Easter is a season of resurrection and hope. At Sojourners, when we have looked around for signs of hope, the witness of Catholic women religious has often been prominent in our view.
Religious sisters are at the center of the most hopeful initiatives for change in this country. They are praying for justice and marching for peace, advocating for women and standing with the poor. And out of their experience of oppression as women and their bonds as sisters, they are forging a new spirituality.
With an authority that comes from their experience of God, of the poor, and of community, Catholic women religious are revolutionizing the church and forcing an institution that does not recognize their authority to examine itself and its life. While they have a particular message to the Roman Catholic church, what these sisters have to say offers hope and challenge much more broadly to all of us in the churches.
It seems fitting this season to bring together some of the women who are at the heart of this movement of empowerment and hope. On the following pages is a conversation with four religious sisters and a Catholic lay theologian that took place at Sojourners.
—The Editors
Sojourners: New roles and new leadership appear to be emerging among religious women. What is happening, and is this really new?
Joan Chittister: Radicalism has been at the base of the history of religious communities for centuries. I would simply argue that the old radicalism has become establishment.
What I'm talking about is the Catholic school system. Women religious took on the education of minority peoples—German, Italian, and Polish immigrant kids—and taught them not only in their own language, but in another language, enabling them to become inserted into the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture. That was a very radical thing to do. It's the only explanation for the torching of convents in Boston and Philadelphia. The WASP did not want us here, mucking up the system.
But that radicalism eventually became not just accepted, but status. Status! Catholic schools became the private schools, the alternative school system. They became the way the system runs. They became showcases of this system. And the thing got so comfortable that people began to take it for granted. The nuns themselves moved up with the people that they moved up.
But one day we woke up and discovered we weren't doing what we were supposed to be doing, what we'd been doing all those centuries, which was being with the poor. So I would argue what's happening is not new at all. It's just, unfortunately, a lost communication to this generation.
Marjorie Tuite: We have taken a more serious, intent look at the foundresses of our religious congregations, in terms of why they gathered a group together, and what was the context of the times in which the congregation or the institute began. We had never looked at that seriously before.
And then we set that understanding into the context of today's time and what we're about and who we are, and how we name ourselves—back to rootedness.
I think we've gone from doctrine to an understanding of the spirit of Jesus. The combination of the intentions of the foundress to the spirit of Jesus, and to the signs of the times—it's not new. It's simply making better connections in what we're about. I think it's a return with greater clarity.
Luanne Schinzel: I believe also that it's a real return that we see when we look at the beginnings of communities. My community started because rural white people were not educated in Kentucky, and they wanted the women educated. They started schools. They moved from Kentucky to Iowa because the bishop wanted to keep them quiet. And they didn't want to be kept quiet.
These are our roots. We have not lost that. Even through the times that you talked about, Joan, of being more institutionalized into the system, there was still a dynamic happening among women, as women worked together and formed their lives together. Women in the past were able to really build the church to the level that it was.
Chittister: The continuing radicalism in women's religious life was precisely because it was women's religious life. That radicalism has never been lost. The single-sex schools, for instance, where the girl was the class president, kept alive an alternative model of the capability and capacity of women.
At one time at least, nuns had to be phenomenally potent role models for women. Eventually that was turned against women. I think laywomen are struggling to find their identity because our identity was so clear in many ways.
At the same time, I can't discount the work of the sisters who, when everybody said it was just a waste of time to educate girls, did it anyway. I can remember the programs from our early academy 114 years ago. The first ones were crocheting and music and the fine arts. And they weren't in the building two-and-a-half years until it was crocheting, music, the fine arts, French, history, and religion. And then they threw in a little math on the side. You know, more than enough for them to boil the eggs!
That continuing radicalism has been the message in women's religious communities. Women were capable of being independent people who could handle their own lives and be educated, independent people at the same time.
Schinzel: I think the rest of the development I see happening is that the Second Vatican Council opened up the doors for that radicalism to become more public. Women started to speak and be able to act in the church. In a sense that could happen only within certain parameters. But then those parameters began to break down and women started to step over them, and we now have women on the larger level who are saying, "I can still speak."
My sense is that the institutional church and the hierarchical church are getting nervous because they see that solid foundation, and the women speaking, and they know it's stronger than any human element.
Chittister: I'm not really sure that Vatican II started anything. I honestly believe that Vatican II came at the end of a cultural period in history and legitimated it. If you went back to your own communities' histories, I think you would find that almost 20 percent of the people who left religious life had already left before Vatican II was over.
There are a lot of people standing around wanting to say that Vatican II has so disoriented things, that after it, women couldn't find their moorings and left. All the figures that I've studied indicate that the exodus was at least two to three years before Vatican II was concluded.
What's the message there? The message is that these highly trained, professional women, who found themselves functioning as adults in one arena, came home and were expected to be children in another. And they had already reached the ceiling of that. There was no place else to go. And since nothing gave, they gave—they left. When Vatican II came along then, it released in these convents the head of steam that was already there and had begun to drain off. So to people who argue that some of this is a misuse of Vatican II—and people do want to make that point—I would just answer that without Vatican II, you wouldn't have religious life at all right now.
