I would spend a lifetime being grateful to God for the decision He helped me make, and being sorry for those who were unable to make it.
Sister Mary Yolanda, BVM, “Vocation:
From Doubt to Decision” (1959)
Three friends, Lucy, Ellen, and Fran, sat in the corner drugstore drinking coffee for the last time together. It was a poignant moment for Sister Mary Yolanda, née Lucy, a recent college graduate about to enter the convent of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This moment, her last as a typical American girl in sneakers and curls, became the centerpiece of a rumination on women’s vocation published in Today magazine in 1959. The story neatly reveals popular conceptions of Catholic laywomen and their standing in the church at the brink of the 1960s.
The bulk of the story focuses on Lucy’s spiritual journey to the moment of decision, filled as it was with doubt and uncertainty. Wasn’t she too social to be a nun? Too indecisive? Too focused on the material things in life? She felt the pull of religious life yet was conflicted enough that she wore a new fur to her meeting with a priest vocation director in a bid to get herself rejected. But once he taught her how to pray properly about her incipient vocation, it led to her final commitment. “I did not dream of the hundredfold harvest of joy I would reap,” she concluded, “with chalk on my veil in a yellow classroom—172 teaching days a year.”
Lucy made her choice against the backdrop of her two best friends, Ellen (engaged to be married) and Fran (eager for a distinguished career in journalism and the single life). It is Fran that Lucy identifies with most closely; before her decision to enter religious life, the two spun dreams together of success and glamour in the big city. It is Fran, too, who finds it hardest to let her friend go, treating her to a new hairdo so that the “holies . . . will realize that [she] knew how to dress.” Lucy speaks of her fondly but ultimately rejects Fran’s path, which represents the way of materialism. “No gain, no greed, no applause, no recognition pulled me toward religious life,” she said. “Here, then, was the heart of the true vocation: it is followed solely for love.”
If Fran represents the single career woman, with an appropriate hard edge, Ellen is equally materialistic, but with a softer, flightier, domestic glow. Her obsession with bridesmaids, florists, and “the price of petit fours” was “the joke of our crowd.” Like Lucy, Ellen faced indecision over her vocation. An earlier scene finds them ensconced in Ellen’s bedroom, Ellen wrapped in a blanket, weeping over her fear of marriage. “Oh Lucy, how can you be so sure of what you’re doing? Maybe I’m supposed to be a nun instead of Bill’s wife.” We are told that Ellen stalks about “melodramatically,” and Lucy observes that “she looks smaller than ever—almost pathetic.” Ellen’s dilemma is not resolved until her fiancé takes charge. Lucy reports with a smile that “God had used the tools at hand, namely Bill, to steer her by the circumstances of life around her to this vocation.” We are left with the vision of a deliriously happy, but decidedly passive, married laywoman.
There is another significant laywoman in this story, although we hear of her only in passing. Lucy remarks sadly that her “parents’ objections to my leaving loomed large on the horizon of obstacles.” Ever since her announcement, “there had been little that was pleasant at home—little that did not carry soreness with it.” Thus appears one of the most common tropes in what we might call “vocation crisis literature”: the obstructionist Catholic mother. We will see much more of her in the pages to come.
Sister Mary Yolanda’s story is heartfelt and sincere, and it reveals much about the challenges of accepting the call to religious life. But she shows us quite a bit more about where laywomen stood in this church of 1959. Catholic laywomen may have received a variety of calls, but they were certainly not all perceived to be on the same plane. At the top of our hierarchy is the priest vocation director, the only person capable of offering sufficient spiritual guidance to Lucy. Lucy herself comes next. Her self-understanding is the most developed, as is her spirituality, and she uses both to guide and comfort her friends (with firm assistance from the layman Bill). Fran and Ellen are safe on their own paths, but they have not overcome their materialism, which will keep them from achieving a higher spirituality. The lowest rung on the ladder is reserved for the Catholic mother, who created an unpleasant home that brought only “soreness” to her daughter on the brink of dedicating her life to God. While Lucy is clearly full of love for her friends and family, she herself tells us how she views other women’s vocations in relation to her own: “I would spend a lifetime being grateful to God for the decision He helped me make, and being sorry for those who were unable to make it.”1
