Today’s post continues a conversation from the last few days about Sister Sandra Schneiders’ writing. Sister Sandra has written and presented much on Religious Life. To each endeavor she brings herself and the variety of “coordinates” from which she speaks: a Catholic woman, an IHM Sister, an internationally recognized scholar in Scripture and in Religious Life, Professor Emerita at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley.

When addressing topic it’s not always easy (or desirable) for an author to speak only from one “coordinate”. In this context we’re talking about the specific issue of Religious Life, which is my lived experience and also the lived experience of my IHM Sister Sandra. It’s not always easy or even possible to separate oneself from the subject of inquiry.

Dr. Margaret Susan Thompson, known as “Peggy” here at A Nun’s Life, has graciously given us permission to post an essay she wrote on this topic. Click on the link below to view a PDF of her essay.

Concentric Circles of Sisterhood

Introduction to Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, Michigan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997)

by Margaret Susan Thompson, PhD

Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Maxwell School of Syracuse University

A note about the use of “feminist” in Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary … The IHM congregation has a long history of what today we would call “feminism.” The word has many different meanings. It’s rooted in the belief that all people deserve respect, equality, and justice. Many women around the world lack these things and suffer as a result. In this regard, feminists are women and men who desire a world where the fullness of life is available to all people. “Feminism” also refers to a perspective. For much of recorded history, the experience of women was articulated by men. Feminists are women who articulate their own experience as women, and this can yield a perspective on events, such as the birth of a child or the decision to enter religious life, that may be very different from the perspective of men.

There’s more information about the feminist perspective in Dr. Thompson’s introduction to Building Sisterhood.

The National Catholic Reporter has a new article posted by Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, called Discerning Ministerial Religious Life Today (September 11, 2009). In this article, Sister Sandra helps explain why it is that all nuns do not wear a habit, live in a cloister, or pray the horarium. Essentially Sister Sandra is filling a gap in people’s experience of women religious. Many people have had experience of or heard about sisters who live a monastic form of religious life and sisters who live an apostolic or ministerial form of religious life. But it’s not always easy to explain how we got the two or how the two are similar and how they are dissimilar.

This essay is also a kind of continuation of a discussion on religious life by Sister Sandra in recent publications: the essay Why they stay(ed), the personal email that NCR published, We’ve given birth to a new form of religious life, and the address she gave to the IHM Congregation, God So Loved the World … Ministerial Religious Life in 2009.

In this latest piece, Sister Sandra, a member of my own IHM community, responds to the question, What is ‘apostolic Religious Life’? which, as she notes, has been answered though often times with misinformation. The question appears in various forms, often around three main questions about lifestyle:

“Is culturally conspicuous, uniform garb (habit), fixed group dwelling from which members exit only by necessity and from which non-members are excluded (enclosure, cloister), and a daily schedule including shared meals, work, and especially the oral recitation of prescribed texts and vocal prayers, e.g., divine office, litanies, at several fixed times a day (horarium) essential to Catholic Religious Life as such?” The short answer is “no.”

The article goes on to provide a longer answer contextualized within history, scripture and theology.

This is a very important piece of writing and I recommend that you take a read, especially if you are considering religious life or know someone who is. Use it as a starting point to explore some of the issues and insights that Sister Sandra has raised. Whether or not you agree with what she has written, she has done a good job at naming the significant issues that can create confusion and misinformation.

Discerning Ministerial Religious Life Today
(National Catholic Reporter, September 11, 2009)

Please read the article and then join in the conversation below. (NB: The conversation actually got started on another post here so I moved those comment over here.)

Sister Sandra Schneiders’ essay on U.S. Women Religious and the Apostolic Visitation is a must-read essay for all Catholics, all people interested in Catholic sisters and nuns and/or in U.S. history, and definitely all those discerning religious life.

The National Catholic Reporter has just published an essay by Sister Sandra Sandra Schneiders, IHM, called Why They Stay(ed) (NCR, August 17, 2009). The essay addresses two sets of questions concerning U.S. women religious that are “roiling the waters” in and outside the church today:

1. Why are religious disturbed about the apostolic visitation?
2. What is the real motivation for this investigation?

What follows is the most lucid discussions on the topic of the Visitation that I’ve encountered. Not only does Sister Sandra address how the Apostolic Visitation is being received by many U.S. sisters and nuns as well as many priests, men religious, and lay people and why it’s disturbing, but she explains what the situation of women religious is and has been since around the Second Vatican Council.

