AS064 Ask Sister podcast recorded live on March 18, 2011. Sponsored by aNunsLife.org ministry. Guest: Sister Julianna Vagnozzi, CSSF. Topics include: confession and reconciliation, chapel veils, Lent, a real nun on the set of Sister Act II, and more!

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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:

• New Protestant religious order seeks advice on habits.
• What’s up with chapel veils and mantillas in church — too old-school, sign of respect, gender stereotyping?
• Confession and reconcilation
• Do habits “cause” vocations?
• Lenten solidarity with people who are poor
• A real sister gets into the act in the movie Sister Act II

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Father James Martin, SJ, has written a fine response to Paul Rudnick’s article “Fun with Nuns” in The New Yorker (July 20, 2009 issue). Rudnick’s article covers his efforts to get a screenplay (that would eventually end up as “Sister Act”) produced. But his attitude toward and descriptions of nuns is more than “slightly repellent” as Father Martin writes, it’s disparaging and insulting. It illustrates in bold relief negative stereotypes of Catholic nuns and sisters.

Pondering a possible screenplay using nuns, Rudnick muses that they can be “dictatorial, sexually repressed and scary.”  A grumpy elderly nun at a convent gift store looks like a “bat” or a “long fossilized chimp.”  “’I hate this!’ the chimp yipped,” he writes about the elderly woman who has taken vows of “silence, poverty and chastity” (fact checkers–you missed a vow: obedience) and has led what even she describes a “hard life.”  Rudnick admits that the prioress of Regina Laudis, which he visits to do a full two days’ research, is “kind and helpful,” but most of the article depicts the nuns—scratch that, all nuns–as at best cartoonish, at worst absurd.  “’Nuns,’ I declared,” writes Rudnick about his efforts to cajole studio execs into considering them attractive, “I’d do ‘em!”  (Later the same execs wonder which nuns in the upcoming movie are “f—able.”)

The nuns referred to are the sisters of the Regina Laudis monastery (read the A Nun’s Life post about Mother Delores Hart From Hollywood to Benedictine Monastery).

Do read Paul Rudnick’s piece Fun with Nuns (the link is to an abstract of the article — need to register for full article) and James Martin’s response The New Yorker Has Its “Fun with Nuns”.

Sister Act movies have long been a source of entertainment but also a problem when it comes to communicating who Catholic sisters and nuns really are. Unfortunately many people’s image of nuns is based solely on Whoopi Goldberg as lounge singer Deloris Van Cartier hiding out as Sister Mary Clarence in a San Francisco convent (do we even know the religious community?). Each of the nuns portrayed in the movie is naturally a caricature but still the images are compelling enough that they tend to seep into our imagination and to feed false stereotypes: stern mother superior, quiet mousy little sister, bubbly bumbling nun.

And honestly, people, do nuns really need a Vegas lounge singer to enlighten them to the needs that are literally right outside their convent door?

But enough about what I may think, I’m much more interested in what you think because I’m still not sure what to do with these movies. In some way they can lend themselves to positive perceptions of nun life but in other way to negative or false perceptions.

Sister Act movies, Whoopi, and images of nuns: discuss.