The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (18 page)

Another ex-nun tells the story of having a sexual relationship with the postulant mistress who had been in the community for twenty years; both also left the convent eventually.
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Several stories told of superiors who knew, but said and did nothing. Here is one such recollection:

One morning the crude-mannered superior accosted me in the kitchen before Morning Prayer just as I finished putting the milk in the refrigerator.

“Did you spend the night in Sister Martin’s room last night?” she asked, shaking a finger at me. My heart stopped. What could I say? I knew that visiting another sister’s room was forbidden.

“Yes, Sister Superior,” I answered, looking her in the eye and feigning a calmness I did not feel…. I waited for the anger and punishment I knew would come, but the Superior turned on her heel and left. She never mentioned it again.
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And nearly all talked about being “haunted” by the vow of chastity and eventually leaving the sisterhood. The young nun who spent the night with Sister Martin spoke of leaving the community because “the guilt lingered until I could no longer ignore the contradictions embodied in my relationship.” She also reports, “more than once,” that it was a priest who offered to “purge her” of her attraction to women.

Only one story told of a sister who remained in the convent while maintaining a sexual relationship by creating her own “alternative community.” All of her relationships were highly secretive, and at that time she had been a sister for twenty-six years. Even she admitted, “I think I’m pushing the limits in terms of the community knowing about our relationship.”
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All admitted that even given their experiences of sexual relationships, they would never say that the convent is a hotbed of lesbianism. Repeatedly they admit that the structures just aren’t there to support it. No one reported or knew of sexual relationships with anyone other than nuns and a handful of priests—no children, no teenagers, and no pursuing anonymous sex outside of the
convent. For all of the sisters, their sexual partners were either priests or one another. We do not see in the sisterhood today the sexual permissiveness and scandal so prevalent in the priesthood because it’s not there and hasn’t been there for a very long time.

The only story I know of institutional abuse by nuns was revealed recently in Dublin, Ireland, with the Magdalene Asylums, the last of which was closed in 1996. According to a November 28, 2002,
New York Times
article, the Magdalene Asylums were set up in the nineteenth century by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd as a refuge for “fallen” women in Ireland, where according to Dublin reporter Sarah Lydall, “women who offended the country’s moral code were sent to live, and sometimes die in disgrace.”

The nuns in charge proved to be a cruel lot. The girls were made to work seven days a week, 364 days a year (they get Christmas off), given little food, discouraged from forming friendships, beaten for minor infractions, humiliated and ridiculed, and worst of all forbidden to leave the home or make contact, even by letter, with the outside world.
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The Magdalene Sisters
(which won the Best Film award at the 2002 Venice Film Festival) chronicles how abusive the nuns were to women in these asylums, which proved to be nothing more than slave-labor camps. The Vatican, true to form, denounced the film as “an angry and rancorous provocation,” but as Lydall observes, “with so many scandals and investigations percolating at once here, it’s not surprising that the film has stirred not a peep from the Catholic leadership in Ireland.” So much for the Vatican’s continuous claims that sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is an American phenomenon. While sexual abuse and
humiliation were undoubtedly present in the Magdalene Asylums, it’s the physical cruelty and psychological torture of women that appear to be the “abuse of choice” by nuns. As one theologian commented, “I really do think that sexual abuse is far more a man’s problem. Nuns may be guilty of being better at psychologically and emotionally abusing others, but as for sex, I do think that’s the man’s method.” Having been knuckle-whacked myself, I agree wholeheartedly.

For as mysterious and set apart as sisters were, not one of us could have anticipated what would happen all of a sudden in the mid-1960s, when the Church Fathers through Vatican II ask the Church Mothers (though not themselves) to change. All in the Catholic sisterhood were called to return to the holy spirit of their founders and change their religious and apostolic lives accordingly. As a result, the sisterhood has never been the same. While you can still find a handful of religious orders whose community lives resemble the schedule of the day we lived in 1964, and monastic orders remaining true to their cloistered calling, radical changes transformed every other sisterhood in this country by the late 1960s. Our dress code changed, our work changed, and our community lifestyle changed; everything about our lives as sisters changed quickly. Most important of all, our thinking and our understanding of religious life and community life changed. Within a few years, the sisterhood as we’ve always known it turned into the sisterhood we know today.

Almost immediately, we traded in our “Sister Mary …” names and took our family names back. I traded in Sr. Mary Carol Joseph and happily retrieved Karol Ann Jackowski. It felt like I got back my self. Everyone I knew (except for some senior sisters), gladly welcomed trading in the holy habit for something
wholly more comfortable and far less conspicuous. In 1964, I was silent (sort of), censored, and enclosed, dressed from head to toe in several layers of black and white. In 1969, I graduated from college in a stylish navy blue knit suit, with plain shoulder-length blue veil. The night before, I even partied with my classmates, all of whom I was forbidden to talk to until that year. That’s how quickly hundreds of years of tradition changed in the sisterhood. Literally overnight. And that’s how suddenly heartbreaking those changes were to all the sisters for whom that was the only religious life they knew and loved. Many sisters wept silently for years over being forced to change in ways they didn’t want to. I suspect some still do.

