The Nuns Who Defied Vatican’s Order to Be Silent

In the wooded meadows off Lake Erie, a Roman Catholic monastic community practices a 1,500-year-old spiritual way of life. The Benedictine Sisters of Erie gather to pray three times daily. They sing the Psalms. They feed the poor, train the illiterate. They live on donated clothes and a monthly stipend of $70 each.

But the gentle rhythms of their ancient religious lifestyle recently exploded in a radical act of conscience: Risking expulsion, one of the sisters refused to obey a Vatican decree against attending a worldwide conference to promote women’s ordination.

Sister Joan Chittister, a renowned feminist, author and Benedictine nun for 50 years, refused orders not to speak at the conference in Dublin in late June, an appearance Rome warned would “create scandal” in the church. In an extraordinary display of support, her superior, Prioress Christine Vladimiroff, refused Vatican orders to forbid Chittister from attending. All but one of 128 Erie nuns signed a letter of support. So did 22 Benedictine women monasteries in North America.

Chittister attended the conference amid fears that she and Vladimiroff might be expelled from their order or even the church. But Rome, which had declared the women’s issue closed for debate since the mid-1990s, inexplicably backed down. Despite previously threatening unspecified “just penalties” against Chittister for defiance, a Vatican spokesman said she would not be punished.

Now the monastery’s successful stand against being silenced is drawing worldwide headlines and more than 1,000 letters and e-mails from around the globe. Some have chastized Chittister for errant thinking. Most have hailed the women as symbols of conscience against the Vatican’s escalating moves to control dissent.

Chittister, who will speak in Los Angeles today, says she acted in the Benedictine tradition against blind obedience.

“I was not trying to be defiant,” said Chittister, 65. “I was honestly, genuinely committed to the notion that silence and silencing is not good for the church.”

At first glance, the monastery seems an unlikely hotbed of revolution. The outside grounds feature a soaring cross and a lovely garden of black-eyed Susans. Inside, the chapel’s luminous stained-glass windows reflect the early morning light, throwing rays of soft blue and orange across the crucifix. Each day, the nuns gather here at 6:30 for morning prayer.

Some shuffle with walkers, others come in wheelchairs. The average age is late 60s. Many nuns entered as teens. They took vows of obedience, covered themselves with white coifs and black veils. They cloistered themselves in a life so ritualized that specific prayers had to be said when donning each piece of clothing.

That lifestyle was shaken by the liberal reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which opened and modernized monastic life.

Sisters Vow to Work for Peace, Social Justice

Erie moved quickly to embrace the new climate. The nuns began ridding their prayer books of exclusively male pronouns in the 1970s, decades ahead of others. Today, the nuns pray not to “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” but to “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.”

As the Vietnam War raged, the nuns took a high profile. Sister Mary Lou Kownacki started a peace center, invited Jane Fonda to speak and organized “die-ins” around town to protest the war. The nuns refused to allow military recruiters into their high school.

The sisters, vowing to work for peace and social justice as a “corporate commitment,” have carried out their vision through an extensive net of services throughout Erie, a depressed industrial area of 100,000. They run a job-training program, soup kitchen, children’s feeding and sports programs, a neighborhood art center, low-income housing for seniors and the disabled, an environmental education center and summer camp.

The services have endeared them to many, with accolades from the mayor on down. But the nuns have also outraged some faithful. Chittister recalls a local corporate leader calling when she was serving as prioress to complain about a “lunatic fringe” in her monastery that was embarrassing him as a Catholic with prayer vigils against the arms race and war. She thanked him for accusing the nuns of being Christian.

Another time, a police officer called to report that some of her nuns had been arrested for refusing to leave their prayer vigil in the U.S. Capitol. Chittister recalls asking, astonished, why it was a crime to recite the Lord’s Prayer there but not to build nuclear weapons. When he said he was just following orders, she asked why.

Such is classic Chittister: raise questions and questions and questions. But the ideal of open dialogue, of “listening with the ear of the heart,” is also a classic Benedictine concept--which is why the Vatican letter demanding silence floored so many of the nuns.

“I thought, what planet did this come from?” said Lynn Weissert, who entered the community in 1979.

