U.S. Catholics. However, it also reports that there are 30 million FORMER Catholics! Archbishop Dolan and the rest of the bishops and the Vatican should focus much more on that disastrous figure than on some (appropriate) criticism of public flaws of the Catholic leadership.

The archbishop said, "“We welcome criticism of the Catholic Church,” but is that true? Not only does his very blog give the lie to that astonishing claim, but since the beginning of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II there has been a veritable drum-beat of silencing, firings, and excommunications precisely because Catholics have voiced opinions other than those blessed by the hierarchy. For example, according to the Vatican, Catholics are forbidden even to speak in favor of the ordination of women to the priesthood; Catholic church workers have been fired for doing so!

In the first issue of the "Journal of Ecumenical Studies," which my wife Arlene Anderson Swidler and I (dialogue@temple.edu)founded in 1964, there appears an article - painstakingly translated from the German by us - in favor of ecumenism by one Professor Joseph Ratzinger. This is the same Professor Ratzinger, then Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Holy Office ("of the Sacred Inquisition" part of the name dropped earlier in the 20th century), who wrote the vehement attack on ecumenism "Dominus Jesus," and continues in that vein as Pope Benedict XVI.

Sadly, totally gone is the open spirit of Vatican Council II (1962-65), which led to this startling Vatican statement: "Doctrinal discussion requires recognizing the truth everywhere, even if truth demolishes one so that one is forced to reconsider one’s own position, in theory and in practice, at least in part....in discussion the truth will prevail by no other means than by the truth itself. Therefore the liberty of the participants must be ensured by law and reverenced in practice."
But that was before Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I never thought I would be hankering for "the good old days"!

2000 at CTA back nuns

In anticipation of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops meeting in Baltimore, the largest annual gathering of progressive Catholics issued a statement of support to nuns during this time of investigation by the Vatican and called the bishops to do the same.

The bishops' meeting takes place next week, the same week that women religious are asked to submit their responses to the Vatican-issued questionnaire that is part of the investigation. The deadline for the questionnaire is November 20th.

More than 2,000 Catholics gathered in Milwaukee as part of the Call To Action conference and on Sunday morning unanimously affirmed a statement of support for women religious:

"Since January of 2009, the Vatican has investigated and sought to silence Catholic sisters in the United States. They have set a deadline of November 20th for the women religious' communities to respond to its probing questionnaire. Now more than ever we must speak out against the few bishops who continue to wield the sword of division, rather than extend the hand of unity.

To our fellow Catholics in the United States and around the globe, women religious have taught us how to live the gospel and open our arms until they embraced all of God's people. It is now our responsibility to put into action the lessons we have learned and ensure that our sisters in faith are not ripped from the church's embrace,

To our courageous sisters, you who have been the bedrock of our church and country, know that the people you have faithfully served stand beside you as you have stood with us.

To those who are doing the investigation, your actions do not reflect the welcoming and embracing love that Jesus demonstrated in the gospels. We invite you to have a conversion of heart and join us in standing with the women religious.

In every generation God raises up prophets to point the way towards the gospel vision of inclusion. Women religious are these prophets. Today we stand not with those who cling to the gates of exclusion but with the prophets who open the gates and call us to live as one."

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Call To Action (CTA) is a Catholic movement working for equality and justice in the Church and society. An independent national organization of over 25,000 people and 50 local chapters, CTA believes that the Spirit of God is at work in the whole church, not just its appointed leaders.