The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (16 page)

Common among the medieval lifestyles of these solitary sisters was that of the anchorites like Julian of Norwich. These are women whose hermitage was built adjacent to, or “anchored” to, the church. In the Church of Saint Julian of Norwich, for example, her cell is built on the south wall of the church, with an inside window from which she attended mass and received communion and an outside window opening out into the churchyard.
At this window, Julian received and spoke with visitors who came for spiritual direction. The cell, which can still be entered today, has been made into a side chapel, with her desk now a memorial altar, upon which stands an engraved stone that reads:

Here Dwelt Mother Julian
Anchoress of Norwich
c. 1342-1430
“Thou art enough to me.”

It was there that Julian experienced and wrote her one and only book,
Revelations of Divine Love.
Among the solitary sisterhood in the Middle Ages, many women, like Julian, chose to live in solitude as anchorites.

As the Church Fathers became increasingly disturbed over the growth of these free-spirited religious communities and recluses in every major European city, so, too, did their coercive efforts to put the “nun” back into sisterhood, to control once and for all those independent, uncontrollable religious women. Not knowing what else to do with the Beguines who were neither nuns nor wives, and unable to bear such free-spirited religious sisterhoods, the church in the twelfth century began to officially condemn all women who called themselves religious without submitting to monastic rule. And when that didn’t really work, they ordered with church laws all religious women back into the cloister and back under church control. The Lateran Council of 1139 prohibited any new religious rules or orders without papal approval. No religious women could live unsupervised.

Unable to bear the “anarchy” of the Beguines and recluses any longer, popes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reinforced the Lateran Council by issuing a series of what are fittingly
called papal bulls, making it Canon Law for all religious women everywhere to live in a cloister. The full force of the Catholic Church emerged as papal bull to eliminate all forms of sisterhood beyond their control. There could be no such thing as a celibate “free spirit” in the lust-filled eyes of the fathers. The only way women, like men, could ever live celibate lives is when they were locked up forever in the cloister, forever under church control, or so they continued to lead everyone to believe. In condemning the Beguines as an “abominable sect,” the Church Fathers proclaimed:

We have been told that certain women commonly called Beguines, afflicted by a kind of madness, discuss the Holy Trinity and the divine essence and express opinions on matters of faith and sacraments contrary to the catholic faith, deceiving many simple people. Since these women promise no obedience to anyone and do not renounce their property or profess an approved Rule, they are certainly not religious; although they wear a habit and are associated with such religious orders as they find congenial…. We have therefore decided and decreed with the approval of the Council that the Beguine way of life is to be permanently forbidden and altogether excluded from the Church of God.
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In the eyes of the Church Fathers, the most dangerous part of the Beguines was found in their spiritual independence—in their mysticism, in their mystical beliefs, writings, and teachings. Above all, the Beguines were known to be contemplative women of prayer, many of whom were sought out widely as visionaries, prophets, and spiritual advisers. Through their writings the
Beguine mystics quickly became well known and loved throughout Europe, and it’s those writings that the Church Fathers condemned as heresy. Any claim to divine authority other than that of the Church Fathers has always been condemned as heresy, and most mystics’ writings have been condemned as such by the church in their day. Why? Because the truths mystics reveal tend to dismiss church rules as unnecessary, even contrary to the voice of God.

After his dark night of the soul, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross concluded that love is the one and only answer to everything: loving God, loving neighbor, loving life, and loving ourselves. Having seen the divine light at the end of the dark night, “Love and do what you will” is what John of the Cross advises. The message hidden in all dark nights is found in the gospel of love. I bet the Church Fathers were none too pleased to hear that being preached to the “simple people” in the pew. God forbid the faithful from loving God and doing what they will. Julian of Norwich not only reveals in her
Showings
(meaning “revelations”) a God who is Mother, but also concludes that “Sin is no blame, but worship;” a sure-fire double barreled shockaroo for church teaching.
¹⁰
Anyone who experiences sin as worship is guaranteed to be condemned by the church in every age, and referring to God as Mother is still a papal no-no. Mystics and their free-spirited divine messages were nothing but clear heretical targets for the Inquisition, and the Beguines were no exception. They were marked for extinction in the eyes of the Church Fathers from the start.

One of the mystic martyrs of the Beguine sisterhood is Marguerite Porete, a fourteenth-century Belgian mystic best known for her controversial and condemned writings in
A Mirror for Simple Souls.
¹¹
Marguerite was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake for ideas about the “free spirit” all souls enter
in union with God, the free spirit as a holy spirit free of all rules and control, including those of the Catholic Church. In explaining how liberated the soul becomes in union with God, Marguerite writes.

The soul at the highest stage of her perfection and nearest the dark night is beyond noticing the rules of the Church. She is commanded by pure love, which is a higher mistress than what we call “charitable works.” She has surpassed so far beyond the works of virtue that she no longer knows what they are about—but yet she has assimilated them to the point where they are part of her, the Church cannot control her —
¹²

In a nutshell, that’s why the Inquisition burned to death Marguerite Porete and her sisters. The church could not control them. That’s why the Church Fathers condemned as heretics all Beguines and anchorites who would not submit to their “divine” authority. We can only imagine how liberating and inspiring those words were to the thousands of Beguines who resisted church control. And how devastated they must have been to have so many of their sisters burned at the stake for the “free-spirited” heretical beliefs they shared. These saintly women who promised obedience to no one but God barely survived the Middle Ages, and only a handful exist in Europe today. Even so, I have a feeling their day will come soon. Out of all the powerful sisterhoods that emerged in the Middle Ages, both in and out of the cloister, I see the Beguines as holding the greatest hope for the future of religious sisterhood, as well as sisterhood now.

