The Independent News Source
NCR on Kindle - NCR classifieds - YouTube - Twitter - Facebook - Email Alerts - RSS
Printer-friendly version
PDF versionHistorian shines light on US sisters' contributions
Feb. 27, 2010
A group of nurses who trained in the Foundling's Infant Care Technician program share mementos of their time together as the agency celebrates its 140th anniversary in New York Oct. 10. the agency was started by the Sisters of Charity in 1869.
Marching along New York’s Fifth Avenue in the 2009 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, many a Sister and a Daughter of Charity heard onlookers shout: “Thank you for teaching me to read.” “Thank you for giving us our baby.” “Thank you for your compassion.”
Organizers dedicated last year’s parade to the Charity sisters in honor of their 200th anniversary and in recognition of their continuous legacy to the city.
The Sisters of Charity educated generations of New Yorkers; cared for thousands of abandoned children; founded and staffed maternity and pediatric hospitals; and sustained poor women and widows with job placements, day care and with income as wet nurses in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Such innovative outreach to the poor -- the majority of them Irish famine refugees -- became the hallmarks of the Sisters of Charity and of other religious orders of women. Their enterprises proved a working model for much of New York’s social welfare policies and assistance programs to families, women and children.
But the pioneers of these innovations are not to be found in the pages of the city’s history. Nuns’ work has remained largely invisible or been deemed inconsequential, according to Maureen Fitzgerald, a historian at William and Mary College in Virginia, who has spent more than a decade researching the work of religious women.
Maureen FitzgeraldFitzgerald is the author of the 2006 book Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920, in which she chronicles how the nuns embarked on a host of charitable efforts that resulted in an outgrowth of state-supported services and programs for the city’s disadvantaged, especially its women.
NCR talked with Fitzgerald late last year at the College of Mount St. Vincent, founded by the Sisters of Charity in Riverdale, N.Y., and interviewed her more recently by e-mail.
Though the author focuses on the work of Charity and Mercy sisters, her book also looks at the contributions of numerous other orders that rendered charitable services in the city over decades.
The relative invisibility of sisters in the histories of women and of social welfare extends well beyond the city, to much of America and “frankly, the world,” Fitzgerald said. One reason for the failure to regard the significant role nuns played is that compilers of American women’s history have examined Protestant middle-class and elite women -- after all, it was through their efforts women won the right to vote.
Preview NCR's Family Life Issue
Watch this video from NCR Editor Dennis Coday for highlights from our annual Family Life special section.
You won't find these articles on our website. Subscribe now to receive all the content from each biweekly issue.
Religious women and their work has to be seen through the prism of anti-Catholic, anti-feminist, anti-Irish and anti-poor attitudes that were fixtures of the cultural hegemony of Protestantism, which prevailed in the 19th and much of the early 20th centuries.
“Historians of women used analytical estimations of women’s power that made sense for Protestant women, but did not adequately measure sisters’ power because it was organized and articulated so differently,” Fitzgerald said. Whatever power nuns wielded rested in their communal work and wealth as single women.
Legally that meant that their property was their own, whereas through the 19th century women who wed lost property rights in marriage. The relative economic autonomy of nuns allowed them to build hospitals, children’s institutions and educational enterprises.
Protestants, Fitzgerald said, had little regard for celibacy. In truth they thought their gender system superior for women, whose liberation was to be found in the home as wives and mothers. In anti-nun and anti-Catholic literature, nuns were depicted as “deluded victims and thereby incapable of understanding their self-interest,” the author wrote in Habits of Compassion.
Reformers were fundamentally at odds with sisters in their views of the poor. Protestants saw pregnancy out of wedlock, prostitution and even poverty itself as shameful conditions, indicative of moral failings that condemned these people to suffer.
They looked upon sisters who cared for such “fallen women” and their offspring as enabling a lifestyle that reformers believed would foster a dependent class. Salvation for the poor, they argued, lay in reforming their lives through temperance and hard work.
In cases of children whose parents were dead, absent or unfit, they would be saved if placed into kind Christian homes in the country. In the mid-19th century, such cultural and religious biases were the engine driving the orphan trains across America, with their cargo of tens of thousands of poor children, Fitzgerald wrote.
