Changing Habits: Women's Religious Orders in Canada.

Changing Habits

Women's Religious Orders in Canada

EDITED BY Elizabeth M. Smyth

PUBLISHED BY Novalis Publishing Inc., 2007

ISBN: 2-89507-903-3, Softcover, pp.309, $32.95 CND 

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This collection of thirteen essays, all written by women academics, with doctorates in such fields as history, sociology, theology, and material culture, is intended to explore "current research on historical and contemporary Roman Catholic women religious in Canada." The term "women religious" is used to include both "nuns" who take solemn vows and live as contemplatives and "sisters" who take simple vows and work in the world. The congregations studied include the Loretto Sisters, the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Ursulines of the Chatham Union, the Sisters of Charity of Halifax, the Grey Nuns, the Sisters of Providence (Montreal), the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul of Kingston, the Sisters of Charity of the Immaculate Conception, the Missionary Oblate Sisters of the Sacred Heart and Mary Immaculate, and the Sisters of St. Ann. While the editor claims that "over-arching themes related to gender and ethnicity link the entire collection", in reality, the essays seem to be a very diverse collection of isolated studies on widely different topics.

Incidentally, the editor claims that "[a]t their zenith in 1965, there were 183 congregations with 65,254 members in Canada (or 6.9 percent of the female population)", an impossibly high percentage. Since, according to Statistics Canada, the female population in 1965 was 9,765,046, the figure should probably read 0.67%.

Some of the essays are fairly straightforward accounts of the history of various congregations. Essays by Sheila Andrew and Elizabeth McGahan show how women religious in New Brunswick, especially the Sisters of Charity of the Immaculate Conception, helped preserve French language and culture and carve out a de facto separate school system within the public system.

As for Nova Scotia, Sister Mary Olga McKenna, SC, outlines the contributions of the Sisters of Charity of Halifax who worked primarily as teachers, but also as nurses, in five provinces, four states, Bermuda, Peru and the Dominican Republic. They founded both Mount St. Vincent University and the Sisters of St. Martha. But, following the upheavals in the Church and society in the 1960s, McKenna describes the problems that they and other congregations faced: "dwindling numbers, an aging membership, decline in recruitment of new members and loss of traditional educational institutions." Abandoning school teaching, the sisters embraced women's issues and social justice causes. As they approached the millenium, McKenna assures us that their "feminine consciousness and vision were at an all time high".

In a similar vein, Rosa Bruno-Jofre relates the turmoil in the Missionary Oblate Sisters of the Sacred Heart and Mary Immaculate, a diocesan congregation in St. Boniface, Manitoba, from 1963 to 1989. The sisters began questioning their original mission to work with French Canadians outside Quebec and to teach in residential schools. Exposed to the writings of Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Teilhard de Chardin and, later, to liberation and feminist theologians, the sisters abandoned their traditional piety and embraced feminist spirituality. They concluded that "their vows were invented for the patriarchal system: 'poverty to control women materially, chastity to control their bodies, and obedience to control their minds.'" Instead of making reparation to God "for offences committed against Him [sic] of course by us, but also by the world, by sinners", the sisters wanted "to repair (heal) the woundedness in all". Note that Bruno-Jofre cannot even quote a document referring to God as "Him" without inserting "[sic]" after it to denote the flaw in the original and she also makes reference to "the male Vatican." When the sisters qualified their embrace of native culture by adding that it had been "purified and ennobled by the Revelation of Jesus Christ," the author sneers at their "ethnocentric colonial discourse." But, for the most part, the Oblate Sisters do not disappoint their feminist chronicler as they abandon their traditional roles to embrace feminist theology and social justice causes. Perhaps, not surprisingly, as they moved away from emphasis on the community to emphasis on the self, they had to draft policies to deal with alcohol and drug abuse.

Another radical feminist author is the Sister of St. Joseph, Ellen Leonard, who writes about women religious and the study of theology from 1955 to 1980. Leonard notes that, traditionally, the study of theology had been restricted to men studying for the priesthood, but, after Vatican II, she herself obtained an MA in catechetical theology in order to serve as a resource person for the Toronto Separate School Board's "Come to the Father" series. After earning a Ph.D. at the Toronto School of Theology, she was appointed to its faculty in 1977. Leonard pays tribute to such radical feminist dissidents as Mary Daly (author of Beyond God the Father), Margaret Brennan, Mary Malone, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. She attended the first Women's Ordination Conference in Detroit in 1975 and later joined the Canadian Catholics for Women's Ordination and its successor, Catholic Network for Women's Equality. The dashing by Pope John Paul II of their hopes for women's ordination, writes Leonard, "led a number of women religious, myself included, to pursue the academic study of theology". Since not only Leonard, but many of her students, either taught or teach feminist theology at Catholic universities, sometimes to Catholic seminarians, she seems to suggest that, while they lost the battle for women's ordination, they may have won the war.

