Promises unfulfilled: American religious sisters and gender inequality in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church

Abstract

In light of the Vatican’s recent doctrinal investigation of American Catholic nuns, this paper considers gender inequality in the Catholic Church immediately before, during and after the Second Vatican Council. Using Weber’s frameworks of authority construction and literature on corporate structures that reify inequality and gendered workplaces, the author argues that viewing the Church as a complex social organization allows for a fuller understanding of the ways in which its structures of power are constructed and reproduced. Ultimately, the author contends that religious sisters are stakeholders in a hierarchical organization that has prevented them from assuming leadership roles and from developing official Church teaching. Finally, he identifies several hegemonic forces that perpetuate gender barriers in the Catholic Church, specifically the obligatory wearing of the religious habit and the ban on women’s ordination.

Introduction

With Pope Benedict XVI’s historic retirement from the papacy and the recent election of Pope Francis, the leadership of the Catholic Church faces the potential for newness and rebirth, particularly in relation to the roles of women. Just as the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) ushered in a spirit of reformation and self-reflection in the 1960s, the present context offers a unique opportunity for Church leaders to reconsider the ways in which women serve and lead in the Church. However, the ways in which the Catholic Church has largely ignored women and has barred them from positions of leadership for centuries render this hope for structural change wishful thinking at best. In asking questions regarding gender inequality, I suggest that viewing the Church’s structures of authority and organizational hierarchy through a sociological lens helps to explain the conspicuous absence of women in leadership roles in the Catholic Church.

In an effort to avoid what would inevitably descend into a discursive attempt at identifying all forms of gender inequality in the Catholic Church, this paper will specifically consider the position of Catholic nuns in the United States immediately before, during, and after Vatican II. Specifically, I will analyze the subjugation of nuns in the Church through the use of Max Weber’s classical frameworks of authority construction before moving into more contemporary perspectives of corporate structures that reify inequality and gendered workplaces. Following a brief review of the literature surrounding the history of American nuns over the past 75 years, I will critically examine what I see as the two main hegemonic forces that have served to perpetuate the treatment of American sisters as second-class citizens in the Church: 1) the obligatory wearing of the religious habit and 2) the prohibition of women’s ordination.

In order to fully understand how religious sisters have experienced gender inequality, I first examine the roles they play, how these differ from those of other clergy, and how they have developed over time. Mills and Ryan (2001) argue that as a patriarchal institution, the Catholic Church has largely constructed the identity of the Catholic nun over the past two millennia. Like priests, women religious in the Catholic Church commit their lives to Jesus Christ and specifically profess vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. McNamara (1996: 1–2) points out that unlike their male counterparts, however,

women consecrated to the religious life, regardless of the degree and discipline of their commitment, remained part of the laity, arbitrarily barred by their sex from ordination and its privileges, chiefly the sacramental monopoly that qualifies men alone as channels for the saving grace generated by Christ.

While men who served the Church were free to take up specialized vocations as monks, priests, or secular clergy, ‘women religious have been torn between lay and clerical status, between episcopal and monastic jurisdictions, between active or contemplative vocations as defined by male authorities’ (McNamara, 1996: 2). In other words, women in the Church had choices about how to live out their religious vocations but these choices were limited to what was prescribed by the hierarchy, essentially either cloistered prayer or lay service, but neither option allowed women to join the ranks of ordained ministry. Brock’s (2010) analysis of documents constituting official Church teaching on religious life characterizes the roles of nuns in further detail. The author identifies three specific themes present in the texts, namely that nuns were called by God, lived lives of self-sacrifice, or worked for the Church (Brock, 2010: 478).

