These Nuns Are Priests in Everything But Name

Summoned to the bishop’s office, the nun was told she was needed in a parish as a “pastoral administrator.”

“What is that?” she asked.

“It means you’ll be pastor in everything except the sacraments,” the bishop said. “The church needs you for it.”

“I’ll try,” she said.

That, in essence, began five years of running Queen of Peace parish in Ewing, Mo., which Sister Carol Kopff left this month in an emotional farewell liturgy and hugs and kisses from the 125 families she had served.

“We had lived together, worked together and grown together, both spiritually and socially,” she said.

Sister Kopff, now starting advanced studies at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, is among a vanguard of nuns, deacons or theologically trained lay people put in charge of priestless parishes.

The scattered yet growing deployment of these non-clerical “resident ministers,” with about 125 serving around the country, has resulted mainly from shortages in priests.

That trend is expected to intensify, further expanding the new kind of parish leadership.

“It’s pioneering work, and it can be tough at the start,” Sister Kopff said, recalling that when she first arrived, the rural, vacant church building was locked, the key left with a Baptist neighbor living nearby.

“But so many people came back to church,” she said. They told of their increasing parish involvement and activities, taking on new duties and roles in worship, and forming a parish council to review decisions.

Member evaluations of her leadership--and that of another nun, Sister Carol Lang, who leads two rural parishes in northern Wisconsin--have been overwhelmingly favorable.

“It’s working,” a parishioner concluded. Another said, “Sister is truly a minister to us in every sense of the word.”

Other comments:

- “The parish is being rejuvenated.”

- “I’ve never felt closer bonds in a parish before.”

Sister Lang--whose two Wisconsin parishes are St. Augustine at Harrison and St. John the Baptist at Bloomville, 17 miles apart--says the new role was hard at first, but she has gained the “trust and acceptance of the community.”

“Quietly, unassumingly, people get use to having a woman minister,” says Sister Kopff, replaced at Ewing in August by Sister Margaret Buscher. “They open up to us because sisters aren’t seen in the same stereotypes as priests.

“We’re used to mixing with people.”

She tells of initiating the first joint Catholic-Protestant activities in the rural, mainly Protestant area, including running a food pantry for the needy and a shared sunrise service.

Although the women ministers lead worship services of prayers, sermons and Scriptures, they can’t consecrate the bread and wine for Holy Communion--a role confined to the priesthood.

Thus for Communion, either the consecrated elements must be reserved for distribution to the congregation or a visiting priest must be present on weekends to celebrate the service.

Considering those limits, what do the two sisters experienced in running parishes think of the simmering, much-argued issue of admitting women to the Catholic priesthood?

“It will take time to evolve,” said Sister Lang, but it’s coming eventually because of sound reasons and practical needs for it.

“There are no good reasons that the church has come up with not to do it.”

Although Pope John Paul II has firmly rejected women’s ordination and ordered no more talk of it, Sister Lang said that consequently “people talk about it all the more.”

“People are getting used to the idea. More and more women and men are working together in leadership, and Rome will come around to it. A lot of beautiful things are happening.”

Sister Kopff, although not interested in being ordained herself, said that some women are called to that function.

She added, “It’s the Spirit that calls a variety of people, and sex doesn’t make any difference.”

As for the Pope’s instructions for nuns to wear habits, which few do anymore, Sister Lang said, “Most women religious don’t even talk about clothes anymore.

Sisters “today have gone back to their roots, to the core of religious life, instead of hanging on to leftovers from the medieval period,” she said, including those medieval habits.