The New Nuns

They dress in everything from miniskirts to medieval mantles. They do everything from classroom teaching to police work. One has a job with Cesar Chavez, another with Ralph Nader. There is a deputy attorney general and an Air Force lieutenant. They live in inner-city slums, in posh suburbs, on farms, even in the desert. They come singly, by the dozen and in battalions. They are the new American nuns who, in the decade since the Second Vatican Council first provided the inspiration, have streamed out of their centuries-old enclosures into the modern world.

The most radical of the new nuns have abandoned their orders to form "noncanonical" experimental communities outside the reach of church authority. But they do not consider themselves "ex-nuns." A free-form, geographically dispersed group (32 states, Canada and England) called Sisters for a Christian Community (S.F.C.C.) was founded in 1970 to "experiment and pioneer new forms of religious life for the 21st century." Essential to the undertaking, says Founding Sister Lillanna Kopp of Portland, Ore., is the elimination of the bureaucratic, authoritarian structures that have driven American nuns out of traditional religious orders by the tens of thousands since the Vatican Council closed in 1965. Since that year, the number of U.S. nuns has dropped from 180-000 to 150,000--far more than can be accounted for by normal attrition. "We must be a pilgrim people on the road, unencumbered by luggage," says Sister Kopp, a sociologist and author, who left her order in 1969. "Marble mother houses are what destroyed the old orders."

The S.F.C.C. has no mother general, much less a mother house, since it owns no real estate. Each sister makes a home for herself, sometimes shared with one or two other members, finds her own job and pays her own taxes. Each writes a private commitment to Christ instead of taking formal vows. None is required to wear a habit or any other religious symbol. Many, however, including Sister Kopp, wear crucifixes or other emblems of the profession.

Probably the best known of the noncanonical communities is a group that broke away from the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters in Los Angeles (TIME, Feb. 23, 1970). Today 260 of the original 300 "defectors," as they are called in canon law, remain active. In a bold redefinition of a religious order, they have added to their ranks three married couples and one Protestant woman, who are considered full members of the community and, like the sisters, contribute part of their earnings to a common fund. Says Sister Anita Caspary, the community's moving spirit and the former head of the mother group: "Our own strength and liberation as women came from our past experiences in the Immaculate Heart order, when we were forced to take top administrative roles and do work usually assigned to men in the outside world."

Such breakaway groups sometimes shrink or dissolve without a sustaining structure. The Faith Community in St. Louis, which has ties to the S.F.C.C., began with 26 members five years ago, now has seven--yet those are thriving. The sisters, says Spokeswoman Nancy Brossette, found that what they had was not so much a common goal as a common enemy--lack of money, planning and knowledge about how to make it on the outside. Many new nuns share this "reentry" problem. As one former Dominican puts it:

"At first you feel like Henry Adams--between one world that's dead and another that's powerless to be born. But there's also an exhilarating feeling of being on the brink of a new adventure." Some experimental groups disperse because their members opt for marriage or careers as secular single women. Despite the attrition, there are now at least 50 noncanonical nuns' groups, ranging in membership from three to nearly 300.

Many American nuns have been able to update their life-styles without leaving their orders. Perhaps the most successful are the Sisters of Loretto. Under the leadership of their former mother general, Sister Luke Tobin (the only American nun to attend Vatican II), the Loretto community became the prototype for renewal in American sisterhoods. The Loretto nuns were among the first in the U.S. to modernize their convent schedule and dress--the habit is often exchanged for the civilian garb appropriate to their work--and branch out into professions other than the teaching, nursing or running of orphanages and old-age homes usually associated with sisters. In 1965, a Loretto nun became a full-time executive in the Job Corps. Today some members counsel conscientious objectors and drug addicts, and one advises the Denver city council on public housing.

Like the independent Immaculate Heart Community, the Loretto nuns have broadened their definition of community to include men and married couples as well as non-Catholics. But since the Lorettos are still under the authority of Rome, these lay people, called "co-members," take no vows and thus are not officially part of the congregation. The sisters no longer make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in the old formula, but write their own expressions of dedication, which retain the essence of all three vows. "Poverty," says Sister Luke, "should mean detachment, not dependence. Obedience should be to the needs of people, and to the community, not just to superiors."

Marlboro Country. In addition to the internal reforms being made by many communities similar to the Loretto, U.S. nuns have organized their reform activities in a proliferation of groups that bear a marked similarity to secular Women's Lib federations. The feeling among many sisters, says Jesuit John C. Haughey, an associate editor of America magazine, is that the church has been "Marlboro Country as far back as they can see, and will continue to be so as far in the future as they care to look." The organizations include small ethnic groups such as the National Black Sisters' Conference and an association of Spanish-speaking nuns called Las Hermanas. Best known of the larger nuns' groups are the National Assembly of Women Religious (N.A.W.R.), organized in 1970, and the National Coalition of American Nuns (N.C.A.N.), founded by Sister Margaret Traxler in 1969. Sister Traxler's hope: to end "domination by priests, no matter what their hierarchical status" in the internal affairs and renewal of sisters' orders.

Pope Paul VI shows no sign of bending his definition of religious life to accommodate the new nuns. In an exhortation to sisters promulgated last summer, the Pontiff warned against deviations from "the essential commitments" of religious life. Last month the Vatican explicitly forbade nuns to discard "distinctive religious garb" for secular dress. Besides the Pope and many of the all-male hierarchy, some sisters are openly opposed to what they consider the excesses of renewal. About 120 of them have organized their views in a group called Consortium Perfectae Caritatis (Association of Perfect Charity). Nevertheless, the new nuns are confident that they are moving with a historical tide. With secessionist Sister Anita Caspary, they maintain that the church "stands to lose the whole community if it stands in the way."

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