Weber’s ideal type of the ‘religious virtuoso’ has been applied as a sociological category to help understand the position of religious sisters in the Catholic Church (Schneiders, 2000). According to Weber, the ‘religious virtuoso’ describes one whose religious participation transcends that of laymen in that particular faith. Weber (1991 [1948]: 287–290) explains:

… intensive religiosity has a tendency toward a sort of social stratification … ‘[V]irtuoso’ religiosity is opposed to mass religiosity. By ‘mass’ we understand powerful influence over the religiously ‘unmusical’ laymen; this influence might not be in the direction of his (the virtuoso’s) own religious way of life; it might be an influence in merely ceremonious, ritualist, and conventional particulars.

Schneiders (2000) argues that the category of religious virtuoso is ambiguous and must be used with caution to describe what makes those who enter consecrated religious life different from the broader congregation. The author criticizes Weber’s definition, as it has the potential for an understanding of the religious virtuoso as superior to those in lay positions in the Church, an interpretation that theologians and the Second Vatican Council have also rejected. However, she identifies two main points in Weber’s theory that help to explain the difference: ‘the sociological distinctiveness of the life,’ that is, separate from the lay Catholic life that one may live as married or single, ‘and the exclusive concern with the religious/spiritual dimensions of life as the only legitimate foundation and finality’ (Schneiders, 2000: 36).

Religious sisters are stakeholders in a hierarchical organization that has largely marginalized them through the reinscription of structures of gender inequality for the past two thousand years. The Vatican’s recent Doctrinal Assessment of American religious sisters is evidence not only of the patriarchy’s refusal to entertain discussions about gender parity, but also of its public admonition of dissenting opinions. Brock identifies several ways in which these women have resisted the Church’s representations of nuns and exercised their own agency in defining their roles in the modern Church (Brock, 2010). This paper builds upon the notion of religious sisters, refuting the Church’s narrow definitions of their roles in the Catholic Church, and critically examines several instances where American nuns have challenged Church leadership. Though the twentieth century marked a time when women in the Church made significant strides toward breaking down gender barriers, ultimately I argue that the promises of change and further inclusion that Vatican II extended to many religious sisters have been left largely unfulfilled and many of the walls preventing gender equality in the Catholic Church remain in place.

Doctrinal assessment of American religious sisters

In April 2012, after a nearly four-year doctrinal investigation authorized by Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican issued a harsh reprimand to the largest group of American Catholic nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). In its assessment, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), formerly known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, censured the LCWR and the affiliated social justice lobby NETWORK for ‘serious doctrinal problems’ (Goodstein, 2012). The eight-page CDF report also found that the sisters promoted ‘radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith’ and made public statements that ‘disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the [C]hurch’s authentic teachers of faith and morals’ (Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, 2012: 3). Specifically, the CDF investigation criticized the American nuns for protesting the Holy See’s positions on (1) the question of women’s ordination; (2) the correct pastoral approach to ministry to homosexual persons, thus disagreeing with the bishops’ teachings on family life and human sexuality; and (3) their ‘commentaries on “patriarchy” (that) distort the way in which Jesus has structured sacramental life in the church’ (CDF Assessment, 2012: 2–3). Similarly, in an examination of their promotion of social justice, the nuns were found to have remained largely silent on certain right-to-life issues like abortion and euthanasia, as well as those related to discussions about the traditional family structure and gay marriage. The CDF assessment concluded that the LCWR had committed crimes of omission and thus embraced significantly flawed positions directly in opposition to the bishops’ official doctrinal teachings.

The conclusions of the CDF assessment and the current status of American Catholic nuns are worthy of exploration on many levels. For example, their role in the Church is unique in that nuns are in a somewhat elevated position vis-a-vis the rest of the faithful through their leadership roles in schools, hospitals, and social service organizations. Additionally, while many sisters are professors, college presidents, and scholars, they have no authority to determine official Church teaching or direction. For centuries, this power has rested entirely with men, and an elite few at that. Further, the CDF criticism of the LCWR is notable for the ways in which it largely ignores the work that American nuns have done toward poverty reduction, immigration reform, education, and racial equality. Rather, it focuses instead on what they are not doing or saying. The Church hierarchy is essentially arguing that decades of work promoting justice issues central to the themes of Catholic social thought are rendered worthless or irrelevant unless these activities are also taken up in conjunction with an active condemnation of gay marriage, euthanasia, and abortion. This theme of women’s silence and their noticeable absence in official Church teaching and leadership roles recurs throughout history, and I examine several examples below.

