Margaret M. McGuinness
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823239870
- eISBN:
- 9780823239917
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239870.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
Neighbors and Missionaries is a history of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, a community of women religious founded by Marion Gurney (Mother Marianne of Jesus) in 1910. Believing that ...
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Neighbors and Missionaries is a history of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, a community of women religious founded by Marion Gurney (Mother Marianne of Jesus) in 1910. Believing that she was not called to ministries that involved either parochial education or health care, Mother Marianne and the women who joined her worked with the urban poor in social settlements and staffed religious education classes for children attending public schools. The Sisters of Christian Doctrine established two settlements in New York City, and later expanded their work into South Carolina and Florida. The Horse Creek Valley Welfare Center in South Carolina essentially used the model of social settlements that had been developed for urban areas, but adapted it to the rural South. In addition to offering educational and social programs, the sisters taught catechism classes and prepared children and adults to receive the sacraments. Members of the community also served in a number of parishes where they ministered to black and white Catholics. By the 1960s, settlement houses had been replaced by other types of social welfare programs, and the numbers of American women religious were rapidly decreasing. The concluding chapters of Neighbors and Missionaries explore how the Sisters of Christian Doctrine adapted their ministries to reflect the changes taking place in both the Catholic Church and American society during the second half of the twentieth century.Less
Neighbors and Missionaries is a history of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, a community of women religious founded by Marion Gurney (Mother Marianne of Jesus) in 1910. Believing that she was not called to ministries that involved either parochial education or health care, Mother Marianne and the women who joined her worked with the urban poor in social settlements and staffed religious education classes for children attending public schools. The Sisters of Christian Doctrine established two settlements in New York City, and later expanded their work into South Carolina and Florida. The Horse Creek Valley Welfare Center in South Carolina essentially used the model of social settlements that had been developed for urban areas, but adapted it to the rural South. In addition to offering educational and social programs, the sisters taught catechism classes and prepared children and adults to receive the sacraments. Members of the community also served in a number of parishes where they ministered to black and white Catholics. By the 1960s, settlement houses had been replaced by other types of social welfare programs, and the numbers of American women religious were rapidly decreasing. The concluding chapters of Neighbors and Missionaries explore how the Sisters of Christian Doctrine adapted their ministries to reflect the changes taking place in both the Catholic Church and American society during the second half of the twentieth century.
Mary J. Henold
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781469654492
- eISBN:
- 9781469654515
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469654492.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
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. ...
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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.Less
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.
Elizabeth A. Castelli
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226248479
- eISBN:
- 9780226248646
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226248646.003.0022
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Mary Johnson, Patricia Wittberg, and Mary L. Gautier
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199316847
- eISBN:
- 9780199371457
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199316847.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
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 ...
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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).Less
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).
Maureen Sabine
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251650
- eISBN:
- 9780823253043
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251650.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
In her vibrant screen performance as Sister Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman represented the film nun as a mature modern woman who had chosen the religious life with a “complete ...
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In her vibrant screen performance as Sister Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman represented the film nun as a mature modern woman who had chosen the religious life with a “complete understanding” of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this engaging character and her cinematic sisters in later postwar popular film come to be stereotyped as girlish, incomplete, or unimportant characters± Veiled Desires explores this question through a unique, full-length study of nun films over a sixty year period beginning with the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary's and concluding with Doubt in 2008. It argues for a more complex picture of the film nun as an ardent and active lead character who struggled with a problematic dual identity as a modern women and a religious over the course of the twentieth century. It suggests how beautiful and charismatic Hollywood stars such as Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (1947) and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Joan Collins in Sea Wife (1957), Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story (1959), Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), Diana Rigg in In This House of Brede (1975), and Meg Tilly in Agnes of God (1985) called attention to the desires that the veil concealed and the vows of chastity and obedience were thought to repress. In an historically framed and theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, the book recuperates nun films as a significant genre in Anglo-American cinema. It shows in-depth how they probed the tensions between the selfless and sacrificial desires idealized in religious life as agape and the passionate and aspirational desires valorized in feminist discourse as eros.Less
In her vibrant screen performance as Sister Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman represented the film nun as a mature modern woman who had chosen the religious life with a “complete understanding” of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this engaging character and her cinematic sisters in later postwar popular film come to be stereotyped as girlish, incomplete, or unimportant characters± Veiled Desires explores this question through a unique, full-length study of nun films over a sixty year period beginning with the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary's and concluding with Doubt in 2008. It argues for a more complex picture of the film nun as an ardent and active lead character who struggled with a problematic dual identity as a modern women and a religious over the course of the twentieth century. It suggests how beautiful and charismatic Hollywood stars such as Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (1947) and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Joan Collins in Sea Wife (1957), Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story (1959), Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), Diana Rigg in In This House of Brede (1975), and Meg Tilly in Agnes of God (1985) called attention to the desires that the veil concealed and the vows of chastity and obedience were thought to repress. In an historically framed and theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, the book recuperates nun films as a significant genre in Anglo-American cinema. It shows in-depth how they probed the tensions between the selfless and sacrificial desires idealized in religious life as agape and the passionate and aspirational desires valorized in feminist discourse as eros.
Mary J. Henold
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781469654492
- eISBN:
- 9781469654515
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469654492.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Mary Johnson, Patricia Wittberg, and Mary L. Gautier
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199316847
- eISBN:
- 9780199371457
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199316847.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
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. ...
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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.Less
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.
Saundra Weddle
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719099151
- eISBN:
- 9781526121059
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099151.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Carole Garibaldi Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199757060
- eISBN:
- 9780190254421
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199757060.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, Social History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Carole Garibaldi Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199757060
- eISBN:
- 9780190254421
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199757060.003.0017
- Subject:
- History, Social History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.