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	Nun -sense By Frances Kissling Feministe August 20 2010 http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/08/20/nun-sense/ It’s 5 am in Mexico and a pesky mosquito has me up. I’m also planning on watching out for the crow who comes by early am and has managed to eat a couple fish in the little pond outside my bedroom door. But on to more mundane matters. Catholic nuns (actually sisters; nuns are really a small subset with their different rules). Nuns fascinate everyone. They are featured in cartoons, plays, books and movies. They were the romantic fantasies of young Catholic girls till the 1990’s; the long swishing habit, covered head (did they shave their hair?) angelic faces so similar to Muslim women of today hidden behind tightly wrapped scarves or witches who banged your head against the blackboard and dragged you out by the ears if you were “bad”. They ministered to lepers, were played by Audrey Hepburn types. Things changed a bit after Vatican 2, when they dropped the habits, wore street clothes and left convents to live in small groups like college roommates or airline stewardesses. The world lost interest. Young women stopped entering convents. (Well, something odd happened. I pressed save drafts and the next thing I knew this was up on the web, I wanted to check some stats and then come back, but that is not to be so my “data” is going to be general and perhaps a little sloppy). Today, their numbers dwindle and the average age is around 70. A lot of sisters are inactive, living out the end of their days in residences for the elderly. A lot of attention is paid to a small group of sisters who are considered politically progressive – and to some extent feminist. All this group of nuns has to do is issue a press release mildly critical of the hierarchy of the church and they are treated by media as “man bites dog” story. Any stepping out of line and we read columns calling them brave beyond belief. It is as if they were subject to being stoned to death for their minor transgressions like martyrs of old or the women in Afghanistan. OK, I am a little cynical about nuns. More correctly, cynical about the new media fascination and lack of sophistication. The nun who speaks out for women’s ordination is interesting in the same way as the nun who knows all the baseball stats. So what’s one insider’s take on how feminist and how progressive sisters are? No stats exist, but out of the I think 60,000 plus in the US, probably a good half are politically liberal, worry about health care, the poor, think government should provide more, oppose war, were for civil rights, you name it. the same percentage would generally believe in women’s equality, worry about the feminization of poverty. But when you go a bit deeper, the number of sisters who, say, believe that feminism includes the a woman’s right to choose and abortion or even have sex while unmarried is pretty small. Let’s take a look at the last time a group of nuns spoke out on an issue that touched on abortion. During the final stages of the health care debate, a group of nuns signed a statement calling for passage of the health care reform bill without the most extreme amendments prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion. Their position differed from that of the Catholic bishops who wanted the most rigid rules preventing even the possibility that private insurance could cover abortion. From media reaction, you would have thought the nuns had endorsed abortion on demand. In fact, the nuns were clear that they supported the restriction of federal funds for abortion, they just thought the bill had gone far enough and that we should not hold up health care for everyone by demanding more draconian positions. What was also ignored was that to a considerable extent, the statement was not precipitated because of a commitment to health care (which they had), but because one of their own was under attack. The president of the Catholic Health Assn., Sr Carol Keehan had taken a similar position to that in the statement and was being raked over the coals by right wing Catholics and the bishops. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the nuns made the statement and it was a good thing to do, but the fact is that there are no more than about 100 nuns in the US that are really willing to stick their necks out and say what they believe about abortion, women’s ordination, glbtq issues – and I’m probably overstating the number. Let’s look at two recent examples of progressive, feminist nuns behaving badly. The first relates to Charlotte Bunch, the former president of the Global Women’s Leadership Institute, best known for her unwavering commitment to human rights and ending violence against women. Charlotte was invited to give a keynote address at a Sisters of Charity conference in Ohio on violence against women. The sister who had invited her had lost her affiliation with a Catholic college because she was on the anti-racism committee of the Women’s Ordination Conference. A few weeks before the event, the local bishop freaked out. Charlotte is prochoice on abortion; the sisters must rescind the invite or they could not meet in a church space and the diocese and several conservative groups would withdraw their co-sponsorship. Now, this is not the first time things like this have happened. Standard operating procedure is to move the event to Jewish synagogue or friendly Protestant church. In this case, the sisters caved. The very sister who herself had been abused by the church, called Charlotte and canceled. What was the real killer was the irony of a conference on violence against women doing violence against another woman without the slightest realization of what they were doing when they acceded to the patriarchy. No media interest. The next example relates to abuse of children. The untold story of the sex abuse scandal in the church is both sex and physical and verbal abuse by nuns. We want to see nuns of today as good guys – and we do not want to remember that in the old days, a lot of them were pretty mean to boys and girls. In the ordinary course of events, in Catholic institutions, things were done to children that today would land a teacher in jail. On an average day in Catholic school, you had your mouth washed out with soap, hem of your skirt taken down, were cracked on your knuckles with a ruler, made to clean up your own vomit if you got sick, and publicly humiliated. I remember the girl with large pointy breasts in the eighth grade whom sister believed had to be wearing a padded bra. One day, she marched her into the girl’s room, ordered her to take off her bra for inspection. It wasn’t padded. Both returned red faced to the classroom. But some nuns did more, they sexually abused girls (and boys). In institutions for unwed mothers, foster children, and boarding schools, harsh work regimes and corporal punishment were the order of the day. Last year, at the annual meeting of US heads of religious communities, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, requested that women survivors of abuse be invited to speak at the meeting and tell their stories. We all know the healing effect of story telling. The nuns refused. Even the bishops had made time some six years ago for survivors to address their meeting. What most galls me is that the fascination that the media – and some in the feminist movement– have for feisty nuns often obscures the large feminist movement in the Catholic church which is made up of truly courageous women who are speaking out for lesbian rights, abortion, women’s ordination and for the very sisters who, more often than not, do not have the courage of their own convictions to stand with those “lay” women, say what they really believe and really work to challenge the patriarchy. Now, it is first light and it time to protect the little fish from the crows.
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