Last of Their Kind: Elderly Nuns No Longer Turned Away from Voting

4 Comments

1. 

   Ghostdreams

   October 30, 2008 | 9:35 pm

   I am so glad you let us know how this turned out Doc!
   I remember reading the original article you posted a few months ago and wishing there were a solution (and knowing there must be).
   I was very upset for the ladies involved. I kept thinking about the older nuns who taught when I was in school. These older ladies would work all day and into the evening at a time in life when most people had been retired!
   In addition to that, they were really good at what they did! They taught and they did it well (generally speaking they were, kind, loving and very compassionate).
   I remember the Mother Superior at the first Catholic school I went to taking me into her office for the day to just, give me a break.
   I was eleven. My parents were in the middle of a divorce and due to the dramatic nature of the divorce and custody fight, I was an emotional wreck.
   This one particular day another student had decided to ridicule, taunt me, etc. and wouldn't let go of it. He and his kept friends following me saying horrid things to me (kid stuff yet hurtful as hell to me at the time…).
   Ordinarily I would have probably blackened one of their eyes but at this time in my life, I was just a little too raw and thus, I just fell apart and just couldn't get it back together.
   I looked around desperately for a place to hide from them and then saw the girl's restroom (someplace I could go where they couldn't go.. HA!).
   I sat in the bathroom for….well….ever (about 45 minutes to an hour had gone by – at 11 years old an hour can seem like eternity) trying to get myself to stop crying.
   First Sister Theresa, my home room teacher, came in to see if I was ok. I started to shrug it off and say, “I'm fine .. ” but In the middle of my shrug I lost it and was sobbing again. So I ran back into the stall and locked the door.
   Sr. Theresa assured me that all would be well and she'd be back in a few minutes ..
   After a few minutes one of the lay teachers came in and tried to talk to me…
   Same thing happened. Shrug, run into stall, lock the door.
   Not too much longer and “knock, knock….”Chris? Chris? This is Sister Elaine sweety. Could you please come out here just for a minute?”
   I didn't feel like I could say no to the Mother Superior soooo….
   Out I went and she was standing there with her arms open as if to offer me a hug….”Come with me sweetheart. We're going to go to my office, just to talk and have cookies….Do you like cookies?”
   And she embraced me, gave me a huge warm hug and with one arm around my shoulder, walked with me slowly to her office.
   I felt better already..
   She spent the rest of the day with me (or the majority of it).
   We sat in this cozy little office and talked about …everything!
   She listened, she cared, and I remember thinking, “This feels like family….This feels like someone loves me….like a 'mom' loves me. I wonder if that's the real meaning behind the title, “Mother Superior”….
   I had to transfer to a public school at the beginning of the next year but by that time…Sister Elaine was gone (along with her Order – Sisters of the Immaculate Heart).
   They were either the first or one of the first Orders to stop wearing those black and white habits (although the majority of the time they had small headpiece on that declared their vocation) and the Vatican decided to excommunicate the Order over the issue.
   I was very angry and indignant about the whole thing.
   A year or two later, my older sister helped me to get a hold of Sr. Elaine ….
   We got together and got some lunch and then went to the Sunday evening Mass.
   Indeed, she had been excommunicated so she couldn't take communion but she insisted I go….
   My memories of that day are very sad. I was looking at a broken woman and with me being so young, I didn't know how to deal with the issue …
   I remember wanting to hug her a lot….
   I remember having extreme anger at the church for hurting this woman so badly.
   She, on the other hand, held no bad feelings for the church at all. Not local, not Vatican, not even the Pope the signed her excommunication papers.
   She was hoping that the church would take them back….
   It was one of the first times I'd even seen what real forgiveness is.

   When you first posted about what had happened to the nuns up in Idaho I did the math and realized that Sr. Elaine would be about 80 (or older) herself now and I thought, “If she was there in Idaho and they treated her like that ….Oh man! GrOwL!!”

   I'm so very happy that people pulled together and made this come out in a good way!
   These women belong to a sisterhood that brought a true beauty and love into my childhood and their love did some very amazing things for me and many of the other children I went to school with.
   They were and are truly wonderful people!

   Thanks again for the post Doc!
   Ghost

   PS Sorry if I babbled a bit too much but I think about her often and since your first post about this issue I've been thinking a lot about all of the nuns who helped me out back then … thought I'd uh….”share.” blush heeh

2. 

   archangel

   October 30, 2008 | 10:47 pm

   Dear GhostDreams, Your sister-nun Sr.Elaine sounds like a great soul. Go look her up again. Our nuns often live to very old age with great alacrity. Show her what you wrote here. It will mean a lot to her. As it did to me. The part about her noticing your suffering as a child made me tear up reading. The suffering of so many little ones is never noted by adults who are often, understandably, 'too busy.' But your Sr. was about her Father's business/busyness, in just the way that matters to a child so much. I am glad you wrote.

   dr.e

3. 