Nuns or sisters? The significance of the name

While this paper will examine the lives of the group of women referred to under many monikers including ‘nuns,’ ‘religious,’ ‘women religious,’ ‘sisters,’ and ‘vowed women,’ I believe it is necessary to settle on common terminology. Quiñonez and Turner (1992) suggest that the term ‘sisters’ is most appropriate when discussing these women, and that the descriptor ‘American’ may be applied to denote those who are of the United States. Further, the authors argue that in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a marked shift away from labels such as ‘children’ and ‘daughters’ of the Church, and a move toward ‘religious sisters’ on behalf of Catholics and non-Catholics alike (Quiñonez and Turner, 1992: 88). Kaylin (2000) adds to the discussion in offering that ‘nun’ is too limiting, as it simply means one who has taken solemn vows, devotes her life to prayer, and lives in cloister. Recognizing the connotation of one who is caring and extends service to all, the name ‘sisters’ (and in our case ‘American sisters’) signifies the work they do and their gendered identity.

I argue that this choice of name is important for several reasons. First, like the authors above, I believe that the name ‘sisters’ allows for recognition of their work of service and care, specifically to the poor and marginalized. Unlike the other names, ‘sister’ implies a sense of equality and one who walks with or alongside the other, as opposed to one who is in a position of power doing for another. As many religious congregations have long histories of ministering to the poor and oppressed, this name functions to eliminate that imbalance of power between the doer and the receiver. Therefore, sisters may be seen as being in service with others, as opposed to simply helping those who cannot help themselves. Thus, the term ‘sisters’ is one of empowerment and consciously avoids a reinscription of power and subjugation in their daily work.

Similarly, I submit that the name ‘sisters’ also serves to assert authority and redress institutional inequality. While Quiñonez and Turner (1992) argue that the terms ‘children’ and ‘daughters’ were appropriated by both religious and non-religious, these names imply a sense of meekness and submission. ‘Children’ and ‘daughters’ have the connotation of being ones who need to be protected, presumably by someone older, wiser and with more power. I suggest that rejecting these terms and utilizing ‘sisters’ is a means of empowerment and asserts their status within the Church. A sister may then be viewed as an equal, and not one who must always be shielded from outside influence. As I will discuss below, it is precisely this notion of ‘she who must be protected’ that the Church hierarchy (who are, of course, referred to as ‘fathers’) strove to reinscribe after Vatican II in the 1960s.

American sisters, a historical context

Women’s religious orders are among the oldest forms of women-only organizations in the West (Mills and Ryan, 2001: 60). According to Koehlinger (2007), early American sisters from Europe were mostly missionary or frontier women, opening schools and hospitals throughout the Midwest and Western United States. In the early part of the twentieth century, the papal bull Conditae a Christo granted official status to congregations of American sisters. Yet this recognition also required partial cloister, thus preventing the women from the ‘polluting’ influence of the outside world, and American society in particular, a theme that would recur throughout the twentieth century (Briggs, 2006; Koehlinger, 2007; Quiñonez and Turner, 1992). It is perhaps here that we see the first instance of the Vatican exercising direct control over American sisters through a limitation on their interaction with the laity. I suggest that this is evidence of a patriarchal system where the sisters must be protected (again, not coincidently by fathers), as their inferior status renders them susceptible to attachment, contamination, and/or victimization.