In the early years, most of the women becoming nuns were themselves famine victims, arriving in New York with little formal education. Convent life gave them “extraordinary opportunities,” including chances for education and public leadership in charitable and educational work, Fitzgerald said. Classes taught by the nuns and charitable projects run by them served as incubators for the next generation of sisters.
The city’s population of nuns soared from 82 in 1848, to more than 550 by 1865, to 2,846 by 1898.
Among the most inventive achievements of the Sisters of Charity was the New York Foundling Asylum begun in a small house on East 12th Street in Greenwich Village in 1869. Sr. Irene Fitzgibbons commenced the work in response to the plight of babies and young children abandoned on the city’s streets or dropped at one of its horrific public asylums.
Within days of its opening, a woman who had left her baby in a crib on the sisters’ doorstep returned, threatening suicide if she could not stay with her infant. From the moment that Fitzgibbons realized that one could not just save babies, but must attend to the problems women faced when pregnant or trying to raise children, the care of women and children became linked, Fitzgerald said.
Three months after the Foundling opened, the nuns had taken in 120 babies, receiving as many as 12 in a day. Within four years some 1,500 infants were being cared for by outside wet nurses who needed only to present a certificate of health from a physician, and to bring the child each month to the Foundling for supplies and a health checkup.
Fitzgibbons paid each nursing mother 38 cents per day to feed her child and another baby. The money was the sum total of aid the nun received from the state per child. It gave mothers $10 per month -- enough to keep poor families fed and their rents met.
Primarily dependent on city funds, the Foundling Hospital and Asylum’s budget from the city never dipped below $250,000 annually through 1920 and at times neared $500,000.
Still sponsored by the Sisters of Charity, the Foundling is today one of New York’s largest social services agencies for children and families. Perhaps if evidence were needed of nuns still being vanished from the city’s history, it came again last October when The New York Times, reporting on the 140th anniversary of the Foundling, made no mention of the Sisters of Charity who had built it and staffed it for decades.
That the benevolence of Irish and other nuns on the sidewalks and tenements of New York could so greatly influence the state’s discourse on poverty, morality and family life, and its welfare policies, and yet hold no place in its annuls, owes not only to the fact that much social history has resulted from a study of the dominant classes.
Other factors include the nuns’ practice of humility, the fact that they strove to shield poor and “scorned” women from public glare and that they refrained from leaving a paper trail for the archbishops. While this often frustrated Fitzgerald’s efforts to uncover their history, she said, she came to appreciate their reticence. The nuns didn’t lie to bishops, she said, “but they gave the male hierarchy in its entirety the least information possible, pushing to the very line of what they could get away with. And for a long time they got away with a lot.”
[Patricia Lefevere is a longtime contributor to NCR.]
‘Tragic,’ ‘mind-boggling’ investigations
Historian Maureen Fitzgerald holds that the current Vatican visitation and investigation of U.S. women religious has ramifications for all Americans -- not just Catholics. Sisters are among the nation’s primary actors in the field of social justice, and she believes their outreach to the needy is endangered by the current Vatican inquiry.
Nuns have been most involved in developing the mechanisms for the attainment of social justice, said Fitzgerald, a historian who has spent more than a decade researching the charitable work of U.S. sisters. By curbing the power of women religious, the Vatican will also limit the ability of nuns not only to care for the poor, but to advocate on their behalf, she said.
Fitzgerald called Network -- a group of sisters who monitor the effects of public policy on the nation’s impoverished -- “an extraordinary resource for all Americans who seek social justice.” Limiting the power of these sisters to speak and to do their work “seriously undermines the capacity of Catholicism to speak to and for the poor,” she said.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, currently subject to a Vatican doctrinal investigation, provides a space for nuns from many orders to speak with other sisters across dioceses and congregations. In so doing the group of sisters wield more power than they could in today’s small and scattered convent settings, she said.
“As a women’s historian, one of the primary marks of women’s relative power we investigate is their ability to construct networks apart from men,” Fitzgerald told NCR. The leadership conference “fills that need,” she noted, but its relative autonomy from ecclesiastical oversight “is clearly seen as a threat to a top-down understanding of male power over women in the church.”
Fitzgerald called it “tragic” and “mind-boggling” that Rome imagines that curbing the autonomy of the leadership conference or what women religious say will restore convent life in America. “The investigation and its consequences will only lead more young women to conclude that entering convent life leaves them vulnerable to the arbitrary dictates of the male hierarchy in ways that threaten their capacity to live out their vocation within the institution of the church,” she said.
