From the Middle Ages of Chaucer to the modern age of cinema, nuns have been of perennial fascination because of their unconventional look and lifestyle. Their distinctive outfits known as habits (which have largely disappeared), and their public vows of poverty, obedience and chastity (which remain), have made them stand out in real life and in popular culture.
Helping to perpetuate their image were popular movies such as “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (1945), with Ingrid Bergman as a tough-loving mother superior of an urban school, and “The Nun” (1959), with Audrey Hepburn as a dedicated medical missionary in Africa. More recent popular portrayals have ranged from nostalgia trips, such as Maripat Donovan’s solo Chicago show, “Late Night Catechism,” to convent camp, as in the Whoopi Goldberg movies “Sister Act” and “Sister Act Two,” about the adventures of a Las Vegas-style showgirl disguised as a nun.
In reality, contemporary American nuns continue to pursue their traditional works, but often in new and innovative ways. Reforms over the last 40 years have given them greater flexibility to venture beyond the confines of the convent to carry out the work of the gospel. And they do it despite a decline in their numbers.
For four years, Sister Georgia Greene, 50, has worked at SOME (So Others Might Eat), a facility about a dozen blocks from the U.S. Capitol that feeds the homeless and provides them with medical, dental and substance-abuse treatment. A member of the Sisters of Mercy from Philadelphia, she taught school for 25 years before coming to Washington on a sabbatical and becoming an advocate for the city’s homeless. This month she left for Arizona to become principal of a Catholic school in the San Carlos Apache Reservation near Phoenix.
“I chose it because it is poor, a place with very few resources, and a place where no one wanted to go,” Greene said of her decision to move. “I think that is one of the things that many women religious are looking at today. For us, it’s the gospel commitment to the poor.”
Near downtown in the nation’s capital, a veteran Mercy nun, Sister Simeon Mahoney, 78, still lives in the convent adjoining Immaculate Conception Church, a surviving landmark in a neighborhood of businesses that were torched in the riots following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. When she came to the parish as the school principal in 1969, she recalled, the words “soul sister” could still be seen scrawled on a keystone of the school that spared it from the conflagration.
After a long career of teaching children, especially those with special-educational needs in a string of East Coast cities, Mahoney still keeps a busy schedule. One day a week she meets with women in the neighborhood at the convent to pray and prepare for the Sunday liturgy. For the last three years they also have made sandwiches for Martha’s Table, an inner-city facility that feeds the homeless and unemployed.
Two other days she travels by subway to a parish near Catholic University, where she phones shutins to check on their needs. Mahoney speaks of all the opportunities she has had since joining the order in 1937 and how much she enjoyed teaching. “We are all supposed to be apostles,” she said, “but more through our actions than our words.”
Greene and Mahoney are among the nation’s 93,000 nuns, whose numbers have dropped from a peak of 182,000 in 1965, according to the U.S. Catholic Directory, an annual publication based on reports from church authorities. A recent study by the church’s retirement office shows that the average age of women religious in the U.S. is 66, and the average age of new members is 37.
At the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in Silver Spring, Md., an association of leaders of religious institutions of nuns, Sister Margaret Cafferty, the executive director and former head of parish outreach for the San Francisco archdiocese, stressed that nuns traditionally came from “two-parent families and were graduates of Catholic elementary and high schools,” a pool that “is getting smaller and smaller.”
Further, she said, “We live in a society where the thought of making a perpetual commitment to do anything–get married, any kind of life choice–is more difficult for people. There’s a lot about the choice to enter religious life that’s very countercultural.”
Still, said Sister Jeanne Knoerle, who worked on a three-year study of the future of Catholic religious communities for the Lilly Foundation in Indianapolis, “I don’t think it’s the end of the road for us.”
Rev. Philip Murnion, a priest-sociologist and director of the National Pastoral Life Center in New York, pointed out that most religious orders in the U.S. were founded or came from Europe in the 19th Century to serve the growing immigrant and earlier, mostly rural, Catholic population. (The New York center, founded at the instigation of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1983, promotes the renewal of parish life.)
New areas of service
With the U.S. Catholic population having shed its heavily immigrant background and moving into the middle class–often with educational skills acquired at Catholic schools and colleges, according to Murnion–nuns have expanded their traditional ministries beyond the familiar schools and hospitals.
Indeed, in seeking to create “a future quite different from the past,” as Knoerle put it, nuns have moved into new areas of service. For example:
– In Texas, nuns have established Partners for the Common Good, an organization that provides money from their religious orders to credit unions or local groups for loans to low-income people who find it hard to get credit elsewhere.
– In Hartford, Conn., nuns set up a center for day care and literacy classes.
– In Providence, La., religious orders are supporting two nuns who will spend a year assessing the needs of poor women and children there before initiating any programs, such as day care or job training.