I doubt Sister Mary Yolanda wanted to trivialize the life choices of her friends, or suggest her own superiority. Her intent was to verbalize her dedication to this intensely challenging and rewarding vocation, in terms meant to appeal to an American Catholic girl. Those average Catholic teens of the baby boom generation would be heavily scrutinized in these years, and charged with stemming a looming crisis in the American church, a crisis born of Catholics’ prosperity. As was widely reported in the Catholic press at the time, the growth in the Catholic population was rapidly outstripping the increase in vocations. For example, the Paulist magazine Information reported that as of 1948, 80,000 teaching sisters taught 4.5 million students in the United States. By 1958, 96,000 sisters were expected to teach 8.5 million students. That’s an 89 percent increase in students, but only a 20 percent increase in sisters. And the numbers continued to rise: in 1958 alone the Catholic population grew by 1.5 million.2
Little wonder, then, that worried Catholic leaders took to the press to get the word out; between 1958 and 1964 the Catholic media featured all manner of hand-wringing articles on the dearth of new priests, brothers, and nuns. These articles give us the opportunity to examine not only how laywomen were viewed in the period just prior to the Council, but also the limits placed on their vocations. The national conversation about the vocation crisis was heavily gendered and saved its highest criticism for married women. A variety of experts in the field of vocation looked on the Catholic girl with approval, each a potential religious vocation; the married laywoman, however, bore the brunt of Catholic frustration. Most commonly, she was viewed as an obstacle to her child’s vocation, either because of her lack of faith, her failure to promote Catholic values (and devotions) in the home, or her selfish refusal to relinquish her hold on her child. Anxious to prove their commitment, many laywomen, especially those in the national women’s organizations, vowed to do their part to forward, not hinder, the growth of vocations. It is in this atmosphere that the Theresians came into being, as will be discussed in chapter 1. But all of the laywomen in these pages were forced to contend with the persistent stereotypes revealed here that shaped laywomen’s identity and responsibilities.
The first thing to note is that these articles about the vocation crisis were usually written by priests and religious. Of forty-one articles consulted for this study, written between 1958 and 1964, twenty-three were written by priests, eight by women religious, and three each by laymen and laywomen. Perhaps this is not surprising, since priests and religious had a vested interest in increasing vocations, particularly to their own orders and dioceses. The end result, however, is that blame was placed squarely on the one area of life about which these authors knew the least: the modern Catholic home. “Since God is not wanting in the graces He gives,” one editorial concluded, “we must look for the answer in American Catholic family life.”3
Nearly half of the articles advanced the claim that Catholic parents actively obstructed vocations. Remember, though, that we rarely hear about parents’ objections firsthand, only through the hearsay of priests and religious. In the same month that Sister Mary Yolanda was writing of her vocation, Father Henry Strassner outlined four potential sermons on vocations for Emmanuel. He described the eager young boy or girl, nervously confessing a vocation to a parent. “And thus the battle to kill a vocation is begun.” These parents take a number of different tacks. You’re much too young, they claim. Or they bribe the youngster with new clothes or car privileges. The mother “sobs hysterically”; the father “manfully” describes his aspirations for his boy. “Stupid parents,” Strassner writes. “Selfish parents.” He describes two figures in the night, looking in the windows: “The devil sneers a smile of triumph. Christ’s face is wrinkled in pain.” A widely reported survey seemed to justify these accusations. In the late 1950s Serra International, a group for laymen committed to increasing vocations, asked 1,561 young priests and 2,453 young nuns how their parents responded to their vocation: 59 percent of the men, and a whopping 72 percent of the women reported “parental objections ranging from simple ridicule to physical violence.” As one author noted, “We can bring God’s dream to glorious fruition—or we can kill it over Wheaties and milk.”4
The discrepancy between the statistics on parental objections for nuns and priests can be explained by the fact that priests enjoyed a higher prestige than women religious, and also greater independence relative to sisters. Documents also reveal that many, even in the Catholic community, worried that convents were stifling and unpleasant places to live. A revealing comment in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a journal for priests, shows how priests themselves found it difficult to speak positively about convent life. The author took his fellow priests to task: “From our point of view, Father, the convent life of today may not seem in the least attractive, but we must remember that neither of us is going to live that life. . . . If 160,000 girls in America alone are able to do so well at it this very day, it certainly cannot be something unusually repulsive.” He reminded his brethren, “Don’t try to understand women! Any one of the fairer sex who is at all honest will tell you that women do not understand each other or even themselves.” With all Catholic laywomen thus summarily dismissed, it was not that far of a leap to blame them for failing to bring their daughters to a proper understanding of their calls to serve the faith.
