Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America

The enduring popularity of this work is even more remarkable when one considers that the author is neither a Catholic scholar nor, obviously, a Catholic nun. At the time of writing [2004] John J. Fialka was an investigative journalist for The Wall Street Journal whose previous books had examined, among other things, the nature of war reporting. But in the May 19, 1986, edition of the WSJ, he broke a story that the United States Catholics Bishops were laboring to suppress: the financial plight of Catholic religious orders of women in America, who were facing a collective minimum shortfall of $2 billion in retirement/housing/medical costs. [Later analyses would put the number higher.] By 1986 it was obvious that fewer and fewer women were choosing to enter religious life, upsetting a century-old theorem that the wages of the younger sisters, minimal as they were/are, supported the care of the elderly sisters. My sense is that the author was deeply moved by where his reporting was taking him, and he decided to push on into the 400-page book at hand.

One might argue that Sisters is an imperfect book in that it tries to do too much: describe the arrival and the expansion of religious women across the American continent from the early 1800’s: highlight the extraordinary energy, imagination, and courage of sisters as they expanded into the American West; assess the positive and negative interpretations of the Council Vatican II by the various religious orders; and describe the religious lives of the “survivors of the exodus” and the motivations of women who seek admission to religious orders in the twenty-first century. True, Sisters is an ambitious project, but it introduces the reader to a rich menu for further thought and reading, particularly helpful to those of us in the United States who are attempting to reinvent our pastoral church life in the twenty-first century.

Pope Francis’ call to Synodality stresses, among other things, the need for greater voice from the laity, something much more complex than occasional circular discussions in church basements. Fialka’s text is the exercise of one man’s baptismal and synodal right to explore his church’s history and religious practice, and to offer analyses and advice about the future. It is deeply refreshing to hear a level-headed layperson offer straight talk about the Church, mostly free of the “progressive conservative” quagmire into which we professional church people have floundered for many years.
 
To that point: Recently I read an essay featuring Catholic CEO’s and philanthropists, the “high roller” donors. The universal consensus of all of them is that major Catholic donors—the philanthropists-- are most attracted to Catholic educational institutions, the very ministry jettisoned by bishops, pastors, and religious sisters alike, and that donors expect to serve on boards of trustees and cancel mismanaged ministries. In a sense, synodality already does function at certain levels of the Church, and it is necessary to take its contributions seriously, even if the insights run counter to long-held modus operandi. [Catholic University in Washington, my alma mater, has been financially strengthened through its adoption by the Koch Brothers and Tim Busch, though not without controversy.]

The spine of this book is the two centuries old Sisters of Mercy community, founded in Ireland in 1831 by the heiress Catherine McAuley. The earliest ministerial identity of the Mercies was “a corps of Catholic social workers” as Wikipedia puts it. The order spread through Ireland, and soon extended to the East Coast of the United States serving multiple needs, but most notably to the destitutes, health care for the poor, and education. Of note is the nursing service rendered by the Mercies and other communities to wounded and dying soldiers of both flags after major Civil War engagements, particularly at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. Fialka believes that this war service was a considerable step in assisting Protestants to understand and accept Catholics in general in American society, and specifically the identity of Catholic sisterhood.

In 1866 and 1884 the U.S. Bishops, in plenary councils at Baltimore, mandated that every Catholic parish must build and maintain a Catholic school. The intentions of the bishops were protection of Catholic students from anti-Catholic harassment in public schools and the establishment of moral and academic formation of the young. Take a moment to digest what an audacious pastoral plan these bishops were proposing and its eventual impact upon the American Church. At its crest after World War II, the Catholic school systems coast to coast were staffed and nurtured by over six hundred religious orders and communities—the vast majority being women. [I myself am a minority: my Catholic education was provided by male religious, the Christian Brothers, and the Franciscan Friars; it was the Christian Brothers who encouraged me to read exhaustively, write, and research—in middle school.

The author plays to his strengths: years at The Wall Street Journal are brought to play in his acute and persistent attention to the “business of nuns,” as one might put it. The financing of Catholic hospitals and Catholic schools, the two primary ministries of American sisters until very recently, has always rested upon the personal dedication and radical charity of the sisters. This reality has created some remarkably interesting and stressful episodes between major women superiors and certain bishops. The sisters truly asked bishops for only one form of compensation: autonomy to live their communal and ministerial lives without radical and/or arbitrary intrusions from chanceries. To this repeated request over the years, the bishops gave a wide range of responses. Generally, bishops do not like women telling them what to do. Other bishops had no experience communicating with women at all. But on the other hand, many bishops were so eager to obtain the services of religious women in their dioceses that they made frequent recruiting trips to Ireland. The successful orders, as a rule, enjoyed superiors who could navigate the treacherous waters of troublesome bishops and other men of influence.

Fialka is not steeped in the theological lingo and undercurrents surrounding Vatican II [1962-1965], but he can competently report on the impact of the Council on every faction of the American Church, and specifically the sisters. To read his treatment of “the great exodus” of sisters—nearly 200,000 in the U.S. in 1960 compared to 3,409 as of this writing—a Catholic can gain an elementary overview of how things seemingly “fell apart” in many departments of Catholic parish life, particularly Catholic education and the ministry of sisters.

