The New York Times has an article, Nuns, a Dying Breed, on the disappearance of Catholic sister from the Catholic Health system
The history of religious women has had its ups and downs, There was an order if widows in the early church, but it gave Paul headaches, and he advised the younger widows to marry and raise families, rather than gadding about and spreading gossip. The Middle Ages saw formal and informal groups of women such as the Beguines, but the Council of Trent, in its attempt to bring order to a chaotic church, ordered that all religious women be subject to cloister, thereby ending any active charitable work.
The Daughters of Charity were the first to escape from this prohibition; they scrupulously avoided anything that would make them look like a nuns to avoid being forces into a cloister. . The nineteenth century saw an extraordinary increase in the sisters of the active congregations 0 8n 1898, 13,000 members, but in 1878, 135,000 members. They founded numerous schools and hospitals and social welfare services, educating, to the displeasure the anticlericals, the majority of the girls in France.
Historians look for human motives, and there were natural motives for a woman to join a congregation. At a time when women were confined to the household, a congregation gave a women opportunity for work in education and health care that no other lay women had. A sister lived with like-minded and supportive women, respected by all, and had security in illness and old age. Lay people were also told that religious life was superior to married life. There were no doubt supernatural motives, but the natural motives contributed to the vast increase in sisters, There were 1.5 sisters per priest in France at the height of the congregations, and 3 sisters per priest in the United Sates. The vast majority of the staff of the Church was female.
But this is all gone with the wind. Prosperity and the opening of careers to women meant that women could choose their work and support themselves outside of a congregation. The emphasis in theology changed and the dignity and importance of the lay state of life was now recognized. Ill advised changes also undermined many congregations.
The congregations are dying, and many are making plans to shut down. The one in the NYT article has not had a new member in 25 years, and has decided to accept no more.
The congregations that ran hospitals have done well financially. A few years ago the Wall Street Journal tracked the money the Daughters of Charity had gotten for their hospitals and found a billion of so of it in the Grand Caymans. This will pay for the retirement of the sisters in those congregations. I am not aware that the prosperous congregations have shared any of this wealth with the aging sisters of the teaching congregations, who had few or no assets when the schools they had staffed shut down.
I do not expect any rebirth of these congregations on a grand scale in the West; there will always be a few women who are drawn to the contemplative life and A few small vital congregations will survive. Women in the third world are still drawn to the congregations for the same reasons Western women were in the nineteenth century, but eventually those societies too will modernize.
Catholic health care can be run economically with employees, but Catholic educations is vanishing. No alternative method of educating the laity in the rudiments of the faith has been put in place, and we are returning to the middle ages in the level of religious literacy.. In the book on Catalonia I previously mentioned, the zealous clergy of the Counter Reformation were astonished to find the level of ignorance of basic doctrine among the population – and I am afraid we are returning to that. What that curious word Trinity means, what or who the Holy Spirit is, who wrote the four gospels, will all be mysteries to most Catholics – who are confronting biblically literate Protestants. Sounds familiar? — 16th C redux.
First, the nuns abandoned their habits, then doctrine.
Sad end!
Leon, I’ve discovered this fundamental illiteracy in a series of discussions I had with a conservative Catholic who runs a blog. If you like, I can send you the discussions to your private e-mail address. All I ask is that no names be revealed.
I also think the phenomenon you describe is as bad with conservative Catholics as it is with liberal ones. Neither group places much stock in Scripture as a legitimate source of revelation. The conservatives hold to papal and traditionalist teaching as if it were divinely inspired (“creeping infallibility”?), which explains Absp. Chaput’s support for JPII’s arbitrary, revisionist teaching conerning capital punishment.
In one argument with a conservative concerning the role of apostolic successors as self-sacrificing servants as opposed to monarchs, he tried to refute my citations from Scripture w/citations from Pius IX, Leo XIII and a couple of other popes.
I think this explains the popularity of people like Michael Voris and Fr. Corapi. They fill the void caused by the abyssmal catechetics and homiletics of the post-Conciliar church.
The ironic thing is that when many a Catholic woman became a nun, the birthrate among Catholics was high. Yet from the 1960s onwards, when the number of nuns has dropped, the Catholic birthrate has dropped as well! We may conclude that both are a result of a drop in faith among Catholics in the United States, Western Europe, and Canada.
If you are planning to dig into this subject, you should consider that the teaching and nursing orders were products of the Industrial Age. Mass education and mass health care arose in the 19th century, initiated by both the Church and a variety of secular groups and governments.
And all of them used the same novel method of staffing, mobilizing large numbers of newly educated women. Who mostly lived lives of something like poverty, chastity and obedience, whether they were in the Church or not. Nurses and teachers used to have to leave their work if they got married. And when my sister went to nursing school in the 60’s, she was required to be unmarried and live in a dorm.
And this model broke down, for both religious and secular realms, at the same time. Teacher’s unions, for instance, happened right at the time of Vatican II. As did pushes for higher wages by nurses. And that was the time that we saw the first clear signs that we were entering what’s come to be called the Information Age. A time of intoxicating possibilities that probably would have doomed the orders even with the Council…
Oops. I meant “even without the Council…”
Interesting to note that 40 years ago this year Bishop Charlie Buswell shut down all the Catholic schools in the Diocese of Pueblo, CO. I guess that was his way of “implementing” the decrees of the Council.
The post-Conciliar Church has failed in almost every aspect to “renew” the Church. From sexual abuse to religious education, the V-II Church has been an absolute failure. The phony traditionalists in the Church have not done much to correct any of this.
Biblical literarcy even among conservative Catholics? | English Catholic
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In the fourth century St. Jerome said “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”. At least as early as Leo XIII popes have encouraged the reading of Sacred Scripture. Something got garbled or lost on the way from the Vatican to the people.
nuns have meant so much to me. st.cecelia’s school is gone/st.joseph’s boys camp is gone/all the catholic grammar schools in inner-city new york are gone.i shudder to think that there is no replacement for these institutions,staffed by nuns,where i learned about my catholic faith.