The letter came in March from the Vatican department that oversees religious communities worldwide. In late May, Prioress Vladimiroff flew to Rome, accompanied by two Benedictine experts in canon law, to argue that Chittister’s appearance would not flout rules against “teaching against the authority of the pope,” since she was not directly speaking on the ordination issue. But Vatican officials refused to change their minds.

In the Benedictine way, Vladimiroff made no decision until she spoke with every sister in the community. They had large meetings and small ones. They prayed and fasted. They sang a song by St. Teresa of Avila to let nothing frighten them, that God is enough. They spoke their fears. Some nuns wanted to follow Rome. Others saw oppression and sexism and urged the community to resist.

On June 26, Vladimiroff gathered the women to announce her decision. She would not pass on the Vatican’s order to Chittister. In her letter to Rome, Vladimiroff explained that the Benedictine idea of authority and obedience differed from “that which is being used by the Vatican to exert power and control and prompt a false sense of unity inspired by fear.” The sisters signed the letter, then gave Chittister a group blessing to go to Dublin.

The nuns do not regard their act as unfaithful to Rome.

“I just think I lovingly disagree, and it is as much my church as theirs,” Vladimiroff said. “If you separate a person from their truth, there’s a loss of integrity, conscience. . . . That was the consequence I would not be able to bear.”

For Chittister, the brouhaha came just one month after five U.S. dioceses boycotted her appearance at the National Catholic Educational Assn. in Milwaukee. Officials there have declined to comment on their opposition, but some Catholics say Chittister is spreading heretical ideas.

“Sister Joan represents a dissident and marginal segment of the church,” said Leon Suprenant, president of the Ohio-based Catholics United for the Faith, a 95,000-member group of traditional Catholics. “She’s a political activist and not a Catholic saint.”

Speaking Out on Feminist Spirituality

Chittister, a vibrant woman with gray-streaked hair and alert blue eyes, sees herself as neither. She says she is simply a woman who loves her church and wants to coax it to its highest calling. She aspires to serve like one of her favorite art pieces: a hollow sculpture of a prophet, arms outstretched, given to her by one of her spiritual mentors.

Her tool is words. They pour out of her in rapid, passionate streams. “The writer is only a channel, an empty reed for the voice that comes through,” she said. “You have to be utterly truthful, totally empty of self and complete in the giving of the gift.”

The Pennsylvania native, who grew up in a union household and mixed religion family, says she knew she wanted to become a nun from age 3. That’s when her mother told her the two nuns at her father’s funeral would tell the angels who came for Daddy’s soul to take him straight to heaven.

She knew she wanted to be a writer from seventh grade, when a leg injury took her out of basketball and into journalism. She hasn’t stopped writing since: more than 20 books, numerous papers, speeches and academic surveys, armed with advanced degrees in communications theory and social psychology.

Chittister writes on contemporary spirituality, with tomes on Benedictine wisdom, gospel inspiration, the search for belief. She writes on social justice and militarism.

Most prominently, however, Chittister speaks out on feminist spirituality. She warns that society will collapse without a balance to what she calls the patriarchal values of superiority, dominance, effectiveness and conformity. She calls the faithful to practice “Jesus’ feminine side” of compassion. She writes about neglected biblical women such as Ruth and Lydia.

And she speaks out in favor of women’s ordination, although Chittister says she would never become a priest herself. She says discussion about female deacons--who could preach and minister but not celebrate Mass--would be a sensible opening step. Church history, she says, is filled with examples of women deaconesses until the Middle Ages.

Such views are widespread among American Catholics, whom numerous polls have shown back women’s ordination by a two-thirds majority. But because of the Vatican gag order, the issue is not publicly debated by bishops. The issue is promoted mainly by liberal organizations such as Call to Action, a group of reformist Catholics hosting the Los Angeles conference where Chittister will speak at 9:15 a.m. today at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel.

Gag order or no, Chittister intends to keep talking. It took 400 years of debate to end church support for slavery, she notes. It took extended debate on whether to abolish bans on usury, declare Jesus divine, and separate church and state.

“How can you say you know what the Holy Spirit is thinking,” she said, “until you have heard it in everyone, everywhere?”