6
Sisterhood Now

B
Y THE TIME WOMEN’S
religious orders were founded in the United States, they were already totally different from medieval nunneries. Thanks to the Holy Spirit of the Reformation and some divinely inspired women, miracles were worked in cleaning up all the medieval corruption in the sisterhood—most important of all, the admission requirements. By the mid-nineteenth century, convents were already filled with women who truly felt called by God to religious life and celibate sisterhood. The days of turning the nunnery into a death sentence for misguided girls were over. Undesirables need not apply. Few girls joined the convent because they were forced to, and even if they did, most didn’t last long. Those not truly called by God to sisterhood either couldn’t stand it and left, became sick and got sent home, or were dismissed against their will. Unwilling nuns, as well as unhealthy and scandalous behavior, were no longer acceptable in the sisterhood. At the dawn of the second millennium, nuns in this country emerged completely transformed, finally becoming, once again, the holy and apostolic women they were called to be in the beginning.

In every way it seems as though the sisterhood was reborn at the dawn of the twentieth century, very much in the contemplative spirit of their cloistered sisters and equally in the apostolic spirit of the Beguine sisterhood. Those brave and visionary women who founded the religious orders we have today were both educated and dedicated, saint and businesswoman, cloistered and
uncloistered. Nearly a third of women’s colleges in the United States were founded by nuns at that time. It was then also that the sisterhood became a powerful workforce in Catholic health care and education, not to mention the backbone of parish life. The women who gave birth to the religious sisterhood we know now were a new breed of nun in their day. Once again the Church Mothers emerge strongly as holy and apostolic, just as they did in the Jesus Movement.

For as independent and as visionary as the founding sisters of religious orders were, so, too, were they governed and controlled by the Church Fathers, local and papal. By the nineteenth century, church control of all nuns was a foregone conclusion. Rome refused to recognize or support any sisters who didn’t live in a convent with a superior, wear a habit, and abide by its canon laws. In the Catholic Church, no one is self-governing except the Church Fathers, least of all the Church Mothers (even to the point of the nineteenth-century papal prohibition forbidding hospital sisters from working in obstetric units or nurseries, believing such intimate contact would be harmful to a nun’s chastity).
¹
That’s how obsessively involved Church Fathers became in regulating every aspect of nun’s lives, and that’s how obsessed they were with sex.

Even in my day, and for the very same reason, we weren’t allowed to hold children or babies, nor could we sit next to men in public (including family). All kinds of church rules came down to govern nun’s lives, most of which reflect nothing other than the Church Fathers’ literal and sex-obsessed understanding of celibacy. They saw sex everywhere, even in hospital nurseries. For as smart and as visionary as nuns were in building the American sisterhood, that’s the kind of “divine” authority that governed much of their lives; and whatever Father said, Sister did.

The whole way women’s religious orders grew and developed in the United States is the result of church governance and guidelines, including the authority structure of superiors and subordinates, rules of order, and the establishment of motherhouses. All communities of Catholic sisters were required to establish motherhouses, a single geographical location (usually where they were founded), where all members “grow up,” so to speak, and become full-fledged nuns. For example, the Sisters of the Holy Cross have their motherhouse in Notre Dame, Indiana, on the same grounds as Saint Mary’s College, the women’s school they founded in 1844. That’s where we went for our “sister formation,” and that’s where we went for our college education. The college became the Mother of our Mind, and the motherhouse became the Mother of our Soul. Throughout a sister’s life, she is called to return to the motherhouse for spiritual renewal, continuing education, community meetings, sister reunions, and community celebrations. Those communities of visionary women who organized into religious orders were required by church law to establish motherhouses, which happened to serve well the sisterhood’s growing needs.

The motherhouse grew to function as the sister’s general headquarters, as well as its training grounds. Usually, the community’s highest-ranking members live and work in the motherhouse, as do the sisters who manage the convent’s administrative and support services, like the kitchen, laundry, and convent infirmary. I thought it was called motherhouse because that’s where the Church Mothers in the community lived and met. While religious orders are governed externally by Church Fathers, they were also governed internally by a comparable structure of Church Mothers, the sisterhood’s own divinely appointed superiors. There was one Mother Superior, or Superior General, several regional superiors also called Mother, and
then every local convent had its own superior, some of whom were called Mother, too. Once you received the title of Mother in the convent, it stayed with you forever, even in death and on your tombstone.

Sisters’ lives became governed by submissiveness to layers of “divine” authority, male and female alike. In the eyes of Church Fathers, nuns are to submit and obey without question all divinely appointed authority but their own. Even as recently as 1989, the papal commission reexamining the status of American Women Religious stressed obedience as the chief vow for nuns to follow and even flirted with the idea of having nuns return to religious habits.
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When the Church Fathers forced sisters to change in the 1960s, the way we are today is not what they envisioned. The obedience of the sisterhood remains a source of tremendous concern to the Church Fathers, because when those silent, sleeping women wake, mountains will move. Within the submissive silence that nuns (and most Catholic women) have kept for years lay the power to change the world. And there’s nothing more that the Church Fathers fear and abhor than the irreversible power of change, especially when it comes from women.