   Ghostdreams

   October 31, 2008 | 9:36 pm

   Thanks for the suggestion Doc!
   I'm trying to find her but thus far have only found an article from Time Magazine (Feb 1970 – which I'll copy and paste below in case you're interested) verifying that the Order was in a bad situation with the Church over the habit issue.
   (The name of the article is “Immaculate Heart Rebels – WHAT a title! LOL)
   It looks like the Order split into two groups with one group choosing to stay within the church and the other group leaving.
   I'll continue to search. Sooner or later I'm bound to find something me thinks.
   This was a great idea! Thank you again for mentioning it!
   Ghost

   From Time Life Mag (1970)

   The Immaculate Heart Rebels
   Monday, Feb. 16, 1970
   It was a conflict of principles deeply held between a majority of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Roman Catholic hierarchy. For nearly three years, the nuns had demanded freedom from the traditional rules of the cloister; the Vatican and the archdiocese of Los Angeles insisted on fealty to religious discipline. Last week the dispute ended with the largest exodus from Roman Catholic religious life in recent memory.
   About 315 of the 380 nuns decided to follow their president, Sister Anita Caspary, in asking for dispensation from church vows. The request will be granted. Rather than disband, they plan to form an independent secular organization devoted to “the service of man in the spirit of the Gospel.”
   Educated Women.
   Tentatively called Immaculate Heart Community, the group will be open to Roman Catholic couples as well as single people. “Many people are attracted by something bigger than themselves,” explains Sister Anita. “That is the role the new lay community will be able to provide.” It will continue to pursue the main tasks of the Immaculate Heart order—teaching, public health service and social work. A loosely organized communal framework to accommodate what Sister Anita calls “differing life-styles and living arrangements” will replace the traditional discipline. After receiving the dispensations, the women will be bound by vows of poverty, obedience and chastity only if they choose to make such pledges to the community. Says Sister Ruth Anne Murray, a high school religion teacher: “Our decision is a most viable way of rallying our potential as educated American women in the service of the church.”
   New members, whom the group hopes to attract from the laity, will work on a voluntary basis or for nominal compensation. The former nuns plan to continue to operate a hospital near Los Angeles and a conference center in Santa Barbara. In addition, they hope to retain a high school and Immaculate Heart College on the 13-acre site in Los Angeles. A settlement is still to be worked out, however. Some members, following Sister Eileen MacDonald, are remaining in the order and may attempt to hold some of the property now under the control of Sister Anita's group.
   Ironically, the decision to leave the church came shortly after the nuns' archantagonist, conservative James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre, 83, was replaced by the more liberal Timothy J. Manning, 60, as Archbishop of Los Angeles (TIME, Feb. 2). Many, even in Rome, felt that a more flexible prelate than Mclntyre could have avoided the break. When the nuns started to wear secular clothing in the fall of 1967, McIntyre barred them from teaching in archdiocesan schools. The nuns refused to take up the habit again or to modify other changes—including the elimination of compulsory daily prayer.
   Time to Experiment.
   As the split attracted partisans on both sides, the Vatican in 1968 appointed a four-member commission to investigate. It decided on a compromise, permitting the order to split into two groups. The innovators, led by Sister Anita, were given “a reasonable time to experiment and to come to a definitive decision concerning their rule of life, to be submitted to the Holy See.” The other group, consisting of some 50 traditionalist nuns, was allowed to continue teaching in parochial schools. Simultaneously, however, the Vatican's Sacred Congregation of Religious ruled on the case with Pope Paul's blessing. That decision amounted to an ultimatum to the nuns that they could continue as a religious order only if they returned to wearing a “recognizable” religious costume and restored much of the traditional discipline of religious community life.
   Instead, Sister Anita last December set Feb. 1, 1970, as the deadline for the Vatican to relent. Father Edward Heston, secretary of the Congregation of Religious in Rome, explained the Vatican's refusal to give in: “When it became obvious that these ladies no longer wanted to operate within the framework of the religious community, there was nothing else to do but permit them to get out.”
   Sister Anita expects others pressing for reforms may follow the lead of the Immaculate Heart nuns in experimenting with secular communities. “The religious life,” she says, “may not survive.” Father Heston saw one good thing in the rebels' departure: the church, he feels, has demonstrated the limits of its toleration of innovation

   Url http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,917…

4. 

   archangel

   November 5, 2008 | 8:28 pm

   dear Ghostdreams
   that is an amazing article/ time past. Thanks for posting it. It was sad to read it, and I am glad it is no longer 1970. Although I know remnants of that mindset still exist…. nonetheless, the gates are broken off their hinges in terms of the Internet providing spiritual direction across national boundaries, nuns and priests counseling and blessing over electronic waves regardless of what they are wearing or Vatican perseverating, by some, on the minutae.

   The fall in religious vocations can likely be traced in part to some in the hierarchy not being able to recognize and engender many forms of holy intention and action, unless it's their narrow one. I would hate to think Christ would have prescribed a 'uniform' for the Apostles, I mean, think of trying to herd Italiian fishermen into a codified grooming… and that they spend each hour of the day just so. There is a pointed absence of C ordering obedience re petty matters, and far more emphasis on blessing, understanding, generosity, protection, thinking toward the Ineffible. Just saying…

   dr.e