-- Patricia Lefevere
"Classes taught by the nuns
"Classes taught by the nuns and charitable projects run by them served as incubators for the next generation of sisters."
And the tradition continues today. While canonical novitiates may be empty or almost, the numbers of "associates" seems to be growing:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Who%27s+following+orders%3F+The+appeal+of+...
Can Rome therefore really say that American women's religious life is facing near-extinction? THESE numbers would beg to differ:
http://www.catholic-church.org/nacar/assocgrowth.htm
When giving priests' retreats
When giving priests' retreats in the late 70s and early 80s, I found many priests who were frightened by the fact that the sisters had been taking the renewal of Vatican II seriously. Most of them took theological updating to heart, and were perhaps more theologically adept than a good number of priests. The variety and number of social institutions that they started and managed testifies to their talent and competence.
I wonder if the current efforts are trying to recreate those days when sisters were (supposedly) meek and mild and subject to the authority of their pastors. It's not only the sisters who are being investigated, but the Leadership Conference itself is being accused of doctrinal deviance. God forbid that the sisters should ever hear anything besides officially approved Roman theology! What would have happened at Vatican II if all the theologians silenced in the 50s had not been made periti for the more theological astute bishops?
I now trust a lay theologian
I now trust a lay theologian before a cleric! I cannot in conscience support any Roman Catholic cleric.
Even at the arrival of the
Even at the arrival of the CARPATHIA:
"Mrs. Thomas Hughes, Mrs. August Belmont and Mgrs.
Lavelle and McMahon, of St. Patrick's Cathedral, together
with a score of black-robed Sisters of Charity, representing
the Association of Catholic Churches, were on the pier long
before the Carpathia was made fast, and worked industriously
in aiding the injured and ill."
http://www.fullbooks.com/Sinking-of-the-Titanic-and-Great-Sea3.html
Thank you, AGAIN, Sisters.
Thank you, Ms Fitzgerald, for
Thank you, Ms Fitzgerald, for this most important gift to the good sisters who have worked and endured and suffered from attitude of the men of the church who have ignored and/or written off their contributions as inconsequential. Without these women - all over the world - the church would have collapsed a long time ago.
Intersting how things change
Intersting how things change so fast. A few years ago, many were clamoring about the evil Irish nuns that ran the homes for problem girls and laundries, and now they are all saintly and lived an idyllic lifestyle.
The Vatican 'investigation' is a waste of everyone's time. The nuns are gone and will never return in large numbers--at least in our lifetimes. Nuns in the USA fulfilled their mission in education the social justice issues will always be around.
Speaking of nuns, Aundrey Hepburn in 'The Nun's Story' is on today 2/27 on TCM at 5:15 pm ;)
"They looked upon sisters who
"They looked upon sisters who cared for such 'fallen women' and their offspring as enabling a lifestyle that reformers believed would foster a dependent class."
===========
The sisters shamed the women who were pregnant out of "wedlock".
Your own article in the Dec. 16, 1994 NCR makes that clear. The sisters hustled "unwed" mothers to make decisions that would haunt them FOREVER.
With the sisters pushing them to sign, women/girls who had just given birth were separated FOREVER from theis babies. Baptismal certificates were altered. Twins were separated. Etc.
Look at some of the online message boards to read the heartbreaking stories of people separated by the adoption racket, and notice how many of them were victims of Catholic Charities, Daughters of Charity, Sisters of Charity.
Trying to brush it under the carpet now by pretending it was the fault of the Protestants is weird. Women/girls abandoned by the men/boys who impregnated them were victims of puritanical social workers, Catholic and Protestant and non-denominational.
The agencies, including Catholic Charities, still conceal records. As you pointed out in the 1994 article, they regard those who want to unseal the records as "people who need therapy".
http://findarticles.com/p/art
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_n8_v31/ai_16025843/?tag=c...
Link to your previous article on the treatment of adopted people and their "unwed" mothers.
Historian Maureen Fitzgerald
Historian Maureen Fitzgerald is very insightful and correct about her conclusions . The Vatican's move to curb the autonomy of the leadership conference or what religious women say will only make more women decine to enter religious life because Rome does make arbitrary, demeaning and diminishing,restricting dictates on women's capacity to live out their vocation within the church institutions.
