Why I Love Being a “Sister,” “Nun,” Or Whatever…

The week of March 10 was the celebration of Catholic Sisters Week throughout the world. The acknowledgement somehow slipped past me until I started getting lovely notes from former students and other people I had met during my various ministries. I was both humbled and energized. But it got me to reflecting on my life and those of my friends in the ministry. I then made a list of what I most cherish. I’ll share that with you now, but you must remember what I share is what every other sister I know would share because we all went through the same training and experiences no matter what community we belonged to.

My list is in three sections: 1. Training 2. Ministry and Freedom 3. Spirituality and Justice.

Training: Get a Sister started on sharing memories of her training and you will either laugh out loud or stare in bewilderment. In my training years, pre-Vatican II (meaning before the seismic changes brought on by the Vatican Council), our rule was rigid and demanding. I recently glanced at the archival copy of our pre-Vatican Constitutions, and it gives you an idea of the scope of discipline. My favorite was, “Do not be absent from recreation but bring work.” (So, no differentiation between work and play?) “Recreation is to be subdued. Laughing out loud is not of a lady.” “You may not peddle anything.” (Like selling raffle tickets in the classroom or donations for ‘pagan babies’?) This went out the window pretty quickly. Wait, it gets better. “Make no noise while washing dishes. We are not a hotel.”  “Do not rearrange the silverware at the table.” And “Move furniture quietly and close doors quietly.”  “(Superiors) should report anyone reading novels and magazines at all hours.” But the best was, “Absolutely no fancy underwear!” Early on, we wore the infamous union suits!

But the practice of personal and communal prayer fed our souls and tended to our spirits. Spiritual reading included histories of our founders, classics in spirituality, scripture.  Classes with our saintly directress inspired us. There wasn’t a person in my class who didn’t desire to be a martyr for the faith. We were all aspiring missionaries who were going to save the world!! The novitiate was a cross between the Gulag and heaven. Some days were rife with hard work, questionable victuals (we learned to eat what creative cooks could dress up from the donations of the ingredients.) Other days were uplifting in prayer and journaling, private hours when we listened for God’s voice in our hearts.

Ministry and Freedom: Sisters became the best educated population in the nation. We were all sent to school for nursing or education and in most cases, we had no choice of the career. Whatever was most needed at the time, we were asked to fill. Founders of communities knew we would not be accepted easily into secular institutions because in the earlier days women in general were not accepted. So, we started our own colleges and accepted Sisters from other communities. We worked during the day in our ministries and attended school in the evenings and weekends. But here’s the point: We worked in Diocesan Catholic schools which meant we provided the religious education of countless children for 100 years, plus.

Religious communities of Sisters are autonomous from clerical governance. This is church law. However, some religious superiors and Bishops have historically engaged in monumental disagreements resulting in the excommunication of the community from the church. Most of the squabbles were over property—the Sisters owned property the Bishop wanted. These can be funny to read in archival material, but they were sadly experienced at the time and even more sad when they occur in today’s enlightened society. Sisters are freer in challenging church structures where they see infringement on the neglected or underserved that Jesus said we must embrace. By our autonomy, we are not locked in the confines of acquiescence or deference to clerical power. We pray to live this wisely.

Justice: From this core freedom, Sisters can make the preferential option for the poor as advocated in liberation theology. Some ask why Sisters are so liberal and this might stem from the core documents of the Latin American Bishops during their 1968 groundbreaking conference in Medellin, Colombia, which developed a theology called liberation theology. Religious communities, particularly of women, took to this new paradigm of ministerial spirituality. They found this thinking firmly rooted in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures of the Bible, and in each of their community’s founding charisms inspired by the founder’s spirituality. The recent documents on Religious Life from Vatican II at the time reinforced a direction for renewal with this grounding.

My community has supported all of us as we traveled the world to serve others when our classroom walls expanded after Vatican II. A call to justice is the natural growth from my community’s charism and words of St. Vincent de Paul, along with St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s teaching. I cannot choose to be other than an advocate for the oppressed. All Sisters carry this spiritual DNA. 

Reflection

This is why I love being a nun. Perhaps you will both understand and see the workings of our ‘charity charism’ if you reflect this week on St. Vincent’s words to his first religious community: “Have for your cell a hired room; for chapel, the parish church; for your cloister, the streets of the city; for obedience, the obligation to go nowhere but the houses of the sick; for your grille, the fear of God, and for a veil, holy modesty.”