– On Capitol Hill, nuns support and operate a nine-person lobbying office known as Network, which monitors federal legislation for its impact on the poor.
Also, in response to the growing shortage of priests, sisters now serve as parish administrators and hold an estimated 16 percent of the once-all-male and priestly position of diocesan chancellor.
How far they’ve come
Meanwhile, dramatic change also has taken place within their convents and in their appearance and manner since the 1950s.
“We never left the convent without a companion. We could never drive, and we were always dependent on other people to take you places,” Sister Doris Gottemoeller, 57, the president of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, said of the 1950s and early 1960s. “We didn’t go out in the evening or have lay friends. We didn’t receive phone calls. We would never have invited anyone to our convent for a meal. It was just not done.”
A leading voice in the discussions about the future of women religious, Gottemoeller oversees the work of 6,800 Mercy nuns and 1,400 lay associates at the institute, the largest body of English-speaking nuns in the world.
Her light-filled office in Silver Spring suggests how far nuns have come since the 1950s, when she joined the order in Cincinnati.
Whereas any display of personal effects or style was once shunned, her walls include a large abstract painting of blissful purple and lavender hues by another nun, titled “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.” The decor includes framed prints of Vincent de Paul, the 17th Century French saint devoted to the poor, and of Latin American laborers; a photo of her own robust-looking parents who live in Rocky River, Ohio; and another of Gottemoeller with Catholic health-care leaders assembled on the White House lawn with President Clinton after a bill signing.
Time to change
Gottemoeller coolly dismissed any lingering notions that the past was the apogee of religious life.
“I get so impatient with the references to the good old days of religious life,” she said. “People remember with such nostalgia as if they were the golden age of religious life when, in fact, the church told us we had to change.”
As far back as 1939, the newly enthroned Pope Pius XII had warned nuns that their centuries-old tradition “runs the risk of remaining inert or deficient in its application if it is not revitalized by a breath of progress and adaption.” Not until after World War II, however, did nuns respond fully to the pope’s continued exhortations to modernize and initiate what came to be called the Sister Formation movement.
“There were thousands of very hard-working, faith-filled, dedicated and generous religious,” Gottemoeller recalled. “But there were a lot of things that were not well: the lack of education, the lack of professional preparation, the outmoded customs and practices. We were in danger of looking quaint and irrelevant.”
Like most nuns who no longer wear habits, Gottemoeller dresses conservatively, usually in suits. While attending graduate school in 1970 (she has master’s degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Fordham, where she also received a doctoral degree in theology), she retired her religious habit, which had changed little since Mother Catherine McAuley founded the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland in 1831.
But being without the familiar attire has its drawbacks. Gottemoeller recalled attending a class reunion at St. Teresa’s in Cincinnati and not being recognized by her former students.
Low-key `habits’
Nowadays she is never without her distinctive pin: a small, modernistic cross the Mercy Sisters adopted in the mid-1960s. It’s a low-visibility accessory compared to the long rosary of the old days that dangled from the waist of the regulation, floor-length black habits with the starched white collar. Most nuns now wear rings or some emblem of the cross as a sign of their profession.
Last October, as one of a small number of women invited for the first time to attend the synod of Catholic bishops in Rome, she reminded the predominantly male assembly that nuns would continue to identify with women and the needs of people from a women’s perspective.
“We have brought to the care of generations of poor and needy the fruits of our own renewed feminine spirituality,” she said.
Indeed, the Mercy Sisters cast their net of social services widely. Among their familiar constellation of institutions in the Chicago area, which they have served since 1846, are St. Xavier University, Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School and Mercy Hospital and Health Center.
But there is also Su Casa, a former monastery on South Lafflin Street that provides housing and training for Central American refugees, and the House of Prayer, the former convent of St. Ethelreda Church on South Paulina Street, which has been turned into a retreat center where African-Americans go for prayer and spiritual renewal.
Elsewhere, the list of services is similarly varied: free mammograms for New York women who are uninsured or underinsured; a New Mexico center that teaches women English, sewing and parenting; a school program for children of migrant workers who work around Fremont, Ohio, in the spring and summer and Plant City, Fla., in the fall and winter; a program enabling adults who can’t attend college to take courses through a computer network linking them to instructors at New Hampshire’s Castle College.
Increasingly commonplace are projects in which religious congregations collaborate. In St. Louis, 11 congregations, including the Sisters of Mercy, sponsored the conversion of the old Sisters of Loreto convent into Pillar Place, a residence for single mothers with children.
“There will always be new needs,” said Gottemoeller. “I think we were spoiled by the large numbers of religious in the recent past, but it was sort of like the Baby Boom, a phenomenon of a few generations.
“I think the call to religious life is always going to be to a small number of people and make sense to a small number of people.”
