New Habits

Since the Sisters of the Congregation are not strictly cloistered and must go out into the world to devote themselves to the practice of charity and works of mercy, it is necessary to receive as subjects only those who possess the qualities and virtues required to edify the neighbor and safeguard the subjects themselves from all danger.

The following qualifications are required:

Applicants must be of legitimate birth. Their parents must have led an exemplary life and must not have incurred any defamatory judicial sentences. They must have good health….They must be free from debt. They must, above all, be straightforward, and must possess a sound and practical judgment. Those who are notably lacking in judgment must be excluded.

—“Formation of Subjects,”

Rules and Directory of the Sisters of St. Joseph

When I joined the Congregation of St. Joseph (CSJ), in 1957, Catholic girls right out of high school were entering religious life in droves. Between 1950 and 1965 the number of religious women in the United States rose from 147,000 to 179,974. We had eighteen members in our band—a tiny number compared to our cousin CSJs in the Northeast (same founder, different branches), who routinely had a hundred or so young women a year entering the community. After the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962–65) the number of aspirants to religious life would plummet, and nuns would leave the convent in large numbers. Some would say the number of nuns dwindled because we modernized too much and so lost our distinctive, otherworldly form of life that set us apart from ordinary Catholics.

For now, I’ll just say that the huge mind shift of Vatican II about Christian vocation and holiness—that every baptized Christian is called to holiness, not just nuns and priests—in confluence with women coming into our own intellectually, socially, and politically, had more than anything else to do with the diminished number of nuns. Until Vatican II, Catholic women flocked to religious life in large part because it was held up as such an esteemed option for Catholic women who chose not to marry. In contrast, the lifestyle of single women was considered a shadowy half-life existence at best: unable to get a husband and not generous or holy enough to become a nun. But, no doubt, with fear of eternal damnation as a driving undercurrent in so many Catholic lives, the single biggest advantage to becoming a nun was that you were practically assured eternal salvation. (Whoever heard of nuns going to hell, except in jokes? Or even getting a traffic ticket?)

An aside: The traffic-ticket nun waiver extends into current time. A few years ago I’m driving on Interstate 10 from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and occupying myself in an intellectually satisfying way by reading a book I have propped up against the steering wheel. I glance down at it for a few sentences, then look up at traffic, and so on—up and down—and everything is going smoothly until I become conscious of a blue flickering light on top of a car riding alongside me on the left, and, lo and behold, I’m looking into the faces of two rosy-cheeked, no-doubt-rookie policemen, now speaking over the loudspeaker and ordering me to pull over. They pull over behind me and I reach into the glove compartment for insurance papers, which I do speedily in situations like this, because the insurance forthrightly names Sisters of St. Joseph as the car owners, and I hope the “nun card” might effect a merciful outcome.

Meanwhile, the rookie cops have zapped my license plate and a digital voice informs them that they have a nun on their hands. I now take my sweet time with the insurance papers because I can hear them in deep theological discussion about their situation, and one is saying, “Rick, for God’s sake, she’s a nun. We can’t give her a ticket; we’ll go straight to hell!” No use rushing such a discussion, so, papers in hand, I slowly walk to the back of the car, and the younger of the two (he looks like he’s twelve years old) tells me in a worried, very concerned tone that they had been cruising alongside me for ten minutes and that I’d go fifty miles an hour, then seventy, sometimes eighty, then drop to forty, and that I must never, ever read while driving, that it is a very, very, very dangerous thing to do, not just for me but for others. They are so totally sincere and concerned that I promise on the spot never, ever to read while driving ever again. I mean it. And I haven’t done it since. True story. No ticket.

The CSJ congregation I joined got its start in France in 1650, one of the first innovative religious communities to allow women to leave the enclosure of the cloister to serve the people. Until then, joining a “nunnery” meant sealing yourself off from the world to devote yourself to a life of prayer and penance. In seventeenth-century France, where women were severely constrained and options were limited, for some women, at least, joining this new form of Sisterhood with its freedom to work with people in need must have seemed like a heady adventure. Married women had a hard lot. Many died during childbirth, and usually the very best a woman could hope for in a husband was amitié, friendship, and even that was asking a lot. Confessional manuals of the time reveal that fathers had “absolute” rights over children and wives, and disobedience to the paterfamilias was treated as a mortal sin.

