I know what boat I want to be in
Sr. Joan Chittister
I was just like you. Before you scroll past this, before you denounce me as a Protestant heretic who knows nothing about the Catholic Church, please listen for a few seconds.
For fifteen years of my life, I was sure I was going to be a religious sister. Of course there were a few years of doubt, but at 14 I was dead certain. I emailed religious communities, even visited a few. I fully intended to enter a religious community after I finished high school. It consumed every part of myself.
I had ideas about religious life. Habited nuns were the only “real” religious sisters. The others were of lesser value. Protestants were “heretics,” I accepted the “intrinsically disordered” teaching on “homosexual persons,” life issues were the main issues, etc. Religious communities had to talk about them and if they didn’t, they had no value to the Church. I was depressed because of the rigid rules I placed upon myself, and because I thought I was damned to the eternal fires of hell.
Then I had a revelation. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t worked for the Church understands what really goes on in one. There I was at 17, a pastoral assistant Suddenly I was faced with my own humanity. I realized that the world was a lot more complicated that the black and white rules I had drawn at 12 for myself. LIfe was a lot more complicated. People had real problems, they had real struggles. The catechism didn’t solve them and I could not just spout theology at them, they needed real pastoral care and love and understanding.
So I no longer had the conservative view of Catholicism that I had before; I grew to respect and love and cherish the LCWR congregations. My parents had me go to university—to broaden my view so that when I did enter the convent eventually, I could more effectively minister to those I was called to serve. I was going to work with those who felt they were unloveable, because I had once felt that way.
As some of you know, I got sick and was no longer able to enter religious life. I later left the Church because of personal reasons and joined the Episcopal Church, but I still work with a LCWR congregation.
I want you all to live your lives. Don’t spend your lives waiting to enter the seminary or the convent. Don’t spend them in perpetual holy hours or in Church all the time. Go out and find God in the world and serve Him in others. Love him in others by finding him in the world. Don’t spend your time calling others “heretics” on the internet or in real life. I’ve been there—instead spend your time loving God in the Other by serving your Neighbor.
If you are truly called to the religious life or the priesthood, your time to be a nun or religious or priest will come. But that time is not now. Go to college, go to high school, live the life you are called to live now, not waiting for the possible future.
I love the sisters whose congregations belong to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. I’ve lived in three convents run by three different religious communities who are part of the LCWR (almost four) and spend a good amount of time with one particular congregation in the States.
There is a lot to be said about these women. They do everything in their dioceses. For the community I volunteer with and have dinner with a lot, they are social workers, nurses, teachers….they run hospitals, schools, several diocesan offices, parishes, non-profits, they work to end capital punishment, the deportation of migrant workers, they work to end the cycle of poverty. They are intensely prayerful, compassionate women who have spent every day of their lives serving Jesus. They never get any credit from American bishops, especially not now. They got investigated instead by Cardinal Law (what the hell was the vatican thinking???)
They don’t wear habits, and haven’t since the 1970s. The way they are treated because of this is simply absurd. I’ve seen seminarians and priests dismiss them simply because they don’t “look like nuns.” Because I’m at the Motherhouse for all the feasts, some of the younger priests and even lay people mistook me for a sister, too (I dress like Nikki Grant meets Dutch lady theologians), and their attitude towards me and the sisters was absurd. And this wasn’t because of something the sisters did—it was because they weren’t ~traditional~ and didn’t wear a habit.
These are sisters who have literally gone across the world, started hospitals and schools where no one else wanted to go, took shit from priests and bishops for years, help the people no one else wants to, and love the people everyone wants to forget about. .One of the nuns I lived with had the ministry of working with Dignity USA before they were shut down by the vatican—and you know what? She still works with the LGBT community because love of Christ and welcoming neighbor and all that stuff in the New Testament
I understand that there is this move in the Catholic Church towards ~orthodoxy~ or ~traditionalism~. I was all for that at one point in my life, a very sad part of my life when I was a very depressed young teenager. That doesn’t give any priest, any lay person, the ability to insult them, to hate them, to hope their orders “die out.”
Because you know what? These women are the strongest women I know. They aren’t afraid of bishops, priests, or even the pope. They taught me about strength, about really serving Jesus (not the hierarchy), and about walking with one another.
tl;dr: if you are going to judge the LCWR on what they wear, hope their orders “die out,” and treat their sisters like shit while praising habited nuns as “better” you need look at your life, look at your choices, and you seriously need jesus.
| Sr I: | I got another speeding ticket. |
| Me: | wait, ANOTHER? |
| Sr I: | this makes three in only two months...but in two different states! |
| Me: | ........... |
| Sr I: | I have to tell Sr. Pat that we have to skip Christmas. I've spent our money on the speeding tickets. |
At a time when the sick died uncared for, and the uneducated died illiterate and the poor or addicted died destitute and minorities died invisible to the rest of society, women religious chose to challenge any and every system for the sake of the coming of the reign of God.
And in the end, they succeeded. But don’t be fooled: They did not succeed because their numbers were large or their influence was great or their social support was either broad-based or obvious. They succeeded because they refused to allow the ideas of the past to become the cement of the future. They succeeded because of the courage of women who went where they were told not to go.
"St Gertrude of Nivelles
my heroine forever
[please ignore the BLATANT grammatical error in the first paragraph of this piece. Time get yourself together]
The five women were from small town America but chose to live in the midst of one of West Africa’s most brutal civil wars. Each belonged to the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, a St. Louis-based Catholic order; each had volunteered to live in Liberia, not only as missionaries, but as desperately needed relief workers.