The Vatican wants to control, silence, diminish women religious. Only men matter to the Vatican, and mainly only male clergy matter to the Vatican. Children really are only a source of hidden pedophile sex for too many male RC priests, bishops and their only concern is to not get caught, never get prosecuted, try not to bring "public" scandal no matter what private scandals and suffering these male priests/bishops cause. No more silence anymore about the evils done by too many Roman Catholic priests/bishops//cardinals/archbishops/popes.
i am still reading this
i am still reading this weekend's group of articles on women religious, and just want to say now that i am grateful.
story-telling is an ancient way of sharing truths, and it respects the capacity of the listener to engage fully with the experience and truths encountered by and now related by the story-teller.
i trust these stories. i have some questions. and i trust these stories. it allows the analysis to be created in the dialogue after the stories are shared and experienced.
i understand that many believe the Visitation does not allow for just that process of story-telling and dialogue. in my responses to the responses to the Visitation, i have realized that i have been downgrading the value of my lifetime of training and experience in evaluating human experience in emotional and psychological terms. for that, for any lack of compassion for the emotional impact of this event, whatever that emotional impact is for any given person, i am quite sincerely sorry.
AND i am relieved to see women religious and others simply telling the stories. and telling more stories. and telling more stories. and telling more stories.
as i read these stories, i am reminded of my two favorite statement by Audre Lorde, the black feminist poet:
“When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
AND
“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
Stories are strength. Telling stories when forms ask for answers is speaking. Telling stories when forms ask for answers is strength.
Thank you, NCR, authors, sisters, for these stories this weekend.
Jean Brookbank
How wonderfully wide and
How wonderfully wide and hope-full is our community of believers, of sisters and brothers who make up this Mystery of the Living God in our midst. How full of compassion and deep faith, how LIGHT-giving and free in the grace of the Creator!What a privilege to be called to be 'sister' to the most forgotten and defiled.
This Paschal pain (Visitation, Investigation, questionnaires and polarizations)which is transforming many of us these days on our journey to the Risen Truth is a gathering embrace;the Sacred in our midst. These pages of story-telling are a place of encounter and dialogue.
Thank you Jean, for your sincere understanding ('standing with'- I, too, have read your story sharing and I see it in between your words!)
Many are the courageous ones who have lived and loved within the Sacred, long before we even arrived. We must continue on in the tradition of the only truth that is: God is love. God is love. God is love.
Sr. Maureen Foltz, ccv
Sister: I never understood
Sister:
I never understood how asking questions could be referred to as "Paschal pain.". You make this visitation and questionnaire sound like your sisters are being crucified. Come on, certainly your so called suffering is nothing compared to those who have no food or clothing. You sisters live very well, so count your blessings. For the life of me, I never understood why sisters who belong to pontifical institutions and congregations are beyond reproach? Ok. This visitation/investigation is annoying, but you make it sound like you are living the way of the cross because the Vatican wants to know why your community is not bringing in new members and wants to know how your spend your money and how the sisters pray and live out of their "consecrated" lives.
Consider these points:
1. You aren't getting any younger.
2. Your community isn't attracting younger sisters who share your post Vatican II /Sister Schnieder's vision of religious life.
3. The direction of the church in 2010 is more traditional and the more you fight this move, the more your sisters will find themselves irrelevant for the institutional church in the 21st century. Would your founders have wanted that?
4. If your community's legacy is not continued in the future, then why get yourselves all worked up over a questionnaire and a visitation by co-women religious. I mean, it is your opportunity to tell people what you really think.
5. The more you make the pope, the Vatican the bad guys, or make this journey of dealing with this visitation appear like you are sharing Jesus' pain on the cross, the more your communtiy estranges itself from the hierarchy of the church and makes us ordinary lay folk, especially women, sound like a bunch of winers. Is that really a good thing?
Our hope is found in truth and if your community has nothing to hide and if they are living by the tenets of their constitutions and church law, then the truth will set everyone of us free.
Do not be afraid, Sister. If you think that this visitation is the way of the cross, maybe your life has been too easy.