Articles often outlined the objections most raised by parents, then systematically dismissed them. Isn’t thirteen too young for a boy to decide his fate? Not for Christ in the Temple! Shouldn’t my child see more of the world first, so she can make an informed decision? Sure, if you want to expose her to temptation and the possibility of a mixed marriage . . . or worse! As these objections were dismissed, judgments were passed. Parents of the day were accused of being overly concerned with upward mobility and material possessions. These accusations reveal deep unease over American Catholics’ prosperity at midcentury, and seem to be a manifestation of the “materialist crisis” of the 1950s. Vocation experts believed Catholic parents had chosen prosperity over spirituality, individualism over the community, selfishness over sacrifice, and were transmitting these values to their children en masse. “The real truth is that either parents lack faith,” one priest concluded sadly, “or they lack a real love for their children.”5
At first glance, these authors seem to heap equal blame on both laymen and laywomen, since the articles were usually directed at both parents, but the gendered nature of the texts indicates that mothers were being subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) blamed for the crisis. First, one of the greatest charges leveled at lay readers was that their homes were insufficiently Catholic. As the religious tone of the home was the mother’s province, it was implied that failure to promote a Catholic atmosphere was her fault. What did the authors mean by a sufficiently “Catholic atmosphere”? Parents were told that a truly Catholic home featured daily family rosary, mealtime blessings, statues and holy cards representing a variety of saints, holy water and blessed candles, crucifixes, and a ready selection of Catholic magazines. Parents should set the example by engaging in daily prayer and frequent reception of the sacraments. “A home without such things is usually a worldly home,” Fr. Donald Miller argued, “that is, one in which worldly ambitions will be fostered in the minds and hearts of children to the exclusion of any thought of spiritual ideals.”6
Catholic laywomen’s gradual shift away from personal, home-based devotions to a more institutionalized communal prayer focused on the liturgy began in the 1950s, and certainly predated Vatican II. As has been noted, this is one area in which the Catholic laity anticipated, and to some degree drove, the changes that would appear to be a startling break with tradition after the Council. But we cannot forget that even though the tide had shifted, change was still contested. These articles show that the backlash against laywomen for abandoning devotions was not limited to discussion of devotions themselves; here laywomen are blamed for undermining the church’s most essential infrastructure: the priesthood and religious life.7
A second indication that women were to blame for the lack of vocations is the frequent discussion of maternal selfishness. “They are greedy. They love themselves,” a priest explained. “They are looking for security with no view to confidence in God.” Authors often included anecdotes to illustrate their arguments, and these usually featured a mother reluctant to relinquish her child. Such love and devotion were rarely praised; rather, a mother’s reluctance indicated the failure to place God’s will above her own.8 A pair of Maryknoll vocation directors argued that this selfishness represented weakness, not intentional obstruction: “a child, whose whole juvenile life has been spent trying to please his parents, cannot be expected to be heroic in the face of his mother’s quivering lips and a few tears. I’d certainly say that most parents do not encourage their children to be heroic. They would prefer that they be tranquil and prosperous, but not heroic.” (It is telling that while the priests called out both parents for this, the article’s headline read, “Mothers Today Do Not Want Their Children to Be Heroic.”)9
The priests went on to demonstrate proper sacrifice from a proper Catholic mother: “Now I can’t imagine the Blessed Mother trying to talk Christ out of the Crucifixion. I can’t hear her saying: ‘This is all very nice, but this crucifixion is just too much.’” The men and women of Maryknoll offered more models for Catholic mothers in Bernie Becomes a Nun, a 1956 book designed to appeal to teenaged girls. Bernie includes a series of images showing a mother succumbing to tears when Bernie gives her the news of her vocation. “Mom cried a bit,” we are told. “I don’t know if it was joy or sorrow.” But in the end “she said at last, ‘Dad and I are proud that God has chosen one of ours.’”10
From Bernie Becomes a Nun (1956), a book by Maryknoll sister Maria del Rey written to recruit sisters. This illustration demonstrates how a good Catholic mother should respond to the news that her daughter had a vocation. She was to put aside her grief quickly for the good of her child and the church.