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, American sisters were directly involved in the Catholic school boom in the United States, which reached its height in the 1950s. As the primary teachers in the classroom, the American sisters educated tens of thousands of young Americans during this period, while often being right out of high school themselves (Fialka, 2003). Yet it is also at this time that there was a marked shift in focus away from the traditional cloistered model of women’s religious life to one where education and attention to apostolic ministries became much more relevant, and were in fact even encouraged by Rome. For instance, in 1952, Pope Pius XII convened an international gathering of the heads of women’s communities, at which he argued for aggiornamento, that is, an updating of certain aspects of community works and religious life. Pius XII emphasized modernization, whereby sisters must adapt to the changing times, and said specifically: ‘a sister should have this assurance: “My superior is giving me the opportunity of a formation that places me on an equal footing with my secular colleagues”’ (Quiñonez and Turner, 1992: 12). As a result, the Sisters Formation Movement initiative in the mid-1950s served to make American sisters the most highly educated sisters in the Church, and among the most educated women in the United States. The Sisters Formation Movement encouraged superiors, professors, and college presidents to allow American sisters to pursue bachelor’s degrees before teaching. Thus, American sisters were adequately prepared not only to be educators but also to think of themselves as competent professionals as opposed to nameless servants of the Church (Koehlinger, 2007; Quiñonez and Turner, 1992). As the sisters became more engaged with the laity and secular society in general, many were emboldened to use their voices and newfound autonomy to address structures of inequality, especially those affecting the poor and marginalized. During this time and in the decade that followed, American sisters became directly involved in challenging various systems of injustice, perhaps most visibly through activism and engagement with the civil rights movement (Fialka, 2003; Koehlinger, 2007).

Koehlinger (2007) adds that through college education and in many cases graduate degrees, the women had greater access to current ecclesial and social thought. American sisters began reading works like Goffman’s Asylums (1961), and Cardinal Suenens’s The Nun in the World (1962), which directly addressed issues of homogeneity and authority, as well as St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (1947), which argued that the ultimate authority in moral issues is ‘one’s own conscience’ (Kaylin, 2000; Koehlinger, 2007). Quiñonez and Turner (1992) point especially toward the publication of ‘The Sister Formation Bulletin,’ which helped to awaken sisters to the changes stirring in their lives and encouraged grassroots reformation. The bulletin published works by contemporary Catholic thinkers like the Jesuit Karl Rahner and, equally importantly, presented writings by sisters themselves. This then became a vehicle for the transmission of common ideas and discourses about modifications in religious life, effecting a shift in the worldview of American sisters. This newfound identity through education, social engagement, and what Koehlinger (2007) calls an ‘outward-oriented theology’ drew the ire of priests and bishops, who still considered sisters to be ‘subjects’ (Fialka, 2003; Quiñonez and Turner, 1992).

In the 1950s then, we see a time of great rebirth among the women of American religious congregations. Primarily through their own education and a redirected emphasis on addressing issues of social justice, American sisters began to create their own identities not only within the Church, but also within American society. Following Pope Pius XII’s instructions, the sisters reexamined their congregational missions and worked to further these agendas. Religious sisters adapted to the changing nature of the times and were no longer simply servants of the Church and, by association, the patriarchy. This period of renewal was merely the beginning, however, and in the decade that followed, Rome spoke even louder to encourage this evolution.

The Second Vatican Council: A period of renewal

At the request of Pope John XXIII, who called on the faithful to ‘open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air,’ the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) was commissioned in 1962 and ‘set in motion a process of formal reflection, innovation, and reform that dramatically transformed the culture of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as its central institutions’ (Koehlinger, 2007: 9). Envisioned as an opportunity to reconfigure the rules of the Church, Vatican II developed into four sessions over the next several years that brought together theologians and other Church leaders to examine all aspects of Catholicism, its place in contemporary society, and its relationship to and with other religions. Concluding in 1965, Vatican II ushered in historic changes to the ways in which Catholics experienced their faith, the mass, and religious congregations in general (Fialka, 2003; Quiñonez and Turner, 1992). Already in a process of renewal and self-reflection, American sisters responded enthusiastically to the calls and promise of Vatican II (Briggs, 2006; Kaylin, 2000; Koehlinger, 2007; Quiñonez and Turner, 1992).