Tuite: It was a heavy period in the interim between the days of the foundress and Vatican II. It was a time of institutionalization of our life, when our goals moved to maintenance of ourselves and our institutions, rather than outreach to the broader community. I think some of those who left, left in resisting that heavy institutionalization. The vision was gone. Once you institutionalize for maintenance's sake and internalize goals, then you lose the vision. And that energy and life that you touched initially, or that the foundress understood, is gone.
Rosemary Radford Ruether: To me religious orders, particularly women's religious orders, really represent the countercultural tradition of the church. This goes back to its earliest origins of being a witness to another kind of humanity over against the system of public power, which was the Roman empire. There was from the very earliest beginnings a sense of the church as a counterculture, and also some latent, and not so latent, messages about a new equality of women. A lot of that got siphoned off in institutionalization, by naming it monasticism, in the sense of something removed from the local church.
But I think women's orders particularly always kept a strong egalitarianism. I would argue that the egalitarian tradition of early Christianity was maintained in religious women's orders, even though it was interpreted as jumping into a new equality precisely by repudiating marriage and procreation. But nevertheless it retained elements of that early radicalism. Into the high Middle Ages, you had a strong egalitarian tradition, a strong educational tradition.
And so in a sense, you have to look at a very large picture, a picture of increasing efforts to control women's religious orders, efforts that begin really in the late Middle Ages, that get stepped up in the counter-Reformation. Yet new orders were constantly breaking out of that by forming new kinds of movements that were intended to engage in direct service to the poor. And then there was an effort to re-institutionalize those. There's a whole history here that needs to be recovered.
I think in terms of the American religious orders, you have a much freer period in the 19th century, when there's very little control. Then there is a real effort to get nuns under control in the first half of the 20th century, as the American bishops get organized as a body and then begin to use the nuns as essentially a low-paid labor force for the parochial schools, and so on.
Chittister: My tradition is Benedictine, and the one thing that very few people take into account when they use the word "monasticism" is that it wasn't monastics who were cloistered. It was women who were cloistered, and not until the 13th century.
I can give you our history up until the 13th century. Then, as celibacy rises in the church, the canonesses are pulled out of the cathedrals so that they aren't a threat to the male vocation, which is apparently very fragile. Then you get into cloistered, female monasticism. But male monasticism, though some of it is cloistered, is always cloistered by choice.
So you're talking about a whole body of women who are now coming into a sense of self and status and competency and egalitarianism, and, apparently, we cannot have that nonsense. And so you put the toothpaste back into the tube. And for a while it looks like it's working, because you just keep repressing every new form that breaks out, until it can't be repressed anymore. Until the culture makes it impossible to repress it anymore.
Sojourners: You've traced some of the developments up to Vatican II; what's happening at this moment in history?
Chittister: One thing was that Vatican II mandated a review of charism, of foundation, of historical development. And the poor nuns, God bless them, they thought they meant it! You know it was a "Catch-22." They said "do it," so we did it.
The horrible irony of all this lies in obedience. The suffering that our communities went through, the pain of these changes ... As silly as it might sound to you, do you have any idea what it's like to be wrapped up like King Tut for 22 years of your life and to appear with your bare ankles hanging out one day? The only thing we've managed to do in 15 centuries is make hair obscene. I can remember a high school boy who couldn't hand in his tuition envelope because he couldn't look into my face. He'd never seen me with hair before! The pain was terrible.
Tuite: And now the message is, "Stop doing it." And we can't. We can't. It's too late.
Ruether: You know I think that reflects the ambivalence of Vatican II itself. Vatican II, in one way, was the culmination of a whole series of processes that have been going on, probably more in European Catholicism—renewal of liturgy, renewal of theology, renewal of biblical studies. And most of the leaders of that movement, from roughly the '20s and '30s on, have really been kind of repressed themselves.
Then it all burst out, and in effect within a very short time the Vatican Council validated everything that had happened before that. But the problem was, having validated that, a whole other thing got released that was far beyond what they had expected.
Chittister: Another thing is the educational resource that women religious as a group embodied. There had been phenomenal professional preparation, prior to Vatican II, as a result of the educational standards imposed by this government on our schools. And so you have waiting in the wings, then, this phenomenal body of highly educated women who could handle the sociology, the anthropology, the psychology, the theology, and the ecclesiology that was required for renewal. So you just said to all your professionals, "Bring your expertise and apply it to your own life," and so help me God, in 18 months, it was done.
The other irony is that the church, which did not permit women theological education and theology degrees, had unwittingly been contributing to the high level of professionalism in these communities.
Ruether: Women got other kinds of professional degrees. Then when the desire for better biblical and theological education began to be raised, there was a surge in the late '60s of Catholic women, not to the Catholic seminaries where they were not allowed, but to Harvard, Yale, Union, University of Chicago, Berkeley and so on, the most prestigious of the essentially non-denominational seminaries.