In describing the work of the Sisters of St. Ann in British Columbia, Jacqueline Gresko also puts gender at the forefront as she attempts to prove that these sisters were not just auxiliaries of the Oblate Fathers and Brothers, but co-workers who kept their own identity and a measure of independence. The author never tires of reminding the reader that the history of the missions in British Columbia is a "gendered story".

However, not all the essays in the book are so relentlessly feminist. Some are just small studies on various aspects of religious life. For instance, Heidi MacDonald's article, "Entering the Convent as Coming of Age in the 1930s", demonstrates that women did not enter the convent as a way of escaping the social and economic upheavals of the Great Depression. Writing about the Sisters of Loretto, Christine Lei describes their devotion to teaching and the importance they gave to vocal and instrumental music. Statistically, the typical Loretto postulant was an only child of Irish descent, proficient in music, art, or languages. Noting the rapid decline in the number of religious, Lei ends her essay with a plea to record the oral histories of those who remain.

Another short essay discusses the painful split of one religious congregation into two. Sister Veronica O'Reilly, CSJ describes the impact of the decision of the bishop of Sault Ste. Marie to create an independent foundation for his own diocese out of the northern missions of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Pembroke in 1936.

The editor of this collection, Elizabeth Smyth, contrasts the lives of two prominent twentieth-century educators: the Ursuline superior, Mother Genevieve Williams, who devoted her energies to fostering education from within her congregation, and Sister Lenore Carter, a Sister of Providence of Kingston and sister of Emmet Cardinal Carter, who worked as a professional educator with such organizations as OECTA and the Ontario Teachers' Federation.

Two other essays focus on the physical structure of the convent itself. Tania Martin, working primarily with the buildings of the Grey Nuns, describes how they "manipulated their physical settings in ways that supported their vocations", through the use of paintings, statues, crucifixes, shrines, and the like. Martin concludes: "all spaces of the convent were suffused with religious meaning and were potentially sites of prayer".

In her essay, "Blasphemes of Modernity", Rebecca Sullivan examines the impact that the imposing convent buildings in Montreal had on the imagination of American Protestants in the mid-1800s. She contends that they regarded convents, teeming with women who had rejected vocations as wives and mothers, as an affront to their New World values. This idea made them susceptible to believing any evil propaganda written about the nuns and the more salacious the better. In such lurid novels as The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (about the Hotel Dieu Convent in Montreal) and Life in the Grey Nunnery, "the convent ... became its own distinct character in these tales of fallen women and shattered piety". The credibility of these novels depended on such fictitious details of the interiors of the convents as secret passages and torture chambers that the nuns could not refute without opening their doors to the public.

Perhaps the most enjoyable essay in the collection is "The harvest that lies before us" by Sioban Nelson, a professor and dean at the Faculty of Nursing in the University of Toronto. Not only is her topic interesting, but she writes without jargon, and shows real understanding of the spiritual motivations of her subjects. Nelson contends that a group of sisters from Quebec helped lay the foundation of the American private health care system. In 1856, Mother Joseph Pariseau led five of her fellow Sisters of Providence of Montreal to Washington Territory in the Pacific Northwest. By 1902, the sisters had built eleven hospitals, seven academies, five Indian schools, and two orphanages. But as important as what they founded is the way in which they funded their hospitals. At first dependent on begging, they switched to a system in which workers (and later their employers on their behalf) purchased the right to free care in the sisters' private hospitals with their choice of doctors. Nelson argues that this primitive health insurance scheme changed the relationship between the sisters, their patients, medicine, and business.

In recounting these impressive achievements, Nelson is really the only contributor to this volume who captures the religious mindset that once inspired women religious. "In the nineteenth century", she notes, "the promotion of self was considered anathema to religious life" and they "sought to eradicate it through religious practice, submission and obedience". In explaining why the sisters wanted to work with the dying, she writes: "the object of a good death for all led them to consider only those who died without grace as failures...". The sisters tried to reach lapsed Catholics and to convert non-Catholics by the excellence of their care. As Nelson notes, "it was actually through good nursing that hearts were opened to God and souls on their way to hell were rescued". Moreover, she describes how they relied on God and the intercession of His saints to accomplish their goals.

As this volume shows, then, convent archives are attracting researchers from many different disciplines for a variety of purposes. Not only do these archives contain detailed biographical information concerning their members, but they also profile women who held positions of authority as school principals, hospital administrators and superiors of large congregations at a time when few women worked outside the home. In recognition of the piety and zeal that, historically, motivated these women religious and the original charisms of their congregations, it is hoped that more researchers will have the Catholic sensibilities of a Sioban Nelson rather than the strident feminism of a Rosa Bruno-Jofre.