Mara - I always like reading
Mara - I always like reading you, in part because you know you are intense (i loved your note to Chris Smith below, where you express that s/he out-"intensed" you). i remember when you were getting knocked around here by someone who insisted that you were denying a vocation and said he would pray for you in that way that (when it is directesd at me) always leaves me feeling like i have just been told to frak off----but in the "nicest" of ways. anyway, i like that you did not let yourself be bullied into silence by someone who thought they could determine through the blogosphere what God wills for you. you often seem engaged with the both/and of things and, even when we come to different conclusions, i have the sense that we could muck about in a conversation together.
not quite sure what to say today but i'll take a shot at it, even though you always seem far ahead of me when it comes to knowledge of the Church.
i didn't interpret Sr Maureen's statement about "paschal pain" the way you did. I did not hear her saying anything so melodramatic as that "answering questions is paschal pain" or that the "visitation is the way of the cross". i thought she was responding to my apology for having failed to attend compassionately to people's emotional experience as they encounter the Visitation, etc. i did not think she was making the melodramatic equation of Visitation = "way of the cross" or that the act of "asking questions" causes "Paschal pain".
here's where i might stumble, so be gentle with me, Mara... i am not trained theologically trained (yet but here's hoping...) so i tend to topple into the language of emotional life since that is my training. I understand paschal pain as the pain of transformation. the pain we experience whenever our old ways, times, selves are undergoing a process of transfiguration into new ways, times, selves - our as-yet unknown, still-unfolding, new ways, times, selves. the pain of the "dark night of the soul" when we know change is coming, when we know we will participate, when we know our commitments hold us in this relationship......... and we are afraid, we are in pain, we are grieving what we anticipate may be left behind and we wish so much that there was another way, when we bargain with God for some other options....just as Jesus pleads with God during his agony in the garden: "if it be possible, let this cup pass".
for me, it would be melodramatic and not very helpful to explicitly liken the Visitation to the Crucifixion of Christ; in my mind, such an explicit equation would be an invitation to so much emotional excess that it could seem almost impossible to enter into productive and proportional dialogue and engagement.
and yet i sincerely hope that i am not wrong in believing that the Paschal journey and the mystery of the transfiguration - of life that is stronger than death, of love that is stronger than hate and violence, of new life when faith and hope and charity are challenged - is meaningful for us, healing for us, saving for us even when our pain is "merely" human and not of truly extraordinary proportions.
i think that is what Sr Maureen was referring to. the pain of the journey from the old time to the new time, the specifics of the journey not yet fully known, the new and transfigured life and ways still to unfold.
i think my statement that i believe i have been lacking in compassion at times invited Sr Maureen to share her experience of pain and, as a sister, her model for understanding and living with pain is the pain and journey of the Paschal lamb, of Christ. When Christ makes his journey, when Christ moves through his agony in Gesthemane so that he can make his transfiguring journey, we are offered a new way, a new time, a new life.......... a vision of how we can make our own journeys, even in pain, even in fear. It does not mean that we will not be in pain or that we will not be afraid. it means that we can live with pain and fear in a new and transfiguring way.
that's my clumsy, clumsy, late-night way of understanding what Sr Maureen said. My apologies if i am totally off-base, Sr Maureen.
peace, mara.
Jean Brookbank
Sister Maureen - what a
Sister Maureen - what a lovely note and offering, especially in your last words and in your words of reminder of the "the Sacred in our midst".
lately, i have been meditating on the cover of a Schillebeeckx book on a bookshelf here in our Catholic Worker house: "Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God". I am not ready to dive into it but a day does not pass in which that title does not make its own way into my thoughts.
chasing right behind it:
all the beautiful faces and voices of the homeless, ill and poor people who have allowed me into their lives over the last twenty years,
AND Luke's words "Were not our hearts burning?",
AND Teresa of Avila's words "Christ has no feet on earth but ours" (poor paraphrasing, with apologies).
the first day i mentioned to someone else these spontaneous meditations on the Schillebeeckx title (just that gorgeous title!) was in a conversation with my vocation director about the Visitation and my frustration and disaffection with the polarization of which you speak.
her response - filled with the spirit i hear in your response and Mother Millea's in the interview with John Allen - brought Schillebeeckx words (just the words of that beautiful title!) alive for me again.
thank you for bringing them alive for me again, Sister Maureen.
i am glad to meet you here, Sister, in the peace and friendship of Christ.
jean brookbank
Thanks for a very fine
Thanks for a very fine article about a very fine book. A couple of clarifications: most Sisters who came to America were well-educated. Perhaps many of the Irish Sisters came because of poverty in their counry, but many from other countries came to help those needing help.