As a result, you now have a large body of Catholic women who are, in fact, better educated in an ecumenical setting than most Catholic priests, even most Catholic theologians. And it's not accidental that many major Protestant seminaries now have on their faculty one Catholic who is usually a woman, and very often a nun.
Sojourners: There has been a tremendous shift for women religious from being an unpaid labor force to being a prophetic community. How did that happen?
Melinda Roper: Well, it happened at the beginning of this century for the Roman Catholic church in this country. All of a sudden after 70-some years, we Maryknoll sisters have been dragged in front of the courts and the State Department, the press, and all that business. I think it is not because we are highly professional. I think that it comes primarily from many, many women having 30 to 40 years experience in another culture.
When a lot was happening in other parts of the world, we began asking different questions about how to be Christian, how to be church in those situations. There were Maryknoll sisters in many parts of the world who were asking those questions and had learned, through many years of experience, to understand how and why people out there were asking those kinds of questions. You begin to talk about justice and the poor and realize that the U.S. economic and political systems held up as ideals really are not working out there.
And so when we come back to the United States and begin to ask those questions, begin to try to tell the story from another point of view, then we get attacked politically. We get told in certain instances that we are naive, simplistic; and maybe in some sense we are, if that's what it means to speak or try to share the experience of the poor.
It's because of the folks out there with whom we've been living and working that we share and reflect those experiences. I would say we've been able to hear them a little bit better. We've been able to identify with them. And that inevitably means trouble, either in those countries or here. And it's eventually going to mean trouble in the local churches, constantly questioning—"What is the role of the missionary?" It's a very difficult question in an evolving church.
We just finished a general assembly, and the tone of what we wrote in our "vision statement" is so different from six years ago. Six years ago we were articulating justice and our solidarity with the poor in very strong language.
The tone now is very interesting: "As we are called and sent and received by peoples around the world, we are invited to walk with them in their journey. We will journey with them, but we don't know where that's going to lead. But we know inevitably it leads to a deeper participation in the Paschal Mystery and to worship." It's affirming our commitment, but it's seeing ourselves and our role change.
Ruether: All over the place you have this crossing over to a solidarity with Third World cultures and an increasing solidarity with the poor. I think the Maryknolls really exemplify that.
Chittister: If you go back to your question, "How do you explain the movement from labor force to prophetic community?" you ask yourself, "What was happening in American-based religious orders 20 years ago, when the labor force was lost?" The membership that had been the labor force simply left. But some of us didn't leave where we were supposed to leave at the right time. So God just tore all those walls down, and we have to finally ask ourselves, "Well now, do we animate or can we only staff?" With what was left, the fact was, we couldn't any longer be labor force.
So just as the Maryknolls had to look at the language of mission, we had to say, "What does it mean to be a religious in the United States today?" And we said, "It must be animation." And so you begin to see women religious now singly, in smaller numbers, become a presence rather than staff.
Schinzel: Seeing that in a different light, I think that by having experience here in this country in the educational system, women religious have stood with the people. Even if we were labor forces in those schools, we stood with those kids; we stood with those families; we stood when the priests weren't there to stand with them. We were in the hospitals. We sensed that need in people, and I think that women have done that well. We have responded whether we're labor force or in the institution. We are going to respond to the needs of the people and the needs of the time. And I think that's the real spirit that has been in women giving them their foundation.
Chittister: Our sisters never saw the movement out of the schools as a betrayal. We saw it as a necessary step for these same people, or the "new poor."
Tuite: One of the things that has happened to us in the last several years is that we've taken the personal experience of listening to others and are able to connect their suffering with systemic oppression. Making that connection brings a clarity in the pastoral response within a political system. And that's key.
We're much less "threatening" if we simply understand the pastoral as direct service, which is always a need and will always be our response. But because of increasing clarity of reality, we've placed that in a political context. So the personal becomes political.
Chittister: I was with a group of religious, it had to be 12 to 15 years ago now, and we would get together representatives of various dimensions of society, and we would say to them, "What would you like to see sisters do?"
I'll never forget this room, where I think there was a Hispanic woman, a widow, a Catholic mother, and a black Protestant woman. The Protestant woman didn't know sisters, and she didn't know the Catholic church. She probably thought we were a nice group of ladies, and we prayed and we were probably just good souls. But she didn't know from nothing what our question meant. So she said, "I just don't know if I've got much to say here or not. I think I just listen. I think it's nice of you ladies to invite me up. I just listen."
So she listened and she listened. It gets on to 3 o'clock and she says, "Oh, I understand now." The panel is over at 3:15, and we've been here since 9 in the morning. She says, "I think I've got something I'd like to say." So we said, "Oh, Olivia, please do."
And she said, "Well, I don't know if I can say it too good, 'cause you know I didn't go to school much. But in my heart I know. I'll just tell you a little story. Now, all you nice ladies just imagine that you lived in a house by a road on the top of a mountain. And there's a big rock slide and a big boulder came down right around the corner on this mountain. And every car that came 'round that corner hit that boulder and smashed up."