However, as Fialka (2003) points out, the Council left much to be desired with regard to gender equity in the Church. For example, of the 15 religious sisters present at Vatican II, only one was an American (Sister Mary Luke Tobin) and all were restricted to ‘nonparticipant observer’ status, much like the Protestant clergy who attended. None of the women were permitted to deliberate the Council’s agenda with the male theologians, even though many of these women were accomplished theologians themselves. I argue that it is here that we see the second effort on the part of the Church hierarchy to arrest the progressive changes occurring in congregations of American sisters. By allowing only 15 women, and just one American woman, to be present, the Vatican was once again reifying the notion that women are not equal and do not have the same (or any) legitimate authority in determining Church doctrine. As a result, the women who were present were basically told that they may ‘look, but don’t touch.’

I contend that this was a very public effort to reestablish the traditional gender boundaries within the Church. While on the surface the words of Vatican II signaled the potential for greater inclusion of women in decision-making in the Church, the subtle actions of exclusion at the council sessions relegated them to empty promises. Ultimately then, as Mills and Ryan (2001) argue, the Vatican II period theoretically suggested that women’s autonomy and influence in the Church was growing, yet simultaneously gave even greater power to male Church authorities to ‘govern the lives of religious institutes, particularly those of women, than had been the case in previous times’ (Mills and Ryan, 2001: 61).

Structures of authority

In citing the sisters’ ‘commentaries on patriarchy’ and challenge of the bishops, who were the ‘[C]hurch’s authentic teachers of faith and morals,’ the CDF report pointed to a larger issue of how power is structured in the Catholic Church. The tradition of official Church teaching residing solely with the patriarchy has its roots in the concept of papal infallibility, one of the key outcomes of the First Vatican Council (Vatican I) in the late nineteenth century (Swidler, 1971). Essentially, the dogmatic constitutions emerging from Vatican I reaffirmed the notion that official Church teaching is legitimized only through the pope and cannot be challenged. Consequently, writings or actions regarding Church doctrine that deviate from official teaching are not only unrecognized by the hierarchy, but rendered incorrect by default.

In the light of this rigid and exclusionary institutional structure, I turn again to Max Weber, whose writings on authority prove useful in understanding how power is legitimized in the Church, specifically through the patriarchy. In its purest form, Christianity embodies Weber’s notion of charismatic authority, where the community is founded upon

a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin, as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader’. (Weber et al., [1915] 1978: 241)

The charismatic leader in this instance is Jesus Christ. While Weber’s description accurately describes the early Christian Church, I argue that through centuries of continued rule by men in the Church’s hierarchy, Catholicism has become closer to what Weber called the pure type of traditional authority. For example, Weber offers: ‘It follows that, in the course of routinization, the charismatically ruled organization is largely transformed into one of the everyday authorities, the patrimonial form, especially in its estate-type or bureaucratic variant’ (Weber et al., 1978 [1915]: 251). In its pure form, the legitimacy of traditional authority is ‘claimed for it and believed in by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers’ (Weber et al., 1978 [1915]: 226). More specifically, Weber’s notion of the estate-type domination applies to our case of power in the Catholic Church in that it

is that form of patrimonial authority under which the administrative staff appropriates particular powers and the corresponding economic assets … Appropriation may be carried out by an organized group or by a category of persons distinguished by personal characteristics … Domination of the estate-type thus involves a limitation of the lord’s discretion in selecting his administrative staff because positions or seigneurial powers have been appropriated by an organized group, a status group. (Weber et al., 1978 [1915]: 232)

In other words, we may look to Weber to understand how traditional authority applies to the Catholic Church specifically because power is centered at the top of the hierarchical organization, first with the pope and then the cardinals and bishops after him. These men represent those who Weber classifies as having the personal characteristics of the organized/status group required to exert domination over others in the system. For our purposes, it is of course important to note here that all of these individuals in the Church’s hierarchy are men.

