“Do not think I am sitting here to pass the time away telling you that
religious life is poetry. It is the roughest kind of prose.”
- Mother Justina Reilly, IHM (b. 1848)

Tis the season to be romantic — an awesome thing to behold! Just a few letters away however, is the word romanticize — and that can be anything BUT awesome.

Let me start with my unabashed biases:

1. I love religious life.
2. I love being a Catholic sister in community with my nuns.
3. I never lived pre-Vatican II religious life having been born after the fact.
4. I love all things “nun” — from old-school nun stories, finding a beloved copy of Bernie Becomes a Nun, bumping giddily into nuns at the airport, meeting corporate board room sisters, and more!
   …. I honestly can’t help myself!

Sister Chloe the Convent Cat reads "Bernie Becomes a Nun"

Given #3 above, I have spent a lot of time reading and asking questions and learning about religious life not only in my Sitz im Leben but religious life throughout the years, across the globe, and spanning theologies and cultures. I’m no expert, but my explorations have been enough to give me a good flavor of religious life as a whole and to see myself situated within it.

One of the challenges in not having experiencing religious life before the second Vatican Council is that we can sometimes romanticize what it was like — nuns in their flowing habits, serenity and silence, compliance both within and outside of the convent, blissful singing and playing of guitar, etc. Aspects of these things were and continue to be accurate and beautiful! Yet it gets a little dicey when we begin to imagine that that is all it was or when we focus only on the poetry of religious life and forget the rugged prose.

In addition to the sisters and nuns whom I know, there are many great resources to check out in terms of seeing what religious life was and is really like. For historical scholarship I always turn to Dr. Margaret Susan Thompson, the leading expert on the history of Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States. Here are some links for Dr. Thompson:

• Guest appearance on In Good Faith – an hour-long show including a section where Dr. Thompson discusses what “the “good old days” of religious life was actually like.
• An 18-lecture series on The History of Women Religious in the United States. The publishers of this series, Now You Know Media, have provided the first lecture for free. Listen to the Introduction and Lecture 1: Discovering Foremothers: Origins of Women’s Religious Life.
• “Concentric Circles of Sisterhood” – an essay that appears in the book Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, Michigan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997)
• Faculty and publications information at her page on Maxwell School of Syracuse University

For theological and scriptural scholarship I turn to my own nun, Sister Sandra Schneiders.

• Guest appearance on our very first episode of In Good Faith
• Another guest appearance for our A Nun’s Life fundraiser where Sister Sandra talked about saints, saints, and more saints! Father James Martin, SJ, is also featured on this podcast — he’s got some great stuff on religious life and vocations as well!
• A series of essays on religious life initially published by National Catholic Reporter and now gathered in the book Prophets in Their Own Country
• Books on religious life by Sandra Schneiders

This is only a smattering of what is out there, but very good places to begin!

So let’s talk about past and present religious life? What are “romanticizations” that you’ve encountered? What questions do you have about “the good old days” and today?

P.S. Check out the last night’s Ask Sister where we tangled with this topic as well — recording will be up by Saturday!

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Join the A Nun’s Life Community for prayer at 6 p.m. CT in the chat room today.

AS093 Ask Sister podcast published on November 24, 2011. Sponsored by aNunsLife.org ministry. This is a Special Edition on Saints, holiness, and joy. The nuns are joined by Catholic superstars Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, and Father James Martin, SJ.

Click PLAY below or right-click here to download the MP3.
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Ask Sister podcast is a live podcast where you have the opportunity to engage with us and ask questions about nuns, prayer, religious life, or pretty much anything in between!

Here are some of the topics we addressed in this Ask Sister podcast:

Sister Sandra Schneiders

• What is the Scriptural basis for the saints?
• In iconography and in various visual renderings, the saints are often pictured with some kind of symbol that speaks to something about their life — Teresa of Avila is pictured with a dove and quill, Saint Joseph with carpentry tools. Centuries from now, what symbol would you hope would be associated with you?
• What does holiness mean in general as well as in the ups and downs of our daily life?
• What was it like first getting to  know the author of the Fourth Gospel?
• Check out Sister Sandra’s new book Prophets in Their Own Country: Women Religious Bearing Witness to the Gospel in a Troubled Church

Father James Martin

• What role do saints play in our prayers?
• Is it considered a miracle that some saints do not decompose after dying?
• Isn’t holiness a pretty serious thing? What role do joy, humor, and laughter play in the spiritual life?
• What’s the deal with relics?
• What advice would you give to people who want to live a saintly life?
• Check out Father Jim’s new book Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life

Do you have a question for us? Contact us http://anunslife.org/contact/and, using your computer, record your question on voice mail. Be sure to give us your first name and city from where you are calling. We’ll play your message and respond on the Ask Sister podcast. You can also comment below. In whatever way you contact us, please know that your last name, email address, and any other private information will be kept confidential.