She continued, "Now I can understand what all you'd do. I heard you. You'd run right out, and you'd take those people out of that car. You'd bandage them up, and you'd bring them in your house, and you'd feed them, and you'd pray with them. And when they got well you'd send them home." She said, "Well, sister, what I think you ought to do is send somebody out to move the rock."
And I got this phenomenal, personal insight that day into the difference between charity and justice.
Sojourners: The change that is most visible is this new thing called "women and ministry." What does that phrase mean? What are its elements?
Ruether: I think that in terms of Catholicism, it's very interesting that the concept of ministry has become so key. When most of us were growing up in the Catholic church, that probably would have sounded like something Protestant—we have priests, not ministers.
Ministry really means the mission of the whole church. And I think it's precisely women religious—who got institutionalized, repressed, but never clericalized—who were in a particular position to claim ministry in a new kind of way.
Tuite: I think it used to mean a place. Ministry was the place you worked. Where is my ministry? It's in the school or in the hospital or in the community organization. I think the development of ministry for some might be not a place, certainly, but a style—a style of relationship.
Chittister: Women in ministry is a contrast to women in institutions. All of our ministries had been institutionalized. You didn't have to use the word "ministry," because what you did was take your obedience in the institution.
Schinzel: I think even the term "women in ministry" is a term that came about in order to name a situation that has happened. It's that movement of women responding to the needs of the time. And that spirit is still there and is growing and putting us in different places because of the light that needs to be there.
Tuite: "Women in ministry" often was an exclusive term for members of religious congregations. They were the nuns who explained their work through the use of the word "ministry." But now it's women, women who carry and who share a vision, a certain worldview.
Chittister: It's women who exist for others through the gospel, and whose role is to intervene at significant moments in a significant way in life situations.
You know, somebody said to me, "Well, Sister Joan, if the sisters close all their schools, where will your vocations come from?" I said, "I don't know, where do gynecologists come from? They don't have schools. Where do airline hostesses come from? How do I know?"
Tuite: I really believe that a woman's consciousness is earth-consciousness, that we are in touch with all aspects of life. We have a sensitivity. I'm not saying that some men don't have the same sensitivity, but I think men are more socialized and conditioned not to have it. Women respond to the signs of the times: the pauperization of women, nuclearism, militarism, the Central America issue. Our vision and our instinct move us toward it and not away from it. Toward it in the sense of responding to what is and creating the new.
Ruether: It's interesting that in the analysis of what can be called the "gender gap," it was discovered that women were generally much less in favor of increasing military budgets and much more concerned about social issues. That difference between women and men in terms of public policy had very little to do with feminism.
The response was very cross-class and cross-cultural. It was lodged in what I would call traditional women's culture. I mean that the ties of women to concerns for children and for welfare and these kinds of things exposed women to a different kind of view of public policy. And this did not coincide simply with those women who supposedly had been influenced by feminism. The earlier feminist movement of the late 19th to early 20th century very consciously drew on this traditional concern of women for family and children and nurture and saw that as the base for a new politics.
Roper: I think there are some common experiences among women, certainly the experience of walking down the street or going somewhere, and the slight possibility—or the very great possibility—of rape.
Chittister: You've just touched something so deep in me. I think a woman's sense of felt vulnerability has got to be a more pervasive part of the filter through which she sees the world. And so she is just more given to the life-survival context of anything. And she sees that being eroded. She becomes more powerless every single day—by systems, by technology, by government. And so she's closer to the questions.
When you get into this level of the conversation, everything inside says, "That's it! I live with those questions. And I can't fight your nuclear wars for you. Over half the human race are women. You're going to wipe us out, and you're not even asking us if that's all right. I am at your disposal at all times."
Unless I can move people in their feelings, in their reason, to recognize the vulnerability that I express for all of humankind on this planet, I have no hope.
Tuite: I think what the institutional church forgets is the fact that—for those of us who are members of religious congregations—we are women who happen to be members of religious congregations. We are not members of religious congregations who happen to be women! Do you see the different emphases? And because of that we bring a particular understanding of ourselves, our own experience, and the lived reality.
Ruether: And one knows, to put it all too graphically, that if religious women are shot as missionaries, they'll be raped too. I think so often that when the four U.S. women were killed in El Salvador, it was the time between when they were taken and when they were shot that is the most horrible to imagine.
Roper: Why did the deaths of the women have the impact that they did? Not just because there were four.
I think there's a whole dimension to their deaths that has not been reflected on and articulated—or maybe reflected on among us Maryknolls. I've only referred out loud to that time between when they were picked up and killed one other time. I just couldn't bring myself to talk about it.
Tuite: We thought of it when we rode along the pavement just recently and onto the dirt road to the place of killing. And you know, all I could think of was the fear each woman must have experienced at that time. The fact that some were members of religious congregations and one wasn't made no difference. They were all women facing the rape and killing.
