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This chapter uses the group the Theresians as a case study to analyze shifting perceptions of Catholic laywomen’s vocation in the 1960s and 1970s. The Theresians was founded in the early 1960s by Fr. Elwood Voss as a group for laywomen to promote vocations to the Catholic sisterhoods. The organization’s founding was an outgrowth of the perceived vocation crisis that began in the late 1950s in the American church. Theresians at this time were consistently taught to privilege the “higher” vocation of women religious (nuns) rather than their own vocations as married or single laywomen. Such beliefs were reinforced by a mid-century Catholic culture that discouraged friendship between laywomen and sisters, and emphasized not only sisters’ special sanctity, but also their authority over laywomen. Over time, however, lay and religious Theresians came to challenge the idea of laywomen’s inferiority, and the group sought new ways of expressing and affirming laywomen’s vocational choices and Catholic women’s self-definition.

This essay describes American Catholic conceptions of and activism around the right to religious freedom, focusing on the “Fortnight of Freedom” campaign announced by the US bishops. The Fortnight begins on the feast day shared by St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, two martyrs who stood up to corrupt state authority, and ends on US Independence Day. Castelli contrasts the bishops’ vigorous advocacy for religious freedom with the Catholic church’s own policy towards the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which has limited US religious women’s freedom of conscience.

The chapter first outlines larger societal changes that impact the likelihood of Catholic women considering a religious vocation. In the present spiritual marketplace, Catholics reflect a larger culture of religious choice, constructing their own religious identity—which may not be compatible with previous models institutes in canon law. Distinctions are drawn amongof vowed religious life. The second section of the chapter summarizes the official categories prescribed for Catholic religious consecrated life, secular institutes, and societies of apostolic life; among contemplative, monastic, and apostolic institutes; and between diocesan and pontifical institutes. Newly forming religious movements are described, as are the two umbrella conferences for Catholic sisterhoods in the United States: the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR).

The turn of the 1960s marked a time of extreme demographic challenges for the American Catholic church. While the number of vocations to religious life was rising, the church itself was experiencing massive growth due to the baby boom of the post-war years. There simply were not enough women religious (nuns) to staff the growing number of Catholic schools required to educate the youth of the church. In response, Catholic periodicals signaled what they called a “vocation crisis” starting as early as 1958. An analysis of the articles produced at the height of the crisis in the first half of the 1960s reveals, not only the church’s fears at this unique moment, but also its perception of Catholic laywomen. Laywomen were most frequently blamed for causing the crisis by holding back their daughters from religious life. They were counseled to sacrifice everything for the church in order to achieve sanctity, and criticized for their failure to do so. The literature of the vocation crisis reveals common assumptions about laywomen’s vocation and its importance in the early 1960s.

This chapter summarizes the period, age, and cohort effects that influence whether a Catholic woman in the United States will enter a religious institute and which institute she will choose. Implications for religious institutes of both the traditionalist (CMSWR) and the progressive (LCWR) conferences of Catholic sisters, and also for the Catholic Church in general, are discussed. Recommendations are made.

Although the monastic principle of poverty had, for centuries, been intended to guide the architectural development of monasteries and convents, the 1260 Franciscan General Chapter of Narbonne took the radical step of recommending that communities of friars adapt existing buildings rather than build complexes ex novo. This chapter examines the adaptive and accretive practice of converting buildings of various functions to accommodate communities of women religious in Renaissance Venice. Convent archives, site and urban plans, building chronologies, patron family histories, civic building statutes all offer evidence for the patchwork and partial conversions of buildings designed to convert. Comparisons with complexes for male monastics inform this study of how patterns of patronage and urban development inflected the ways in which convent architecture publicly redefined and re-presented the identity of the communities it enclosed.

This chapter presents oral history interviews with two American nuns who have assumed leadership positions: Sister Theresa Kane, a member of Mount Mercy in Dobbs Ferry, New York; and Sister Anita de Luna, who served as Vicar for Religious in the archdiocese of San Antonio, as superior general of the Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence, and as president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The narratives capture the women's experiences over the past fifty years, beginning in the 1960s.

This chapter presents oral history interviews with two American nuns: Sister Christine Schenk, executive director of FutureChurch in Lakewood, Ohio; and Sister Joan Chittister, prioress of her Benedictine community, president of the Conference of American Benedictine prioresses, and president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The narratives capture the women's experiences over the past fifty years, beginning in the 1960s.