For many U.S. Catholic sisters and indeed for many Catholics across the U.S. and abroad, the Apostolic Visitation of American Women Religious that began in 2009 turned out to be a graced opportunity to reflect on apostolic, or ministerial, religious life. At the public helm of this reflection has been Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, professor emerita of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology/Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She has served as president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and on te board of directors of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Perhaps her greatest claim to fame, however, is that she is a person deeply grounded in prayer who has given her life to serving God, the Church, and the world. She is a person whom I am proud to call my sister.

At the time of the Apostolic Visitation, Sister Sandra stepped up, offering her reflections on religious life into the public forum. These were certainly not random thoughts and opinions but ones steeped in faith and “in decades of biblical scholarship, religious life scholarship, and lived experience in a congregation.” (Sister Maria Cimperman, OSU, writing about Sister Sandra). These reflections, originally published by National Catholic Reporter, are now collected in the book Prophets in Their Own Country: Women Religious Bearing Witness to the Gospel in a Troubled Church, published by Orbis Books.

A note about the title … We can be a bit sceptical about prophets, especially when one self-appoints oneself as a prophet! The job description for a prophet has never been public acclaim or celebration or even a pat on the back. It is perhaps one of the most arduous of callings that exists. Yet the Church recognizes that some callings are prophetic by nature. One such calling is religious life.

“Religious Life has, from its inception, been recognized not simply as a ‘work force’ in the church but as a prophetic vocation…. For a hundred years before the [Second Vatican] Council a process of institutionalization, standardization, and even domestication muted to the point of virtual silence the specifically prophetic character of the life. Religious began to rediscover that important dimension of their identity as they emerged into public life by their increasing participation in social justice issues in the 1960s and their enthusiastic espousal in the Church of the agenda of Vatican II. Intrinsic to the prophetic vocation within the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition is the tension between prophecy and institution.” (Prophets in Their Own Country, 22-23)

Though the Apostolic Visitation has faded from the news, the important articulations of who we are as women religious remain as well as the deep connection that women religious have across congregations and with the wider lay Catholic community (women religious are lay people after all). Sister Sandra’s book is a great springboard into deeper reflection on religious life as a gift to the Church and to the world.

Sister Sandra has joined us before at A Nun’s Life Ministry for our In Good Faith program, and she will join us again for a live broadcast on Tuesday next week, November 1, at 9 a.m. CST. We’ll talk with Sister Sandra about the saints as we honor All Saints Day. Join us! The event is one among many others to help kickoff the A Nun’s Life Ministry 1st Annual Fundraiser, and we encourage you to support this ministry that strives to promote religious life and to encourage people in living their calling. Please consider a one-time gift or a monthly gift to support the ministry.

What your gift does

Rock star! That’s how National Catholic Reporter described the response of Catholic sisters to Sr. Sandra after her talk last Saturday in Notre Dame, Indiana. Rock on, Sandra!

Sandra’s insights into religious life are music to the ears! Her rendition of religious life past, present and future is one of the clearest and most articulate that I’ve ever heard. The NCR article does a good job of highlighting her key points.

I especially like Sandra’s explanation of why the works of Catholic sisters have changed over time. She describes how the changes in ministry affect the way that Catholic sisters live, what they wear, how they pray, etc. She also offers a compelling vision of religious life for the future – and there will be a future! (She opened her talk with, “Reports of the demise of religious life, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are greatly exaggerated.”)

I appreciate how Sandra links the past to the present, then suggests directions for the future that are already emerging. Here’s an excerpt about that from the NCR article:

Increasingly, religious women have taken their expertise into ministries that, while still in continuity with those of the past and arising directly out of their communities’ charisms, are not ones most Catholics tend to associate with “the Sisters.” Schneiders grouped them into four “clusters”:

• Social justice ministers focused on systemic or structural change, whose “theological glue” tends to be Catholic social teaching. These include social scientists, activists, lawyers, political and community organizers, economists and sociologists, urban farmers and legislators.