Chittister: Such a clear reflection of the total helplessness of the world too. Very few people ever consider a man helpless or powerless. I'm sure men are put into situations where they're both helpless and powerless. And they suffer differently than women do. They suffer very deeply. Their ego is attacked in a way that a woman's ego is not attacked, because she doesn't have one built on her potency. I always think it's so interesting that women are called fertile, but men are called potent.
Ruether: And of course there is the clear linking of male potency with violence. So much of the language that not only symbolizes violent military power, but in fact represses any critique of it, does so by appealing to the ego connection between masculinity and violence. I mean, every male politician in this country is paralyzed as soon as he is called weak, wimpy, or soft. It is the language that controls and prevents criticism of militarism. And it's the language by which men are controlled, by threatening them with loss of masculinity.
Sojourners: The four women in El Salvador are a historic example of this change from women who were protected, or controlled, by not being allowed to minister outside of the place where it was safe to minister. And now women are found in all situations.
Ruether: In a historical context, patriarchy has on the one hand always cloistered women and, on the other hand, threatened them with rape when they were out of place. That, in a kind of exaggerated, peculiar way, has been the experience of religious women. I'd say religious women have always been both cloistered and threatened. For example, in the fourth century, when the German barbarians, as they were called, sacked Rome, one of the leading foundresses of religious community in Rome stood at the door of her house and shamed this German from coming in and raping her sisters.
Chittister: We cannot lose sight of the fact that the cloister was the only way that they could protect women and protect an alternative lifestyle for women. Even then, the convents were simply overrun. So not until this point, again in only some parts of the world, have women even been free to minister out of the place. There are a lot of cultural and theological overtones.
I want to get on, though, to what I think is your question now—the effect of these kinds of changes on religious life itself. As Benedictines whose whole lifestyle is communal, we've been taxed in a particular way in terms of schedules and in being able to create an environment where sisters could work in individual ministries and still maintain community life and community prayer. We've been taxed in another way, and that's a sense of community identity.
My own community has responded to that by creating, in 1978, the concept of corporate commitment—an issue or an idea related to the charism of the order—to which every member, regardless of her individual ministry, will respond. So our corporate commitment is nuclear disarmament: the relation of sexism to militarism. So the first-grade teacher will write down on her blessing of ministry form that we're going to have the peace crane project. The nurses may do the studies of radiology or ask the hospitals to provide those. The pastoral assistants may draw the women of the parish together to help them make connections between violence against them and violence against the planet.
One of the functions of religious community is to be able to do better together what you can't possibly do alone. If you have a corporate commitment, you're at a new point in cultural history.
Tuite: I think we're trying to say that we're willing to do whatever is necessary to be about the work of building peace with justice. Now, if that means dressing this way, that's fine. If it means wearing a habit because that will be the effective way to do it for whomever, that's fine too.
We are willing to do whatever is necessary. If it means living with a large group of women, then that's what we do. If it means living in the neighborhood, that's what we do. If it means living alone and we're more effective that way, that's what we do. Not that those questions aren't that heavy any longer. It's how we can be most effective.
Schinzel: Within our community, it has made us redefine what we mean by community. And often before "community" meant the sisters of this convent, the sisters of this motherhouse. Community was connected with a place or a location. Community now is a group of people who are shaping and sharing their lives together toward what needs to be done for the church and the world. And that has just drastically changed our lifestyle together.
We can't all be together for prayer every morning at 7 o'clock like the rules used to tell us. We've had to dream of new ways of keeping that life together and flowing toward what we're being called to do by the Spirit.
Tuite: A theological principle that has affected my own life more than anything else as I've gotten older—and hopefully wiser—is the body of Christ. I never understood it as a young adult. I never understood it in a classroom. But that whole concept—when one person in the body is hungry or raped or oppressed or violated in whatever way, then part of me is violated and oppressed—is so much amongst us.
Sojourners: Could you talk more about the spiritual bonding growing up among sisters and the kind of spirituality being forged out of your experience?
Schinzel: I think the concept of the body of Christ and the bonding dimension is putting us together on a level that women religious have never been on before. We share our common bondedness of womanhood. Before, we were women in convents, our doors were locked, and we had walls between us.
As we have moved and bonded with other women, they affect our lives. And that affects how we live together in community with women. Plus we affect their lives, and that affects the larger world community.
That is the more dynamic spirituality that I see happening. It's the togetherness and listening and sharing and commonality that are giving strength to women that just can't be stopped.
Chittister: It's also eroding a false theology of hierarchy, of a long history of virginity as the higher vocation. If some women have the capacity for spiritual growth, then don't all women, or do no women? But you still have documents saying, for instance, that the Eucharist may only be distributed in this order: priests, deacons, laymen, nuns.
Tuite: As nuns, one of our greatest struggles is against the class system in our church, because we're part of that class system. The bonding that you're talking about is really difficult in practice sometimes because of the existing system.
One of the things Maryknoll has done for some of us is getting in touch with a global spirituality. When the women died in El Salvador, they were us dying.
Roper: I think certainly the new bonds among peoples of many faiths all centering around the profound respect for human life and the human community is something that is really going to carry us a long way.