A woman’s average age when she married was twenty-four, and most women gave birth to a child about every two years. Childbirth was precarious, and because so many women died giving birth (one in five, or even worse in bad times), a live birth and an alive mother were an occasion for celebration. But getting born was but the first step in a hard, brutal life in which starvation and malnutrition, plagues, blights, epidemics, and wars cut lives short. As always, peasants—90 percent of the French population—fared the worst. Misery and desperation among peasants led to a rash of rebellions close to the time of my congregation’s founding in 1650.

Enter this scene six women in Le Puy-en-Velay, whose names I give you because so often in literature, including the Bible, women remain nameless. Our founding women were Françoise Eyraud, the leader; Marguerite Burdier, whose spirit so breathed life into the group that she was known as its “soul”; Claudia Chastel, who alone could sign her name; and three Annas—Anna Vey, Anna Brun, and Anna Chraleyer. A Jesuit priest, Jean Pierre Medaille, who met the women in the course of his preaching in their towns and villages, organized them into a spiritual association devoted to piety and service “of the dear neighbor” and gave them a simple “rule” (a set of instructions) by which they governed themselves.

This was a vote of supreme confidence at a time when women were thought to be governed by “cold and wet humors,” and thus incapable of fully exercising logical thought. Nor did the theology of the day about women as “Daughters of Eve” help to bolster confidence in women’s gifts. Churchmen preached untiringly about women as temptresses, considered to be more “physical and bestial” than human. No surprise then that many churchmen believed that women were more prone to heresy than men, and so should be separated physically from men in church and not trusted to express opinions on spiritual or theological subjects.

In the spiritual manuals of the day, topping the list of womanly virtues were purity, obedience, and utter submission and resignation. Every spiritual writer of the day stressed that to attain union with God demanded nothing less than “annihilation of self.” Such language, and the attitudes that accompanied it, seeded itself throughout my congregation’s constitution, formulary of prayers, and “maxims of perfection,” and were still in evidence when I joined the community. But there were some timeless spiritual gems in there, too, and I can still say some of them by heart:

“Never leap ahead of grace by imprudent eagerness, but quietly await its movements, and when it comes to you, go along with it with gentleness…and courage.” I ought to have this maxim tattooed on my forehead, so badly do I need its counsel. I’m a “leaper,” all right. (I claim to be “spontaneous.”) But it’s true, at the least provocation I’m prone to jump into action headlong, and only in retrospect check back to see if, perhaps, the motivating spark was divinely inspired, or, once again, simply that trigger-happy ego of mine ready to spring. Thank God for my wise community.

“Always speak favorably of others and value highly the good in them, excusing in the best way you can, the deficiencies they have.” (A tough one, especially dealing with the Clicks of the world.)

“Never think of tomorrow unless it has some necessary link with today, but entrust it entirely to providence.” (Ahhh…the wellspring of Buddhist wisdom: staying attentive to the present moment.)

If a single motto were written above the portals of the novitiate, it would be “Enter here to die to self to be reborn in Christ.” Of course, it might have helped to have something of a developed “self” to die to. Most of us were just kids right out of high school—idealistic, inexperienced, malleable, and trusting. So, no surprise that our descent into the novitiate experience, with its practices of humility, bolstered by the novice mistress’s public reprimands, and extremely limited social contacts and relationships with everybody else in the world, might be—to put it mildly—detrimental to healthy personal development.

Choosing to perform a practice of humility is one thing. But Mother taking you apart limb from limb in front of everyone is shattering. Not just for me, but for others, some of whom I can tell have zero confidence to begin with.