Within a few years our lives moved quickly from those of silent, cloistered, enclosed young sisters to those of socially active college students. And in convents all over the country something similar was happening. Once cut off from the world, sisters were now part of the world, and clearly glad to be back. In convents throughout the country, community life, which was once so uniform and regulated, became reorganized to better serve the needs of local sisters. Being able to wake up later was a dream-come-true. Called by the Holy Spirit of our founders to be silent and submissive no more, sisters began thinking for themselves in ways that were once outlawed. After not having to make decisions for years, all of a sudden we were asked to take part in every decision that affected our lives. Even Mother Superiors gave up their titles, and soon each convent was electing its own superior, now called coordinator, and a council (several nuns to manage household business). What transformed the sisterhood more than anything else in the 1960s was how quickly and obediently sisters responded to the divine experience of speaking their minds and governing themselves. It appeared as though some sacred fire, extinguished for years, had been
reignited. The transformation that happened to the Church Mothers in the 1960s is unlike anything the sisterhood has ever seen, the effects of which we are still trying to discern.

Since the late 1960s, more than 300,000 nuns have left the sisterhood (one in five worldwide), “a breathtaking statistic,” according to Elizabeth Abbott, one that “people in the Catholic circle call the ‘bleeding’”
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—the slow but steady loss of lifeblood from the Catholic Church. During that time, vocations in Europe and the United States also dropped by 50 percent. Of my class of fifty who entered the convent in 1964, three of us remain in the sisterhood. Today there are approximately eighty thousand nuns in the United States. The median age is near seventy and rising quickly, with no new recruits in sight. Only in the Third World are vocations to the sisterhood rising, only in those countries where the status of women is very low. But in this country, when we look at sisterhood now, we are looking at another precious endangered species.

What happened? Why did everyone leave? Why won’t anyone join? The more ordinary our religious lives became as nuns, the more the mystique was gone and all the identity that went with it. As sisters became more immersed in work other than church work, and appeared to live just as every other committed Christian woman did, the unique meaning of our lives as nuns became more obscure. Through the steady stripping away of those external features that defined and set us apart for centuries, these questions emerge: If we now live and work and look like everyone else, then why be nuns? Why the sisterhood? What’s the difference?

For more than 300,000 of us there wasn’t any difference. Most sisters I know left to marry, to pursue a lesbian lifestyle, or to live a more independent life. Either celibacy or obedience was the reason. For some sisters, religious life didn’t change fast enough,
and for others it would never change enough while still governed by Church Fathers and Canon Law. Of the sisters who left, many are still living the religious life they wanted, either alone or in partnership with others. There are thousands of free-spirited ex-nuns still living religious lives in sisterhood with others, some celibately so. While the mystery that holds us together as nuns in this world appears to be vanishing, I see something else going on. At a time when sisterhood in the Catholic Church seems to be bleeding to death, I see signs of what looks like new life.

Hardly anyone is joining the Catholic sisterhood today because no fresh insight has emerged yet for doing so, and the demographics point to its impending demise. I met a bright, young, energetic woman who was affiliated with a religious order for three years, even lived with them for a year. On the day of her reception into the community, at mass on the altar, she realized what she was doing and announced to the congregation that she couldn’t. A powerful movement of the Holy Spirit, I’d say. For as much as she loved and revered the sisters who were so overjoyed to accept her, so, too, could she see a sisterhood without peers, without companionship, without a future. She stood on the altar before her sisters and proclaimed to them what all sisterhood-seeking women must feel when they look at life as a nun now: “I’m sorry, but I just can’t join your sisterhood.” A powerful voice of the Holy Spirit, I’d say.

Because so many in sisterhood today are aging and uncertain of its future, women I meet are not inclined to think of religious life as sisterhood. Nor are they attracted to sisterhoods whose religious authority is subordinate to and dependent upon that of the Church Fathers.
Self-governing
and
independent
are the essential ingredients women tend to look for in sisterhood. At least that seems to be the case among the women I meet. Silent and submissive no more, most women I know are searching for an
entirely different kind of religious sisterhood, one in which independence is preserved as the sacred inner fire that it is.

While sisterhood today does indeed appear to be bleeding to death with no future beyond its current aging members, the work that remains to complete its transformation is no less important, timely, or divinely inspired than what we did in our habited heyday. Even more important now, I believe, is the work of sisters, in providing the divine link to a new vision of sisterhood that will surely follow. As the silent, submissive voice of sisters strengthens and speaks, and as more continue to exercise their priestly powers, new forms of sisterhood are bound to rise from all that sacred spilled blood. And new forms of sisterhood are bound to attract thousands of women seeking that kind of soulful liberation, just as women did in the Jesus Movement. While we are clearly witnessing today the end of sisterhood as we’ve known it, we are also witnessing every day its rebirth, a sisterhood the likes of which we’ve never seen.