Ruether: You talk about eroding of false theology and spirituality. One of the really remarkable aspects is how fast it eroded. Consider the weight and imposition of all of these little forms of sadomasochism and so on that passed themselves off as suffering. Having been touched by real experience, that stuff just disintegrated overnight. And nobody needs to go around and find some way to beat themselves or wear hair shirts.
One is not, of course, only discovering a whole different spirituality in terms of what suffering and witness mean, but it really means a redefinition of your Christology and your understanding of Christ as well. Because you can no longer talk about the cross as though there is nothing that God likes better than to hand out crosses. You have to rediscover that whole story, the story of the radical witness of demand for repentance.
The story of the cross is the story of repentance refused and the crucifixion of the prophet. But it doesn't mean anything unless you've been doing some witnessing to begin with. Therefore, suffering takes on a whole different meaning. It really becomes meaningful suffering in the context of experiencing the hostility, the refusal to change and become a new kind of people.
Chittister: I think Rosemary is touching my concern about the state of an institution that reduces all of its best values to a pseudo-symbology.
When I was a young woman, I was trained that I should walk with my hands under my scapular, crossed at the wrist, to remind me of Jesus bound. At night we prayed on our knees with our arms outstretched, horizontal at the shoulders: Jesus crucified, in prayer. Now, Jesus was crucified, and Jesus was bound in poverty, in wife-beating, in alcoholism, three blocks away from my house. And that's where I should have been praying, with Jesus bound.
I have always said that an institution that has to reduce its best values to the level of the symbolic, or the pseudo-symbolic, is dead.
What has come to light is true symbology in us. So you see, we've been throwing off the old ones. And you have a disappointed population for whom we were a kind of symbolism.
We were the plastic statues on the fronts of their cars. And they mind the fact that they can't have that anymore. Now you have nuns facing Jesus dying and rising every day. And it occurs to these nuns that they simply don't need to play at it anymore.
Ruether: You had this incredible pseudo-piety that people were living out, and yet when the real thing came along, they could so quickly hear it. It couldn't have changed so quickly and so dramatically if underneath the surface there were not somehow a real spirituality. We had the fossilized symbols, but it was the real experience that allowed the fossilization to disappear, and all those symbols suddenly took flesh in reality.
Chittister: We look in our communities and we see our older women so strong, so gentle, so courageous, so able to make this great transition. They didn't fall apart before and they don't fall apart now. If you want a manifestation of whether or not spirituality still exists, I will take you to my oldest sisters. They've made it all, and their heads are set toward Jerusalem. They've got the Scripture in this hand, the Rule in this hand, and they just keep right on going. Now that's spirituality.
The real thing was there. I've said this often. I entered in 1952.1 was 16 years old. I had my little job, I had a lot of independence.
I loved the sisters. I knew God was woman, and I knew Jesus was feminine. And I saw it in them. Everywhere they walked, I saw the gospel.
I would get a penance if I walked swinging my arms. Oh, every week I took the penance, didn't you? But I never internalized it. I wanted to be a sister so badly that if this is what I had to do to be a sister—hey, I would play! Nobody dances like I dance if the party is good enough.
Then in the '60s the kids came. They looked; they saw what I saw. But I just saw it and did it and expected never to be a good sister. The kids in the '60s said, "The emperor has no clothes—why do you do that?" and got scolded a bit and went home. And in the '70s they said, "We're not going to do it anymore."
And so I think what you see is that for a long time the reality of spirituality was there, with less and less internalization of guilt.
Tuite: I think one of the most devastating events at this point in history is that Rome has never invited us or come to us to hear our experience.
Ruether: I think the reality is that there's a shocking gap of moral development between the hierarchical church and what now exists in terms of this active spirituality. And the gap becomes bigger and bigger.
It disappoints me that we understand the gospel and the Vatican doesn't; but on the other hand, that's the gospel story too. It is precisely the hierarchy of religion that doesn't understand its own message and that crucifies the prophets.
Sojourners: What do you as women religious have to bring now to the peace movement, to the struggle for justice, to all areas of ministry?
Roper: There is a relationship between our vows and spirituality, when the vows are lived beyond an individualistic sense, in terms of the social dimensions of the commitment. They go back to the first part of the gospel, Jesus' time in the desert with the temptations: bread and religious power and economic power.
A key element in the spirituality for me is a freedom to move with and be called into and around and beyond. But I think the freedom to move with relationships implies a certain freedom of relationship with God.
I have thought, "I wonder how many people looking at these women walking down the street realize that we are flaunting all the materialistic values by saying, 'We vow poverty'; all the hedonism and abuse of the human person that goes on in this society by saying, 'We have vowed chastity'; and all the abuse of power that is around us by saying, 'We have vowed obedience.'"
What's emerging as a spirituality among women in the church might somehow be linked with a much greater freedom of relationship and expressive faith in talking about life and what life means in terms of how one understands God. And therefore we are freer to protest, and freer to pray in jail.
