Go, Sister, Go

I've just discovered Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB. She writes for the National Catholic Reporter, and one of her latest articles is "Here's the question: Who's the real enemy?" The good sister has been trying to bring heaven to earth since the fifties, and she has some insights about what countries give up when they invest in fear.

I first made Sister Joan's acquaintance in Once a Catholic, out of print but available used. She always wanted to be a nun, and after dating everybody in town, she presented herself to the abbess and announced her intention. "You have to be sixteen, dear," said the abbess. So Joan came back after her birthday and said, "I'm sixteen now." She didn't take well to Vatican II at first. In fact, she was ready to quit. Describing herself as "the perfect example of the unthinking conservative," she says,

"...it was a walk through the outskirts of hell. Absolutely everything that you had ever been taught, everything you ever saw, everything you ever believed, was now up for grabs...You just finally had to get to the point where you said, What really matters? Is it a veil...Is it a skirt...the only answer I could come up with was that Christ mattered, gospel mattered, and the people mattered, and that was it...People are in contemporary dress within the Order now, and the sign is See how they love one another and See what these people will do, at any cost, for the rest of humankind...I realized that I was being called to the most authentic kind of religious life...so the whole question was now whether I could really be what I talked about."

I was attending St. Scholastica's Academy at this time, and the only thing I absorbed was that the nuns wore shorter skirts and the ones with truly awful bishop-given names reverted to their birth names. Sister Walburga, for instance. The nuns also considered whether having a monthly allowance of $25/month would allow them to maintain a sense of poverty. The opinion of us disrespectful brats (even way back in the 60s) was, Yeah, no problem there.

Sister Joan on other topics:

Before Vatican II, there is no doubt that the spirituality espoused was the spirituality of selflessness that led to self-obliteration...[Now] it is a selflessness that stems from self-development...Before Vatican II, it was a spirituality of interchangeable parts...Everybody in the Community was a potential fourth grade teacher...After Vatican II, you began to ask, Who is this person really? What gifts has she been given for the upbuilding of the Church? How can this Community affirm those gifts..."

"The ordination issue is central because it has something to do with the quality of a woman's soul and the nature of women as God sees them...we have never said...'And the Word became male.' They say you've got to have a male in order to be a sign of Jesus...then one of the criteria ought to be that the person has to be Jewish--that has a great deal more to do with being Jesus than being male does because the Redeemer was to have come from the line of David."

"I always get a kick out of the fact that the Church theologians or teachers or administrators took the position that women were unreservedly carnal, whereas Freud took the position that they were unreservedly frigid--so if you're a woman, you can't win."

"When I was a teacher, I taught that wheat was the major export of the United States of America--now weapons are." [written in 1987]

"Somewhere along the line, we are going to have to become more a Church of questions than of answers...The Roman Church should be saying to the American Church, What is your position on consumerism, on affluence, on stewardship? Because your government, your national policies are affecting the lives of other people, and as a Church you must address this issue." [again, 1987]

You tell 'em, Sister.

Though Baptist and Episcopalian, my parents sent me to Catholic High School to avoid integration. (Not that the sisters helped them with that; SSA had a sizable black and Hispanic population.) I've always been ashamed of that, though I had nothing to do with the decision and fought it as much as possible. But I've always been grateful for the moral teaching that put social justice on the table right up there with personal purity and thumbed its nose at traditional values. My boyfriend worried that I might become a nun (a remarkably unbrilliant theory), but I did admire these women who seemed to me to be trying to live the gospel. I'm glad to see in Sister Joan one illusion I don't have to give up.
11:11:26 PM    

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