Onward Christian Soldiers
By Elizabeth McNamer
Sunday, November 24, 1996
"Sisters in Arms" is undoubtedly the definitive work on nuns. The book (644 pages, with another 100 pages of footnotes and bibliography) covers 2,000 years of Catholic women's search for holiness in the celibate life. Jo Ann Kay McNamara parades the seekers from Mary Magdalen to Sister Mary Theresa Kane, and she does it with a scholar's eye for detail, a Catholic's nostalgia, and a raconteur's penchant for entertainment.
Soldiers indeed these women were and are. Disciplined by chastity, they fight on a dense battlefield. They hone themselves on syneisactism (males and females living in intimate circumstances while observing a hands-off stance), refresh themselves in the balm of castimony (sacred marriage to Christ), joust with hedonism. Their shibboleth is prayer, their battle-dress poverty and obedience.
Sisters in arms march along the rocky roads of the Roman Empire, where holiness for women is equated with "manliness"; through medieval quagmires, where they sink in the mud of male domination (though litigious 12th-century abbesses stopped at nothing to protect their rights and property); through the dangerous byroad of the French Revolution, where they were defenseless against "wild worldly men" and hundreds lost their heads to the guillotine; to the broader highways of the new world, where femininity became a value in its own right and the feminine apostolate reached full vigor. It has not been a march for the faint-hearted.
Century by century McNamara presents them: women from Galilee (who supported the "little band of vagabonds"), deaconesses, hermits, sanctimonials, canonesses, conversae, beguines, anchorites, abbesses, witches and mystics. Stealthily, we enter the sacred and secluded halls of Quedlinberg, Bingen, Amesbury, the Paraclete and glimpse (only just) the occupants. But those glimpses are titillating and make us want to keep on reading.
For all that, there is an over-concentration on the anomalies. Tales of nuns who dressed as monks to spend their lives in monasteries, produced children fathered by kings, served in public bordellos, and leaned so close to priests in confession that "two heads were in one hood" take up a good portion of the pages. One wonders at times if this is a book about sexual aberrations. The descriptions of double monasteries, the colorful conduct of the nuns of Watton, and the incorrigible nuns of Lincoln make for provocative stuff. The ecstasies experienced by the ladies of Carmel and the flagellations practiced by the sisters of Toss (who "regularly took turns at beating one another") have definite erotic overtones. The narration of the tales of nuns married to monks (but not living together) and the part about the scamps who had "little drinking parties" in their rooms will cause a few raised eyebrows.
But we read little of the daily lives of nuns (except where they complain of the restrictions of the Benedictine rule). Nor do we learn much about their education. Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila are given good coverage, but too little is said of Heloise's heroic attempts to teach Greek and Hebrew to her charges (at a time when neither language was taught in France). And Julian of Norwich, that most wise of women, is ignored altogether.
McNamara is at her most serious when discussing the modern age and looking to the future. She writes clearly, sympathetically and succinctly of the challenges and changes in nuns' lives, particularly in this century. She is optimistic that these soldiers of Christ will continue, albeit in a different uniform and with new rules in a battlefield where they are more than ever needed.
Carole Garibaldi Rogers's Poverty, Chastity and Change considers nuns as an endangered species. They were 173,351 strong in the United States in 1961. By 1992 the number had dwindled to 99,337.
The book is the result of 94 oral interviews conducted with women who had entered the "religious" life of the Roman Catholic Church prior to Vatican Council II. Rogers seeks to disabuse the public of the image of the nun as depicted in the entertainment industry. She also hopes to correct the notion held by many Catholics of women "wearing veils and floor length dresses" who "never disagree with the Pope." And succeed she does.
Her interviews were taped between 1991 and 1995, some 30 years after the summoning of the Council and, coincidentally, the start of the Women's Liberation Movement, which would radically change the lifestyles of women. Nuns then dressed in "habits" (usually replicas of the clothes worn by the founder of the order), lived in communities that had regularly scheduled times for prayer, and spent most of their working lives teaching or nursing. The habits have long been discarded (replaced by blue jeans and T-shirts, if one is to judge by the descriptions given at the beginning of each interview); many nuns now live in their own apartments or with one or two companions, and have schedules that leave little time for prayer. Their careers span the gamut from social workers, marriage counselors, parish ministers, playwrights, artists and musicians, to college professors, lawyers and doctors.
The nuns' stories are touching, open, sometimes quite outrageous and with rare exceptions told with a sense of loyalty to and love for Mother Church. The subject of women's ordination is mentioned by a few but does not loom large (Sister Theresa Kane feels she was given too high a profile when she addressed the Pope on the issue in 1979). Most express optimism for the future and over and over again say that they would make the same decision to embrace the ideals of poverty, chastity and obedience that drew them to the convent in the first place. All see their new lives as much more fulfilling and the relaxation of the rules as humane.
This is a book about confidence and hope. The average age of nuns may be 65, but somewhere, somehow, one feels that others will come and make the darkness grow brighter again. As Tennyson reminds us, "The old order changeth yielding place to new, and God fulfills himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
Elizabeth McNamer is a regular contributor to Catholic publications. She teaches at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Mont.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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