• Ministers who work directly with the victims of social injustice or natural disasters, whose theological glue is deep compassion for the suffering Body of Christ. These include chaplains, social workers, counselors, literacy tutors, providers of child care or elder care, managers of low-income housing, those who work in homeless shelters or with victims of torture or sex trafficking.

• Intellectuals, scholars and artists, whose theological glue is faith seeking understanding in our time. These include composers, performers, journalists, writers, teachers and researchers in theology, philosophy and the sciences.

• Ministers who address the thirst for meaning and transcendence, with the theological glue of spiritual nourishment and growth. They work in spirituality centers, campus ministry, spiritual direction, retreats, holistic healing, or as popular writers or speakers on the lecture and workshop circuit.

I encourage you to read the article and to share your responses to it!

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Join A Nun’s Life Community and the nuns for prayer today at 6 p.m. CST (your time zone).

In her recent essay “When good (bad) things happen: Religious life in the wake of the investigation“, Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, hits a very key point about how we understand God and God’s relationship to us and the world. She also well articulates many of the positive effects of both the Apostolic Visitation and the doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Council of Women Religious (an organization representing 95% of women religious in the United States).

Read the article and let’s have a conversation here about our questions, concerns, observations and hopes. To start, here are just a few of the lines that struck me …

The “attribution of direct causality for mundane happenings to God can be a spontaneous reaction to bewilderment in the face of inexplicable evil and suffering, but it reflects bad theology and encourages worse spirituality.”

“God is not manipulating by some giant computer in the sky …”

“God is supporting us, urging us to the best responses to reality of which we are capable and even beyond what we think we are capable of, consoling us in suffering, sharing and affirming our joy, strengthening us in conflict, and enabling us to learn and grow through everything we experience no matter how tragic or overwhelming it may be. But this does not make God the direct and immediate cause of each event that happens in the universe.”

“In short, bad causes, whether natural disasters or accidents or stupidity or human evil, do not produce good results, but human beings dealing courageously and creatively with natural or moral evil can cause great good to emerge for themselves and others.”

“Many people … are beginning to realize that two Vatican investigations of U.S. women religious and their leaders … have nevertheless been the context for some very positive developments. These developments were clearly not intended by the investigations and certainly not caused by them. But God is not limited by human intentions …”

“Perhaps the most important development is the impetus … to articulate much more clearly the theology and spirituality that has developed in and energized the last 40 years of ministerial religious life in this country.”

“Are we taking time to interact with younger women who, as they were growing up, may not have known personally any sisters and perhaps thought of them as timid and domesticated “good little nuns” or “father’s little helpers” but who now are hearing and reading about educated and powerful women religious committed to a Vatican II church and a redeemed world?”

“Adversity often calls out of people conviction, strength and commitment that they were not conscious of possessing. That does not make adversity, especially gratuitous adversity caused by human beings, a blessing, even a “blessing in disguise.””

For more on Sister Sandra Schneiders, check out our recent interview with her on our monthly series In Good Faith as well as other articles we’ve written.

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Join A Nun’s Life Community for prayer today via our live podcast “Praying with the Sisters” and chat room. Just before 6 p.m. Central Time (your time zone) join us at http://aNunsLife.org/LIVE … more info on that page.

IGF001 In Good Faith with guest Sister Sandra Schneiders recorded live on September 2, 2010. Produced by aNunsLife.org ministry. Our hosts talk with Sister Sandra about vocation, discernment, the Gospel of John, biblical spirituality, and religious life.

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Guest: Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM

Sister Sandra is a leading authority on Catholic women’s religious life and a renowned author. She is professor emerita of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley. She is the author of a number of books on scripture and religious life. Among them are Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the 4^th Gospel and The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament As Sacred Scripture. She is also completing a three-volume series on religious life: the first is Finding the Treasure and the second Selling All are already published and the third book is on the way.

Topic: Exploring God’s call in everyday life.

The sisters talk with Sister Sandra about her call as a Catholic nun as well as her call as a scholar and theologian. The sisters also discuss her work with the Gospel of John and how biblical spirituality can help us in our daily quest for God.