I strongly recommend you read "SISTERS: CATHOLIC NUNS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA," by John Fialka. It recounts beginnings of other religious communities and is very interesting reading;I found it hard to put down, almost like reading a novel.
Thank you NCR again, for this
Thank you NCR again, for this superior reporting. We need to support the LCWR and Sisters in general should this Vatican Witch Hunt turn into what some have feared. Send money, send offers to assist these remarkable women in any way they ask, and of course pray that these wonderful women be protected from the power holder men in Rome who choose to suppress free thinking rather than follow the dictates of the Second Vatican Council. Do not be surprised if this investigation takes a dark and sinister turn. I am encouraged by the world wide support these women are receiving from Catholic and non-Catholic people of good will who stand ready to shine a bright light on the nefarious motivations of people like Cardinal Rode and his ilk. We are mad as hell and we are not going to take this crap any longer. It's time to stand up and be counted.
So many of these comments
So many of these comments reflect the past contribution of women religious; it is hardly a reflection of the present. This is why we have a Vatican Visitiation: to find out why. How many young people today would be thanking the sisters for their wonderful education. If anything, when we have these sisters as our college professors they do more to undermine the church's teaching than they do to reaffirm our Apostolic faith. So many of them seem to be at war with the Pope: ie. their boycott of the Apostolic Visitation.
One would be hard pressed to find a progressive sister teaching in a school where she was just one of many. SO many of them are hell bent on becoming priests that they reject their glorious past. They prefer the so called power of the roman collar than they do serving the needs of the church. Today, unlike their past, it is all about them and their needs and desires.
They gave up on serving the needs of the church when they encountered the easy life of living a secular lifestyle at the expense of their donors.When was the last time you saw a sister struggling to pay her bills or dressed like a homeless person or better yet living in the inner cities along side the poor and needy or a mal nourished sister? They have a very comfortable lifestyle. Why? because they have "moved byeond Jesus and the Church." Their words, not mine.
Not only must we SHINE LIGHT
Not only must we SHINE LIGHT on our remarkable and courageous Catholic Sisters, but we must also SHINE BRIGHT LIGHT on the forces of darkness that are currently at work in the institutional Church in Rome. These men are about two things: POWER and CONTROL of other human beings. The nefarious acts of these men at the Vatican and their right wing shills who come here to these NCR threads to post their vile, must be stopped in every instance as they continue to try to disenfranchise women, homosexual people and progressive thinking theologians. The parallel in history to this current period is the Catholic Spanish Inquisition and these Dogs of God are being encouraged by "God's Rotweiller". The Inquisition was not that long ago. The People of God must STAND up to the restorationists in our midst and that is why it is important to shine light on their activities and expose them for all the world to see. They are cowards and in almost all instances, they are sneaky about their goals. They are double-crossers! They like to SUPPRESS free thinking and exchange of new ideas because it threatens the imperial model of being Church. This is not the model of Christ. It is the model of a corrupt and decaying system which is a monarchy. Maureen Fitzgerald's book is one way to stand up to the indecency being perpetrated on our Catholic women in the Church. I applaud NCR for this informative article. Please continue to shine light on these remarkable souls who stand up for injustice both in and outside of the institutional Church. We owe a great deal to our Catholic Sisters and books like this are needed more now than ever.
Gee, Chris, and I thought my
Gee, Chris, and I thought my posting was a little bit off the top. You make commentaries of us more conservative folk sound moderate.
Thanks.
Indeed, the contributions of
Indeed, the contributions of the sisters was nothing short of a miracle in the history of the Church in the United States. The countless schools, hospitals, and myriad other apostolates they undertook is remarkable, to say the least. The Church owes a great deal of gratitude to these selfless women, many of whom lived in deplorable conditions and under sometimes difficult and oppressive pastors of parishes and bishops of dioceses. They collectively form the unsung heroines of the Church. Many of them have already been recalled by God and live in heaven with Him in eternity, basking in eternal life and light, united with the Spouse they committed themselves to as young girls.
A good number of these wonderful women are still with us, living in retirement in the motherhouses and/or infirmaries across the country. They live in varying degrees of satisfaction about their communities. Many have embraced the "renewal" of their communities while others suffer and grieve in silence, afraid to express their views about what happened to their communities and living their religious lives the best they can, waiting for the Lord to take them.