First, the four-year history of Vatican II [1962-1965] revealed serious divisions among the world’s bishops: those who advocated a need to reinforce the walls between the Church and the dangers of a secularized world versus those who saw the need for greater openness of Catholicism to the modern world. As a rule, the sixteen documents produced by the Council fathers were styled as compromise documents which could be interpreted in several ways. Look at the decree on religious life, Perfectae Caritatis, paragraph 10:

10. The religious life, undertaken by lay people, either men or women, is a state for the profession of the evangelical [Gospel] counsels which is complete in itself. While holding in high esteem therefore this way of life so useful to the pastoral mission of the Church in educating youth, caring for the sick and carrying out its other ministries, the sacred synod confirms these religious in their vocation and urges them to adjust their way of life to modern needs.   

Obviously, one can draw multiple and opposite directives from this broad umbrella of instruction; wisely, Fialka remains focused on the U.S. situation and its interpretation of the Council. For starters, the seeds of the decline in religious vocations did not begin with Vatican II. In truth the role of women in American life was revolutionized during World War II. Remember Rosie the Riveter? The postwar feminist Betty Friedan published the best seller The Feminine Mystique in 1963. She observes that American GI’s fighting World War II looked forward to traditional homelife when they returned, only to discover that their wives, daughters, and girlfriends were stronger women with multiple career goals when the soldiers returned home. [If you haven’t seen the 1946 film classic on this stress, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” you owe it to yourself.]

Perfectae Caritatis, as it turned out, was too late. Religious women were not oblivious to “women’s liberation.” And in many respects, the orders had more right to their restlessness than about any other branch of the Church. After World War II the wave of Catholic marriages and the advent of the Baby Boomers led to a sharp demand for Catholic parishes and schools in growing population centers, notably Los Angeles, where Archbishop James McIntyre was opening a new parochial school every ninety days! Los Angeles, in fact, became ground zero for “the great exodus,” and its story is worthy of attention for its highlighting of the crisis. [pp. 213-225]

In the 1960’s the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary provided 600 teaching sisters to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Moreover, the “IHM’s” [as we called them back in the day], had embraced the event of Vatican II with varying degrees of enthusiasm, embarking on a more democratic form of government, modifying their ancient habits, and assessing their religious and working relationships with their employer, the archbishop. The IHM superior, Sister Anita Caspary, held to the position that bishops cannot self-legislate the inner working of religious orders except in matters of serious heresy or dereliction of duty, The sisters. she contended, can take care of themselves. Caspary also maintained that the sisters should be paid a just stipend and protected by contracts while in the employ of the archdiocese.

McIntyre was old school, and he was 80 years old. Caspary met with him personally and discerned that the archbishop’s main concern was the sisters no longer wearing habits in the classroom. McIntyre’s consigliere, present at the meeting, stated for the record that it was the issue of a mass resignation of the IHM’s from the diocese, a threat McIntyre would not tolerate. The negotiations lingered, with Caspary taking her case to the Los Angeles Times and eventually the national media. By June 1968, the IHM’s represented the face of reform of the “liberal wing” of women religious in the United States, but it became more difficult to maintain morale—or even membership—in the order under the burden of this stress.

I need to mention here a facet of twentieth century religious life that Fialka must be applauded for bringing to discussion here: the intervention of psychology. During the decade after the Council religious orders began to employ psychologists to conduct marathon group therapy sessions, ostensibly to help religious find common ground among themselves. Lasting from a weekend to a week, the therapy groups as a whole appear in retrospect to be more about existential angst than engagements toward unity. The IHM’s employed such psychological exercises during their Los Angeles crisis. Many other orders did as well in the 1960’s and 1970’s, including my own. I was 22, a young Franciscan, sitting for a week in a circle as middle-aged men vented years of frustration at each other. It was not psychology’s finest hour, nor mine. Fialka notes that in later years some psychologists themselves regretted their involvement and/or tactics. Truthfully, the Los Angeles crisis was nobody’s finest hour. Three hundred IHM’s left the diocese and their order. Sixty remained.

Fialka’s lengthy postmortem concurs with what most of us have observed here in the States. The “radical left” is dying off. Many religious women [and men] are living out their last days in secular nursing homes away from community life, due to financial constraints. New vocations to the longstanding orders are scarce, and many communities have consolidated and/or dissolved.

That said, the future of religious life is not bleak. Fialka interviewed a number of young to middle aged women who have joined religious communities in the last years of the twentieth century [this book was published in 2004]. As a rule, these individuals had experienced secular American life and found it unsatisfying. They had earned degrees, dated, made some money, and found themselves still hungry for a life with a deeper meaning. Spirituality and community were hungers of these women; the religious habit was not a “put off.” Several of them had spent time in orientation to communities they turned down. The consensus: “I was living a secular life surrounded by angry, isolated, lonely, overworked individuals. I didn’t need to join an order for more of that.”  

Although the story line of this work was constructed around the Mercy Sisters, the author has a special place in his heart for the “Nashville Dominicans,” as they are popularly called. [pp. 311-324] Founded in the 1800’s, this branch of the Dominican family enjoys an excellent reputation for both the quality of its religious community life and its professional excellence. Some would say that the Nashville sisters are too “structured” or “too conservative.” But they survived the turmoil of the 1960’s by following the instructions of Vatican II: to revisit the vision of the founders, in this case St. Dominic and his early band, who were at heart monks and scholars. Today Nashville Dominicans are attracting vocations, and recently founded a convent at the University of Dallas.

Again, I find it fascinating that a national newspaper journalist would find the history and status of religious orders of women attractive enough to devote several years of his life to this work. For American Catholics, it is an invitation to us to return to our roots, to revisit those who are primarily responsible for our faith formation.