It’s ironic, then, that these authors often attempted to appeal to women’s inherent selfishness as a means of encouraging them to foster vocations. They claimed that one of the most common objections mothers made to a girl’s vocation was that their daughter would be lost to them forever once she entered religious life. But numerous articles assured mothers that they actually gained more than they lost, since “a married son or daughter must leave their family for another and their interests and responsibilities will change—but a religious—they keep their family close to their heart, daily recommending them to God.” A nun was often the only child available to come at a moment of tragedy, another insisted. And married daughters were distracted and wanted only to “dump their problems” on their mothers, whereas a religious would be a source of serene comfort for all of her days. So even as mothers were accused of selfishness, authors shamelessly appealed to their self-interest, reinforcing the trait they claimed to abhor.11
We can also conclude that many of these columns were ultimately directed at women because the solutions offered were female ones. Numerous experts praised the heroic lengths to which prayerful mothers would go to obtain vocations for their children. A priest speaker at a 1964 vocation conference told such a story of a young mother and her three children. A woman expecting her first child asked her mother, a fallen-away Catholic, to accompany her to church and wait for her while she went to confession. While in church, the woman offered up her child to God if her mother would enter the confessional. The mother went to confession, and later that year the child was stillborn. Even though the woman was informed that she could have no more children, she prayed with all her might that she would have a second child, even if it was “slightly deformed.” She “modified the prayer somewhat upon reflection, asking God if the child were born deformed that it might be cured.” Sure enough, a son was born alive, but with a clubbed foot. After more extensive prayer, the only doctor in the country who could perform the required surgery was located in her hometown. A few years later, the woman prayed again, this time for a child free of defect, whom she could dedicate to God for a vocation to the priesthood. Once again, the woman’s prayer was answered.12
Such tales of heroic prayer and sacrifice were held up as the highest examples of Catholic motherhood. One priest spoke of a family with twelve children that boasted two nuns and two priests; he attributed their success to the practice of saying the rosary together as a family every day for fifty years. Another story, mentioned more than once, tells of Mrs. John Vaughan, a mother of thirteen who prayed for an hour before the Blessed Sacrament each day of her adult life, 7,300 hours of prayer in total, “begging God” that her children might be called to religious life. Although one wonders where she could have found the time, all five of her daughters and six of her eight sons answered the call, “one later to be a cardinal.” Here was the ideal laywoman, the mother dedicated to sacrificing all for the sake of the church. Yet she was also a figure of great strength, generating miracles through her extreme piety.13
Some laywomen definitely understood that their prayer lives afforded them a measure of power, limited though it was by the prevalent belief that laywomen’s power originated chiefly in self-sacrifice and the domestic context. In a 1962 issue of the Isabellan, the Daughters of Isabella exhorted laywomen to tap their special powers for vocation promotion. The article begins with a question: “Christian mothers! The harvest is great . . . are you willing to help Me save the world?” The author then reminded laywomen of their authority: “The family is a parish whose Pastor is the Mother.” She then named different aspects of laywomen’s role—”Praying mother,” “Generous mother,” and “Suffering mother.” In these guises, laywomen “do everything toward the end of seeing their children consecrated to God.” Generous mothers “are ready to sacrifice all that their children might realize their true calling.” An accompanying illustration shows just how generous a dedicated mother could be: a kneeling woman hands her infant child to a standing, radiant Blessed Mother. What wouldn’t the perfect Catholic mother give up to help Christ save the world?14
But what these authors give in praise of laywomen, they could also take away. Examples of powerful Catholic mothers are undermined by the persistent sense that laywomen were inferior, sinful, and generally unworthy. A 1959 article claimed that “physical motherhood” was inherently inferior to “spiritual motherhood”: “It is our task to make clear to our Catholic girls the happiness of spiritual motherhood. Physical motherhood, in itself, is no complete accomplishment, as witness those who are mothers physically, but unwillingly. Without spiritual motherhood a woman is incomplete, and opportunities for spiritual motherhood are greater in a life dedicated to religion than to family life.” Physical motherhood could happen to anyone, but the more highly valued spiritual motherhood required true dedication, more likely to occur in the life of a woman religious.15
Others stressed the laity’s general unworthiness. In the “Parents’ Prayer for Vocations” (1959), parents were directed to pray as follows: “How happy would we be if You would make us the parents of a priest or religious. We know that we often offend You and are not worthy of so high a privilege. But, dear God, do not think of our many sins. Think, rather, of the many needs of Your Church.” In the last stanza, parents were to ask “the Queen of Vocations” to “put in a good word for us that we too may become the parents of a priest, a Brother, or a Sister.” Here mothers become supplicants on their knees before a queen, further emphasizing their lowliness. Mothers reluctant to allow a daughter into the convent were reminded that religious life was the “higher calling,” and she only proved her own spirituality to be “incomplete or underdeveloped” if she stood in her daughter’s way. Pay attention to your child’s call, laywomen were cautioned, “Perhaps it is His way of inviting you to be worthy of such a child.”16
Finally, these authors were not shy in naming the most practical reason for increasing vocations, the relative cost of teaching sisters versus laywomen teachers. One article quoted the archbishop of Cincinnati on the dire need for sisters. He lamented that the archdiocese saw an increase of only four religious in the elementary schools, necessitating an increase of eighty new lay teachers. “How long can we continue to operate a Catholic school system under such conditions?” he wondered.