I have to re-read the essay and will offer more thoughts. For now just want to make sure you have seen it. Please bring your questions, comments, and thoughts about this to the comment section below.

Just got word that Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, will be a panelist on the NPR “On Point” program today, Wednesday, July 8. The topic is “U.S. Catholic Nuns and the Vatican” which will probably include discussion about the Apostolic Visitation. One of the other panelists will be Mother Mary Quentin Sheridan, RSM (Religious Sister of Mercy), who currently leads the Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious, one of two women’s religious leadership groups in the United States (the other is the Leadership Council of Women Religious).

Also on the panel is Sister Mary Traupman, CDP (Sisters of Divine Providence), an attorney who helps senior citizens with legal work, and Laurie Goodstein, national religion correspondent for The New York Times. Goodstein wrote a recent article “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny” (July 1, 2009) which included a misquote of Sister Sandra when it stated she “urged fellow nuns not to participate/cooperate in the study” — Sister Sandra has requested a correction.

Check your local station for the broadcast time of “On Point” is aired. You can also listen live on the “On Point” website 10am – Noon, 7 – 9pm (ET). The program will likely be available on the website after the broadcast too.

Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM, has made public an important paper on Ministerial Religious Life. In the paper God So Loved the World … Ministerial Religious Life in 2009 Sister Sandra describes what Apostolic Religious Life is and how it is evolving (or has evolved) into what she has called Ministerial Religious Life.

Here’s my very brief outline of the paper — any inaccuracies here are mine and not Sister Sandra’s. It’s meant only to give you a sense of the topics in the paper and to encourage you to read the full paper. You really don’t want to miss it if you are at all interested in Religious Life.

Sister Sandra looks at the origins of Apostolic Religious Life (which “has had official canonical recognition since 1900 and existed for centuries before that”) and situates it both canonically (what does Canon Law say about this form of consecrated life) and ecclesiastically (how does Apostolic Religious Life as a lifeform fit within the structure of the Church).

She shows how the Apostolic Religious Life that is being lived today is still authentically religious life and at the same time “involves some very significant discontinuities with earlier understandings of enough of the constitutive dimensions of that life that it is really a new form in relation to traditional apostolic Congregations.” Two important aspects of this evolution are what Sister Sandra calls “the end of Religious Life as Total Institution” and the simultaneous “ministerial turn”. She looks at how both of these have affected our understanding and living out of the vows, community life, ministry, and public witness.

Once Sister Sandra has set the context she goes on to asks, “What has brought about this development and how do we interpret, evaluate, and appropriate it?” What follows is an excellent piece on the impact of the Second Vatican Council on Religious Life. She notes how “most Religious Congregations of women, especially in the developed world, did not read Perfectae Caritatis in isolation, as a kind of self-sufficient magna carta for renewal. They read it through the lenses of Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes.” Note: Perfectae Caritatis is the document on the renewal of Religious Life; Lumen Gentium is the document on the Church affirming the universal call to holiness of all the baptized; and Guadium et Spes is the document on the Church in the modern world.

Sister Sandra then looks at the development of a new theology of world and the development of a new spirituality of world as a result of the shifts and the ongoing urgings of the Holy Spirit. Finally, she articulates some of the implications of these developments for vowed Religious Life.

Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM, is one of my nuns and a leader in the study of religious life and of biblical spirituality. This talk was originally presented at our IHM Motherhouse for the Sisters and Associates of my community.

Read God So Loved the World … Ministerial Religious Life in 2009 and let’s get a discussion going about this. It’s an excellent paper, a good read, and definitely worth reflecting on.

Nunday is here, and I am delighted to celebrate it with a picture of my own nun, Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM. I am currently in San Francisco to give a workshop and was able to spend yesterday with Sister Sandra who ministers as Professor Emerita at the Catholic Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley here in California.

Sister Sandra and I spent the day at Muir Woods. On our way there we stopped at an overlook to see the ocean.

Sister Sandra is a Professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality and has done much work on behalf of religious life. She is a great thinker and theologian. She is also a great nun. Sister Sandra lives and breathes religious life and is an inspiration to me. We had such a good time hiking together and talking about life. I learned that she is a runner and that she’s bungee jumped and that she’s seen hippopotamuses in the wild!

I’ve got a few more pictures of our time together which you can see on my Facebook page.