Show Notes:

• on being a self-described “God junkie”
• putting out the last cigarette before entering the convent
• take time to discern but not too long lest you fall into “analysis paralysis”
• on whether and how we can know for sure that God is calling us
• favorite passage in the Gospel of John
• how biblical spirituality can help us in today’s quest to find and to live God’s calling in our life
• the bible as one story and many stories, like our own lives
• ecumenical and interfaith dialogue
• young women discerning religious life
• on having one’s affective needs met in religious life
• living community v. living in community
• “Staying in the Fire” Phyllis Kittel
• the Apostolic Visitation and women religious
• on being faithful to our own identity, not to give it up because it’s been called into question, but “to affirm it more strongly, to claim it more firmly, to live it more truthfully”
• on experiencing loneliness in one’s life
• does God make bad things happen to us?
• the most rewarding aspect of living as a religious

In Good Faith is a conversation exploring God’s call in everyday life hosted by A Nun’s Life Sisters Maxine and Julie. Our monthly program features guests who are nationally known for their ministry in spirituality, religious life, and discernment. We’ll look at how our guests understand their own life as a calling and discuss a variety of perspectives on living faith and call in everyday life. The program is broadcast live every first Thursday of the month from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. Central Time. Tune in at www.aNunsLife.org/LIVE.

For more information, including upcoming guests on In Good Faith, please visit the program page of In Good Faith.

Just the other day a large vase of incredibly beautiful roses arrived at the convent, to our great surprise and delight. The flowers were a gift from the Divine. Really. The card that came with them said so. It was signed, “Love, Jesus.”

The roses truly brighten our day. Every time we see them, we smile. Partly that’s because we love a good mystery. (OK, so I tried to convince the florist to tell me if Jesus had another name, like a name on a credit card, but nothing doing. I think the florist enjoyed the mystery too!).

The roses also make us smile because they remind us of conversations we’ve had with people about images of God and their meaning.  On a recent Ask Sister podcast, we were asked about God imagery in religious life. Sister Julie and I don’t espouse the “spouse of Christ” image in terms of our relationship with God. For us, other images better express our connectedness with God. Sometimes the spouse imagery can tend toward the literal. Sister Julie and I don’t really expect Jesus to bring home flowers at the end of the day. But when roses appear, it’s really wonderful!

There is no doubt in our mind that the appearance of the roses was an act of God. Sister Julie and I will continue to admire the beauty of the roses – God’s goodness expressed through creation and in human creativity, kindness, and sense of humor!

BTW, Sister Sandra Schneiders has written a lot about the topic of spousal imagery in religious life. She’ll be with us on a live podcast this Thursday. (FYI if new to A Nun’s Life podcasts, they are basically like tuning into a radio program, but instead of broadcasting it on the airwaves, we broadcast it on our website. All you have to do is visit our website and make sure the volume on your computer is up.) If you have a question for Sister Sandra, please write it in the comment box.

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Join A Nun’s Life Community for prayer today via our live podcast “Praying with the Sisters” and chat room. Just before 6 p.m. Central Time (your time zone) join us at http://aNunsLife.org/LIVE … more info on that page.

Theologian and priest Reverend Richard McBrien provides an excellent summary of the five-part essay written by by Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, on religious life. Sister Sandra’s essay was published in National Catholic Reporter from January 4-8, 2010.

• Part One: Religious Life as Prophetic Life Form, January 4, 2010
• Part Two: Call, Response and Task of Prophetic Action, January 5, 2010
• Part Three: What Jesus taught us about his prophetic ministry, January 6, 2010
• Part Four: Tasks of those who choose the prophetic life style, January 7, 2010
• Part Five: Religious life: sharing Jesus’ passion, resurrection, January 8, 2010

McBrien published his summary of the main points of the essay on his blog Essays in Theology (NCR).

• Sandra Schneiders on religious life – I, March 16, 2010
• Sandra Schneiders on religious life – II, March 22, 2010

Sisters Sandra Schneiders and Julie Vieira, IHM, standing in a redwood tree at Muir Woods

I encourage you to read both Sister Sandra’s essay and McBrien’s summary, the latter of which serves as a good guide for reading the essay.

What in the essay or summary makes you say “Yes!”? What challenges you? What surprises you?

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Join the sisters for prayer today at 6 p.m. Central Time (check your time zone). Praying with the Sisters is a live podcast where you can chat with us and others in A Nun’s Life chat room. All you need is an internet connection and a heart open to prayer.

http://aNunsLife.org/LIVE

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.

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