When Mother singles you out for correction, you follow the novice protocol: Drop to your knees, lower your veil, and receive her correction in silence. You never, ever, no matter the circumstances, defend yourself. Corrections can be about anything: being even a few seconds late for class or community prayers, not keeping modesty of the eyes, speaking out of turn, calling attention to yourself (a big one; you’re never supposed to stand out)—anything. I’m moving into my second year of novice training and studying attentively the Holy Rule (which includes a chapter on the novice mistress), so I really should have been able to keep a tighter lid on these wayward lips of mine.

Here’s what our Holy Rule says about the role of the novice mistress:

The novices will often remind themselves that the novitiate is a time of trial….Neither will they be astonished at the trials to which the superiors submit them in order to train them in self-conquest and strengthen their virtue. With this in mind the superiors may impose upon them some salutary humiliations…and teach them to give up their own way of seeing and doing things so that the novices may recast themselves in the mold of the rules, the customs, and the methods of the Institute.

Having already weathered postulancy and the first year of novitiate, I’m figuring I’m ready to take whatever Mother dishes out. If Jesus suffered humiliation, why shouldn’t I? He was spit upon and whipped and taunted as he hung from the cross. I mean, what’s a little humiliation when you know Mother’s just following the Holy Rule? She’s not being mean; she’s simply performing her disciplinary role.

But I never should have cracked that stupid joke.

It happens while we are helping out with a super load of laundry, and we are plastering a ton of guimpes—the white breastplate-like cloths—onto metal sheets. Novices are called in to help with laundry when there’s too much work for Sister Bernard to handle. (I like Sister Bernard. She’s French, has button-brown eyes and large, overhanging cheeks, and a big, warm heart. When we play around instead of working, she says, “Grand parleur, petit faiseur.” [“Much talk, little work”], but the twinkle is there and we tease her back, “Whatcha mean, Sister? Whatcha mean, parleur-ing and faiseur-ing?”)

But there’s no teasing Mother.

Today, because of the huge load of linens, not only guimpes, but bandeaus (forehead coverings) as well, we work all morning and into the afternoon. Mother gave us benedicamus for part of the day, so we could talk as we worked, and that’s probably what does me in—me, the roaring extrovert who loves to chatter and tease (learned with some proficiency at the Prejean dinner table). So, here we are with zillions of linens to do, not hard work, really, kind of fun, rolling up sleeves and sticking hands into the sticky, blue-white, gelatinous starchy goo, slathering it onto white linen cloths, then plastering the cloths onto a metal sheet. The way you starch linens (who knows? you might need this in another life) is that after you rub the glob of starch all over the linen, you start in the middle and press the heels of your hands firmly over the cloth, careful to work the air bubbles out at the sides. And what joy in the work of art after the linen has dried in the sun and you peel it off and it’s smooth as glass. It takes a while to get the hang of it, though. Imagine the look on the faces of the professed Sisters—veteran nuns, who have professed vows—upon seeing the craters and pockmarks in their guimpes, which the poor things have to wear for a week. They know all too well who got shanghaied into laundry duty.

Back to laundry duty and my loose lips…By early afternoon, when Mother dips in to see the progress of the work, Linen Mountain still sits mighty high in the laundry basket.

“How’s it going, Sisters?” Mother asks.

And in I go: “Oh, fine, Mother. Ten thousand down, only thirty thousand to go.”

All it takes is one look from Mother, and lickety-split I am on my knees for ten minutes.

Until then—except for the bed posture thing—her corrections hadn’t perforated my self-confidence. But Mother keeps at me, and I begin to feel demeaned.

“A generous young Sister would have spoken about progress made, not complain. You’re always seeking to call attention to yourself. A humble, generous little Sister would make light of the task. A prayerful little Sister would never…”

At first, inside myself, I’m holding it together, thinking, Mother is just doing her job to keep me humble just like the Holy Rule says. But she is going after my motives, my character. It’s bad, and I feel myself crumbling inside. Maybe Mother can see that I don’t have what it takes to be a good nun. In conferences, Mother has made it very clear that she has the power with the higher-ups to block our profession of vows if she doesn’t think we are mature enough. The ultimate threat: You have been tested and found wanting. I picture Mama and Daddy’s shock and disappointment. Their daughter too immature to profess vows with her group—like a kid in school, held back a grade—all because of one teeny wisecrack, obviously a joke.