This question echoed through every diocese in the nation in the early 1960s. Demographic changes in the 1950s put incredible pressure on bishops and pastors to expand the capacity of the Catholic schools to meet the needs of the growing Catholic population. As the number of vocations failed to keep pace with the baby boom, classrooms overflowed, forcing superintendents to hire laity to make up the difference. Since sisters took vows of poverty and lived in community, they were willing to accept incredibly low wages. Laywomen could not survive on such salaries, so hiring them strained the finances of parishes and limited growth. The situation deteriorated further through the 1960s and 1970s, as falling birth rates and white flight caused the opposite problem—empty classrooms—leaving pastors even less able to pay laywomen a living wage. The author of the article mentioned above went out of his way to acknowledge that lay teachers were “dedicated persons, worth every penny of their salaries; but there is a big difference between the salary of a nun and a lay teacher.”17
It can be quite jarring, in fact, to see how openly officials discussed the monetary side of the vocation crisis. Girls must follow the call to the sisterhoods for the sake of spiritual motherhood, yes, but the closure of the local parish school was a much more pressing problem. A remarkably candid letter from Stephen Woznicki, the bishop of Saginaw, to the regional director of the National Council of Catholic Women, Detroit Province, reveals how one member of the hierarchy viewed women’s role in the looming disaster. Woznicki confessed to losing sleep over the lack of female vocations in his diocese, which had led to the closing of schools and the hiring of lay teachers. Twice in the letter he says that bishops and priests are not at fault; they are “doing all they can . . . but nothing can be done—there are no Sisters.” The fault lay in a familiar quarter: “The bottleneck to vocations to the Sisterhood must be found in the parents and also in the lack of the spirit of sacrifice, or in plain words, selfishness among the girls. It’s the parents who must change their outlook on vocations, or Sisterhoods will become only token organizations in the Church in this country.” We then get to the point of the letter, which is to persuade the women of the NCCW to put their energies toward advancing vocations, “since without doubt, the lack of Sisters is the greatest danger to the Church in America at present.” “Why not soft pedal all kinds of far-fetched activities for the time being,” he advised, “and concentrate on this problem?”18 In one short letter, Woznicki manages to imply that it was untenable to run a school system staffed by laywomen teachers, accuse girls of pervasive selfishness, blame parents for obstruction, and dismiss the chosen work of the NCCW as “far-fetched,” all while exonerating the hierarchy of any blame.
Let’s state the obvious at this point. To use our opening story as illustration, Sister Mary Yolanda found her calling and fulfillment as a teaching sister. “Lucy” might also have served as a lay teacher in the same diocesan school system, giving equally of her time and talents, and finding equal fulfillment in her work. Yet Lucy would have been declared selfish because she was unwilling to enter an order and give her labor to the church at the wages paid to women religious. When Catholic pundits decried the lack of teaching sisters to staff the schools they were frankly stating that the hiring of laywomen was undesirable. In this, laywomen were blamed twice, once for refusing to enter the sisterhoods, and a second time for forcing expenditure to hire their services. Bishop Woznicki, like many of these authors, puts laywomen neatly in their place: they are of little value if they do not put themselves utterly at the service of the church.
One more trend in the articles points to the future rather than the past. A handful of the articles starting in the early 1960s take care to stress a changing definition of vocation, defining it as every Catholic’s call from God to a particular form of work, and not just the call to religious life. Such a reading of lay vocation in particular would shortly be reinforced by the Second Vatican Council. The most notable of these articles were written by women religious involved in catechesis, indicating a shift in pedagogical approaches to vocation. One such article, “I Decide My Destiny,” included a “vocation drama” designed for eighth graders. Students representing numerous vocations from single professional woman to married professional man, to priest and nun each have a conversation with Destiny where they state how they will answer God’s call to their particular state in life, and learn of the joys and challenges of each call. The play suggests no inherent superiority in any one vocation. Similarly, in a 1962 advice column for Catholic teens, Sister M. Dominic echoed the theme that vocations are for everyone and have equal value: “A vocation is the individual life activity which determines the way wherein each one of us shares his personal wealth with other human beings in a love-service to which all of humanity is called by the Grace of God. . . . the vocation is the channel whereby that love is given from heart to heart, from mind to mind, and from soul to soul.”19
Despite these glimpses of a new way of thinking, in the minds of many Catholics at the turn of the 1960s, laywomen did not have vocations so much as they prevented them in others. Since the ideal laywoman was a heroic sacrificing mother, anything short of total dedication smacked of selfishness. Laywomen’s genuine concerns that their children were too young, or the life too difficult, were dismissed as folly, materialism, or a lack of spiritual dedication. These were some of the most powerful stereotypes by which Catholic laywomen were judged, and by which they judged themselves as the era began. It is against this backdrop that we must set the laywoman project.