I’ve been wanting to share with you a bit of my experience of the workshop for women and men religious that I went to a couple weeks ago. The workshop was called Poverty in a Land of Plenty and was led by my own IHM sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM. Sandra is an expert on the theology and history of religious life, especially its biblical roots, and is author of the trilogy Religious Life in a New Millennium (vol 1 = Finding the Treasure, vol 2 = Selling All, vol 3 = forthcoming).

A foundational insight in Sandra’s work is that religious life is not reducible to a career or religious sentiment; it’s a lifeform that is rooted in the crucified and risen Christ who is active among us today. We aren’t nuns (or monks) just because we like to help others or wear religious gear or participate in rituals. We are nuns because God has called us to orient our lives around the quest for God “in a total and exclusive way”. Sandra describes this well:

Religious … do not have exclusive access to holiness nor, necessarily, superiority in relation to it. What specifies their life, their “specialization,” is their exclusive life-commitment to religion itself. Like the person who shapes her or his life around art, or sports, or scientific research or family (even while also participating in some or all of the other spheres [of life]) and who may or may not be better than others in the chosen sphere, the Religious is a specialist in the God-quest in the sense of having structured her life life around it in a total and exclusive way. (Finding the Treasure 37)

“The Religious is a specialist in the God-quest.” Wow. I cannot finish typing that without a sense of fear and trembling. It’s no wonder this way of life is a calling from God because this is no small “specialization.”

I’ve often heard my nuns talk about the grace of office, how when a nun is elected to a position, she receives the grace to faithfully meet her responsibilities. Being called to leadership calls out skills and gifts in a new way. I think this “grace of office” thing applies to all of us when we make a life commitment such as becoming a Religious. We are each ordinary people, living the Gospel as best we can. But when we are called, it’s as if we receive a “new” grace from God to rise to the challenge of such a radical, powerful, beautiful way of life.

Celebrating Consecrated Life
“Poverty in a Land of Plenty”

… shared study, prayer and reflection with Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM …

When:

Friday, February 15 — 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. followed by a social
Saturday, February 16 — 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. lunch provided

Where:

Saint Giles Parish Hall
1025 N. Columbian Ave., Oak Park, IL

Cost:

$40.00 per person

Registration:

Click here — Celebrating Consecrated Life pdf — for the form which can be printed and mailed in with a check. Registration is due Monday, January 14.

Sister Sandra Schneiders is one of my nuns, an IHM Sister of Monroe, Michigan. She is one of the foremost scholars on religious life today. Among her recent publications are Finding the Treasure and Selling All, the first two volumes of a trilogy on Catholic Religious Life entitled “Religious Life in a New Millennium.”

See you there!

Below is a review published in US Catholic (October 2006) by one of my nuns, Margaret Brennan, IHM. Margaret is a good friend of mine, a wonderful theologian, articulate writer and speaker, and a woman of wisdom and insight. Here’s what she has to say in US Catholic about the book Double Crossed:

Double Crossed
By Kenneth Briggs (Doubleday, 2006)

To “double cross” is to deceive or betray a person one is supposedly helping. But that word doesn’t adequately identify the situation Kenneth Briggs attempts to describe in Double Crossed, which contends that “much of the demise of religious orders at the dawn of the 21st century can be traced to the hierarchy’s refusal to make good on the promise of renewal made by the Vatican 40 years before.”

There is no doubt that many of the council fathers thought that women religious would be slow to enter into the changes in the church after Vatican II. Small wonder then that Vatican officials and many bishops experienced a “double take” at the alacrity, seriousness, and independence with which U.S. women religious internalized and undertook the renewal that inevitably would bring them into conflict with church officials. Their participation in the burgeoning civil rights, feminist, and peace movements, and their endorsement of the right of self-determination and the dignity and contribution of each person met with strong opposition from ecclesiastical authorities, with some notable exceptions.

Briggs’ thesis is well-intentioned but somewhat simplistic in its final analysis. Although he alludes to the painful struggles over the meaning, extent, and theology of renewal as mandated by the council, it is important to note—which he neglects to do—that many of those struggles arose from commitments of the women religious themselves to differing ecclesiologies.

Although religious life has dramatically diminished in size since the beginning of the council, it is good to point out, as Briggs does through the astute reflection of theologian Sandra Schneiders, that “the most miraculous aspect of the dying process was that so many communities remained buoyant even as the roof was falling in upon them. . . . They appeared ready to let the mustard seed take its course.”—Margaret Brennan