Afterward I run upstairs to the dorm room and cry my eyes out. Sister Kathleen Bahlinger, a childhood friend, one year ahead of me, sees me crying and says, in her German matter-of-fact way, “You’ll learn.”

Until now, I have had a pretty secure self to hold on to. In junior high I was always elected president of my class, and in high school I was student-body president, accustomed to initiating projects, writing essays that won contests, holding forth at a podium in front of the student body and faculty. And I received top honors at graduation. But here all the rules are different. The whole idea is to die to self. But it’s harder than I thought.

My family bolstered a vigorous sense of self in all of us. I was loved, delighted in, rocked as a baby in Mama’s arms far longer than the law allowed. Mama told me that when she’d rock me and sing to me, I’d settle in under her arm, and when she felt my body go slack, she’d slowly rise to put me in my bed, when from under her arm would come the peremptory command: “Rock!”

Now in my life—this. Which seems to stand in some contrast to the ideas of Father Jean Pierre Medaille, who, despite his use of the annihilation-of-self argot of seventeenth-century spirituality, presupposed the first members of the new congregation to be substantive women. With a minimum of supervision he drew up a basic rule of life that set the women’s energies free to go into the streets, discern a course of action, and serve the people. He trusted that a deep spiritual life in community would give them the inner compass they needed. In the seventeenth century the first Sisters, dressed as widows (which freed them to travel the streets unaccompanied by a male companion), ministered to the hungry and homeless, the imprisoned and orphaned, the diseased and illiterate. Soon small communities of “Daughters of Joseph” began to appear across the southeastern countryside of France. The communities of two or three began the day with prayer and gathered in the evening around the hearth for a meal, prayer, and conversation about how the work of the day had gone.

The effort of each Sister to remain attuned to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, combined with collective discernment in addressing the needs of society, has been a hallmark of our community, as it is of other apostolic (in contrast to contemplative) religious orders. When, in the 1960s, Vatican II invited religious orders of women to recover once again the spirit of our founders so we might better adapt our service to the needs of the people, American nuns responded with amazing—and, to some, alarming—alacrity.

The truth is that by the 1940s religious orders of nuns had pretty much lost the spirit of our founders—the “charism of the community,” as we called it. The uniform Code of Canon Law (spiritual regulations that govern the Catholic Church), imposed on the Holy Rules of nuns, had pretty well blotted out distinguishing characteristics of particular congregations. As a result, all rules looked alike, and you couldn’t tell a Franciscan from a St. Joseph or a Benedictine from a Notre Dame or an Ursuline. Naturally, in the authoritarian mode of the day, every revised rule gave top value to the virtues of obedience and submission. Members were to be obedient to superiors, and superiors, in turn, were to be unquestioningly obedient to bishops and other members of the hierarchy.

Those were the days when we were called the “good nuns” and “obedient daughters of Mother Church.” Or, in playfulness, because of our black-and-white dress: “penguins.” We dressed in black all the way down: veil, wide-sleeved blouse, petticoat, long serge skirt, stockings, and old-lady-lace-up shoes. The only white was the band around our faces, covering forehead, ears, and neck, and a wide, starched guimpe, which covered our breasts. The guimpe proved something of a challenge for our buxom women because it refused to lie flat and tended to stick out like a shelf. Not exactly helpful on the modesty end of things. (There were no guimpe-stick-out worries for me. Mine hung down flat as a Kansas prairie.)

Another aside: When we nuns head out onto the streets of New Orleans, the black garb can scare the willies out of little kids, especially little black kids, who have never come within a hundred yards of a nun. And in New Orleans, with its colorful citizenry, laid-back lifestyle, and penchant for storytelling, there in the mix of Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street nun anecdotes abound.

Woman One: “What’s that coming?”

Woman Two: “Catholic nuns.”

Woman One: “Why they dressed all in black like that?”

Woman Two: “They married to Jesus; he died on the cross.”