Tuite: It's an understanding of God, an understanding of faith and of ourselves. When we grew up, we were trained into, and socialized into, an understanding of God as only transcendent, male, surely white, looking down on us down here. I think in the women's struggle, and our struggle in religious congregations through these years, there's been an understanding of the immanence of God within each of us.
And that understanding of God within me is a freedom that I can choose sides, that I can do civil disobedience, always within the context of a wider reflection with others. But it opens up. I don't have to prove anything. I'm simply who I am. And I think our lifestyle enables us to do a lot of things.
Chittister: I would argue that the concept of freedom is what enables us to go there. But I heard the question, "What do you have to bring to it?" And I realize that we also bring freedom.
I know that we have a different kind of peace community than many other non-sectarian or non-communal peace groups. They bring a legislative package, or a legislative idea or vision. And I honestly think we bring a sense of Christian community, of lived spirituality, of Christian hope. Then the circle gets complete.
Out of these three things comes imperviousness. We get impervious to reprisal. We get impervious to economic control. We get impervious to criticism, because we come out of Christian community, and we go back into Christian community. We live on an ice cube in the middle of the Caribbean. But it's our ice cube. We're on it together.
Women religious can't be threatened by our families; we left our families years ago. Women religious can't be threatened by money; we haven't had any money. Women religious can be threatened only by one group: church leadership.
What's the difference between a radical feminist, radical in the sociological sense and the historical sense, and a radical Christian feminist? The demand that the gospel be lived. It's being convicted by the gospel that makes us dangerous in the church and the women's movement, not that we're radical feminists. Those are easy to dismiss. But to bring the gospel to feminism is the thing that makes us dangerous.
Ruether: The problem with the repression from the church is that you find the church hierarchy denying the gospel.
Schinzel: When you asked the question, the first word that came to mind was "empowerment." Empowerment is what we have to bring to the peace movement, because I think women clearly see Jesus working in a sense of empowerment in the gospel. Coming out of this bonding with women across the world, of this sense of freeing ourselves and empowering ourselves, that message goes to all those groups we're with.
Chittister: The thing that enables us to empower so many people, I think, is the fact that we come to these people as communities. We provide a kind of stable base to which people can keep dipping in and out. I think we've aided and abetted a good many wonderful, wonderful people who in their own search know they have to do something and are looking for a vehicle through which to do it.
Sojourners: You've talked about how the horizons have expanded to include political struggle as a part of the spiritual life. That's true. But it also works the other way around. By your participation in the political struggle, you have helped others involved in the political struggle to see its spiritual foundations.
Tuite: That's right. It's an integrity that for some of us, we wouldn't be in the political struggle if it were not for our faith. One thing we try to do is transcend party politics or ideology, and we are able to because of the depth of our belief. I think that gives us freedom to practice and freedom to speak.
Chittister: In addition to a political transcendence, we bring not only Christian community, but the possibility of continuity and stability in the face of obstruction. When other people have to move in and out of the movement because their mother got ill, or whatever, we are training generation after generation. And that's continuity and stability in the institutional sense. We have staying power, along with spirituality.
Sojourners: You have a particular sense of hope that others often lose in the justice struggle. Where does that hope come from?
Ruether: There's a base for the struggle both in terms of actual community, but also in terms of faith that is not rooted in the political system. Therefore it's not going to get burned out after two or four fall and spring offensives, which is what happened to so many of the radicals of the '60s. I saw these people disintegrating before my very eyes, because they really had no internal staying power. What they had was some kind of ideology, some kind of rhetoric and the need to succeed, but they couldn't sustain defeat.
Schinzel: There is something inside of me that wants to say as a member of a women's religious community that all that's being said is true and correct and nice, but I know within my own heart that we are where we are and are able to do what we're doing because we've been with those people suffering out there on the streets. But I don't want to give the false impression that because I belong to a Franciscan religious community, I have all this to bring to the peace movement. The peace movement has fed the religious communities and has brought us where we are in a great degree.
Ruether: There was an amazing renewal of religious life, particularly among American nuns, in the '60s and '70s as people caught on to the real meanings of things. By and large the hierarchy is not pleased and is anxious to repress these people, even if it means destroying half the religious orders and driving half the nuns out. And I think that brings the situation to a kind of crisis where one has to ask not merely how to renew the existing religious orders, but how to refound a whole new way of women's religious communities on some new bases. It may be precisely the repression that gives the creative impetus to this.
Tuite: I think the future big question is: Does canonical relationship of congregations enable or prevent our mission and ministry? In terms of the gospel, the charism of the foundress, and the signs of the times, does it enable or does it prevent?
Chittister: You have to understand historically that all religious congregations will not survive. There's absolutely nothing in history that guarantees that. Eighty-five percent of all the religious orders founded before the year 1500 are now extinct; 66 percent founded before the year 1800 are extinct. I know for sure that just having my constitutions approved by Rome does not guarantee my survival.
In my own opinion, the only thing that will ensure the survival of religious life is what has always ensured its emergence. And that is its authentic ability to relate to the poor, to go to those who need empowerment. And it lies within our power, which isn't to say that we won't suffer in the process from both the church and the state.