I think the important thing to consider in this article is the contribution of women religious of the past. As for the future, the situation seems quite bleak for the LCWR member communities, who represent 95% of women religious in the United States. While Ms. Fitzgerald considers it “tragic” and “mind-boggling” that the Vatican has seen fit to launch an Apostolic Visitation, she never addresses the fact that the overwhelming majority of vocations come not from the LCWR communities, but from the remaining 5% of American women religious who belong to the CMSWR, who wholeheartedly embrace religious life as defined by the Church. Perhaps I'm wrong (and I'm sure many will want to point out that I am), but the fact that 95% of the women religious in the United States are dying is the "tragic" and "mind-boggling" revelation in this story about the contributions of women religious. If these LCWR-member communities were bursting at the seams with vocations, perhaps the Church would not see the need for the Apostolic Visitation?
Mara, there is no power to
Mara, there is no power to the roman collar, priesthood is SERVICE to God and to us, not supposed to be about power,
Thus women ordained is NOT about power. If you think male priests are power mad and all about power then that is a very sad interpretation of priesthood. No, Mara, HUMBLE Servant of God is what the women know priesthood should be.
The glorious Future of the church with women ordained too, reflects the glorious past of the nuns and sisters. The sisters should have been ordained too for the last fifty years and with governance, leadership, authority SHARED fully with women (not as silent, cloistered, ignored nuns) the horrid sex abuse of Catholic children could have been curtailed!
Please Mara STOP thinking the priesthood is a power position. It is to be a humble servant of God. Priests who do wrongly think of themselves as above the law and as 'power' figures do abuse others without conscience and without any integrity. It is a power mad male clergy that has severely harmed the church, not the sisters and nuns or any woman who knows ordination is the way of Jesus who did choose many Women Apostles.
Are you actually a male power mad priest yourself posing as a woman?
Mara, there is no power to
Mara, there is no power to the roman collar, priesthood is SERVICE to God and to us, not supposed to be about power,
Thus women ordained is NOT about power. If you think male priests are power mad and all about power then that is a very sad interpretation of priesthood. No, Mara, HUMBLE Servant of God is what the women know priesthood should be.
The glorious Future of the church with women ordained too, reflects the glorious past of the nuns and sisters. The sisters should have been ordained too for the last fifty years and with governance, leadership, authority SHARED fully with women (not as silent, cloistered, ignored nuns) the horrid sex abuse of Catholic children could have been curtailed!
Please Mara STOP thinking the priesthood is a power position. It is to be a humble servant of God. Priests who do wrongly think of themselves as above the law and as 'power' figures do abuse others without conscience and without any integrity. It is a power mad male clergy that has severely harmed the church, not the sisters and nuns or any woman who knows ordination is the way of Jesus who did choose many Women Apostles.
Are you actually a male power mad priest yourself posing as a woman?
Wow! I didn't know I was
Wow! I didn't know I was "dying". Well--actually, I know I am---but not actively dying at this time, except hopefully to myself---yet, I am active---VERY active. I am blessed at aged 77 yrs to be working among God's people--not accepting a dole as you call it, (and I do not belittle my "older" community and other "older" communities of what they justly deserve--I remember vividly "earning" LESS than $100--total-- a month in the early 1960's--how much were you paid at that time???) I am still contributing positively in the name of a Church who at times, I am ashamed to belong to---read "injustice", read "greed", read "power", read "abuse--and not only, but certainly, by peophyles!", read "controlling", read "second-class citizen", read "closed"---just to name a few words that describe a church which should be struggling to witness to a Christ who loved(s) and served the poor. I am deeply interested in serving others, and have been privileged to be able to do so. The "poor" come in many "flavors": some emotionally, some spiritually, some physically, some economically and some socially--perhaps I need to include "psychologically". There are so many needs. Wouldn't it truly be God's work for those few (and repeat commentators)who have responded so negatively to the work of "we" sisters, to have spent your energy (and yes,vindictiness!) --spend that energy and vindictiveness in something constructive. I hope you can see that as a challenge meant to be used "CON-structively", not "DE-structively" as it seems (a few) comments have been. This will be my only written response as I have some really constructive time to be shared with others. Thank you!
Sr Donna - just want to be
Sr Donna - just want to be clear that i did not mean to imply i think anyone is dying here.... jean
Post new comment