Woman One: “Well, they sure in deep mournin’ about it.”

It would take Vatican II for us nuns to dress once again as ordinary people. As luck would have it for the poor, shocked Catholic faithful, unaccustomed to seeing even a lock of our hair, much less legs, arms, and—Lord have mercy—bosoms, the time of our “coming out” happened to coincide with the time when miniskirts were in vogue. So, not only were the “good nuns” going wild, we were going hog wild by wearing skirts that stopped at the knees, or, with some of the young ones, above the knees—or even pantsuits. Shock waves reverberated through clergy and laity alike, but the wisdom among us was that if we nuns were going to join our contemporaries, we sure as heck weren’t going to look frumpy. (That remains a matter of opinion; some folks claim they can easily pick out a nun in a crowd.) Even now, years later, I still encounter folks who grump about the day of doom for the Catholic Church when we nuns “defrocked” ourselves.

Back in eighteenth-century France, the new form of “unenclosed” religious life quickly attracted new members from upper-class “elites” and peasants alike, both eager to be part of this fresh opportunity for interiority, spiritual friendship, education, and work in the public square. Within the first five years, in the Le Puy area alone, twenty CSJ communities sprang up, and before the French Revolution in 1793 chopped the sapling congregation down to the ground, a hundred or more additional sister communities had been established around France.

At first, the Revolution targeted only cloistered nuns, not active communities who tended the poor and sick and were seen as fulfilling a social purpose. But as the Revolution unraveled into paranoia during the Reign of Terror, it became increasingly difficult for the Daughters of Joseph to avoid taking the “patriotic oath,” which aimed to cut off Catholics from Rome. Under threat of death, Catholics were forbidden to associate with priests who refused to take the oath, or, worse, anyone who attempted to hide such priests. During the Terror many Sisters in the fledgling community were imprisoned, and five were guillotined.

Having myself accompanied six human beings to execution, I feel irresistibly drawn to the women’s suffering and fear—especially thirty-one-year-old Sister Toussaint Dumoulin, who at the time of her arrest protested vehemently that she had been away from the convent in Dauphine when a priest had come there to hide. The young woman’s pleas fell on impervious ears. In June 1794, she and the priest and two other Sisters—Sainte-Croix Vincent and Madeleine Senovert—were tried and sentenced to death.

Their agonized wait was extended by a month—first, because the small town had no guillotine and one had to be transported across the country, and then because officials had to recruit someone from another town who knew how to operate it. And all the while as she waited in her dungeon cell, Sister Toussaint’s loud cries of innocence reverberated throughout the prison. On July 8, 1794, she and the others were led to the guillotine erected in the town square where, at the sight of the first severed head, she fainted. As her limp body was carried across the square, some of the townspeople cried for mercy, but to no avail. The executioners carried out the bloody task and reached for the next victim. In another town, two other Sisters were executed during the Terror: Sister St. Julien Garnier and Sister Alexis Aubert. Many others awaiting execution were spared at the last minute by the death, on July 28, 1794, of Maximilien Robespierre, zealous leader of the Terror.

Sister St. John Fontbonne, a fiery, determined woman who was among those who escaped the guillotine by a hair’s breadth, set about reassembling the scattered Daughters of Joseph in Lyon. We CSJs credit her with refounding the congregation, and you’ll find her serene, strong face in every motherhouse.

Back at work among the people, it did not take the women long to find their way to girls and women desperately in need of education and work skills. Starvation and malnutrition were rampant, and having enough to eat became such a fixation that there arose a mentally frenzied state known as “hunger disease.” The quest for food began right after birth in small babies. What chance of survival did children have, especially girl children and young, single women? In Le Puy, many women found work making lace, though those with strong bodies did manual work as well, some of them working side by side with men, digging ditches.

The education of women soon became a top priority for the newly founded congregation. A large boarding school for young women arose in Lyon close to the convent, a model multiplied throughout the world and across the United States and Canada when, in the 1830s, CSJs made their way to North America, and to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and, eventually, blessedly, to me.