But there's nothing new in that song. That's just an old song sung over and over for centuries. And I don't relish it. I don't look for it. I didn't come out of Egypt easily. And I'm not one of the people who really likes wandering around in the sand.
I am completely convinced that the world is full of vocations. If we're doing significant things in a significant way at significant moments in people's lives, God will send those who are called equally to that gospel service. I have no doubt about that. Our problem is not a vocation problem. Our problem is a question of significance and spirituality. And that's over and above any of our struggles, political or ecclesiastical. Some people will get destroyed in them. Some will despair, some will die. But those struggles are not the things that will destroy religious life. Only we can do that.
Ruether: I see the church as historical institution and Spirit-filled community, and the church is renewed by the constant rebirth of Spirit-filled communities. Religious orders have been a way of institutionalizing that. The problem with institutionalization is that you become committed to the perpetuation of the institution. But it does not have to perpetuate itself as institution. What it needs to do is to constantly relight the fire from generation to generation. Therefore the institutions of the internal community can constantly die, because they need to be constantly reborn in new forms.
Schinzel: Long ago I heard someone address a lecturer, "Will there be religious communities in the future, or are they all going to die?" And the person, I thought, wisely answered, "Throughout history there have always been groups of people who have witnessed to the holy, and there always will be." To me, that's where the question is. Am I witnessing to the holy, which is the human family of God, the poor and the suffering?
Roper: It is so essential to the future of the quality of all human life that there be a lot of intermingling through and across borders and cultures on all dimensions of life, not just in an isolated, political or economic or militaristic way. In the future I would look toward that kind of human exchange growing throughout the world among persons of faith, no matter what that faith is. I have hope for that.
Ruether: Religious communities provide vehicles, not simply in terms of all their spiritual values. But they also provide useable resources that are genuinely available to those who need them. One of the things that was so evident to us in the women's pilgrimage to Honduras—and this was very impressive to the Protestant women—is that these nuns could constantly call up all these communities and, at the drop of a hat, get housing for 98 people.
Chittister: I was with a group of Protestants on a trip. They said, "You do a lot of traveling, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, kind of." They said, "Well, do you do that alone?" And I replied, "Oh yeah, we don't have the money, I couldn't take anyone with me." They said, "Oh my, what would you do if you got stranded in a city?" They were Protestant women and very conservative. I said, "Well, I'd never be stranded in a city." They asked, "What do you mean you'd never be stranded in a city?" I said, "Why, I'd just look up the nearest convent, and just call the convent." They said, "Any convent? Would you know a convent in every city in the world?" And I answered, "I wouldn't 'know them,' but I would know them. And I would just call them and say, 'Sister, I'm here, and I need help.'" They said, "Would that happen?" And I said, "Of course that would happen!"
In the '50s, I can remember the warnings coming through that we were to establish the credibility of sisters who came to our convents, because there were people dressing up like sisters who were stealing and harassing. And I can remember a discussion in my community about whether or not we could in conscience ask anybody for that kind of information. If they came to the door, didn't you just take them in? How could you say to them, "Are you bona fide? Are you legitimate? Are you real?"
Sojourners: Where do you find the hope that enables you not just to hold on, but to really envision possibilities and to offer hope alongside suffering people and each other?
Chittister: I get hope from that line, "This day, you shall be with me in my kingdom." Nobody's going to keep me out of that. Nobody. I am so sincere about that. I know the Gospels as a feminist freedom song. I know it as deeply as black people knew it. I know it just as clearly as the people of Central America know it. It's my song, and the chainers of that gospel in this day will not overcome.
Tuite: Hope comes certainly. You start with faith, and hope comes out of it.
I do not have hope in terms of women's participation in the institutional church. I don't think they want us. I don't think there will be changes, certainly not in my lifetime, of any meaning that will change that relationship.
But I find hope in the struggle with the people. That's why it's important to touch that struggle and be constantly in touch with the struggle of the poor, the struggle of women, the mothers in El Salvador, with Nicaragua, the poor on the west side of Chicago, Appalachia, no matter where. The hope is in the people.
Schinzel: Hope comes for me because I continually see birth being given. Birth comes out of that person on the street in the very depth of his or her suffering. And out of that sense of birthing there is always going to be new life.
I don't have hope that we will be part of what is the present institutional church. And I don't want to be part of that. But I'm willing to help birth something new to be part of.
Chittister: I've said repeatedly, however, if not for us, then because of us. It's my responsibility to lay my life down to build the church in which women have a full part of Jesus, a full part of the revelation. And I owe that to the next generation.
Roper: My experience has been that hope is a gift. And we can touch people who are gifted with hope. I guess in the same way I think it's God's faithfulness toward us that I have become so aware of. Part of God's faithfulness is God's gift of hope.
Paul's writings and the gospel talk about God's peace coming through blood. The thing that I get out of the gospel and the Christian tradition is that God's peace does come through blood, the blood that is shed for others with a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. And I know there are many people who are gifted with hope, and I'm part of that.
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