Mills and Ryan (2001) add that, in terms of modernist notions of organizations, the Church evolved as one in which the right to rule over the larger organizational membership rested exclusively with the male hierarchy. From this view of the Catholic Church as a gendered organization then, the men of the patriarchy can be understood as exerting the same dominance over women as those in the management/professional class that Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977) describes. Therefore, we may draw comparisons between Kanter’s descriptions of secretaries in the corporate structure with the roles of sisters in the Catholic Church. As Kanter (1977: 98) suggests: ‘Secretarial role relations and the work orientations developed by secretaries served … to perpetuate the differentiation of the clerical and the managerial/professional hierarchies, to reinforce the low job ceiling for secretaries and to block their movement into the exempt ranks.’ In that framework then, if we understand the primary roles of sisters prior to Vatican II to be schoolteachers and the caretakers of the poor, rather than those capable of making organizational decisions, I submit that the sisters have become de facto ‘secretaries’ in the Catholic Church.

With the Catholic schools boom of the 1950s, the responsibility of the sisters for teaching became even more important. Kanter’s quote above points to the notion that this situation became self-perpetuating: the nature of secretarial work is such that ‘doing a good job’ simultaneously prevents women from earning managerial roles and makes them more indispensable as administrative support in the organization. In other words, as the ‘secretaries’ of the Church, the sisters became stuck and were unable to climb the organizational ladder. Additionally, given that for decades their work as teachers and social service providers was almost exclusively unpaid, I argue that the potential for non-religious replacements was essentially nonexistent. Though this perspective is somewhat limiting in that it fails to recognize the communal aspect of religious life and potentially dismisses the work that sisters do as purely administrative, the structures of workplace gender boundaries in corporate settings and in the Church are highly analogous. As the CDF report reminded the American sisters, and in turn all of the Catholic faithful, the bishops are the Church’s only authentic teachers. The leadership effectively reaffirmed the fact that the Catholic Church is not a democracy, especially when it comes to issues of dogma and official teaching. Dissent or contradiction of this traditional authority is not only discouraged, but also, as evident in the present discussion, liable to punitive repercussions.

Given that power in the Catholic Church is collected in the hands of a few men, it is necessary to further explore how the organizational structure functions in a gendered hierarchy. Acker (1990: 146) argues that an organization is gendered if ‘advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine.’ Specifically, Acker offers five criteria that serve to establish gender differences in an organization:

1. divisions of labor, of allowed behaviors, of locations of physical space, of power;

2. the construction of symbols and images that explain, express, reinforce, or sometimes oppose those divisions;

3. interactions between women and men, women and women, men and men, including all those patterns that enact dominance and submission;

4. gendered components of individual identity … such as … choice of appropriate work, language use, clothing; and

5. gender is implicated in the fundamental, ongoing processes of creating and conceptualizing social structures. (Acker, 1990: 146–147)

While each of these characteristics may be found through an examination of gender inequality in the Catholic Church, I am most concerned with components of the first four. Acker’s argument that gendered workplaces are reinforced through divisions of labor and the separation of physical workplaces, and through language usage and clothing is the most useful for our present discussion. I concur with Acker’s contention that these processes can occur simultaneously and, in some instances, reinforce each other to further the gender boundaries in organizations. In the case of sisters in the Catholic Church, one can point to a long history of segregated spaces, distinct clothing, and similar methods of control having been exerted upon them, thus rendering them second-class citizens. In fact, Mills and Ryan (2001) point to the Church’s gendered rules for men and women, which were shaped by centuries of cloister and celibacy. These restrictions served as the primary tools for creating and recreating notions of masculinity and femininity in the Catholic Church. As men assumed the positions of power, women in turn took up many of the service-oriented functions. As such, sisters in the Church were poised to subscribe to the discourse surrounding archetypical feminine roles, including teaching, ministering to the helpless, and nursing. Though they have a certain degree of autonomy in these ministries, any authority that these women do claim is thus rendered illegitimate in the eyes of the patriarchy, and such attempts have been met with censure and, in some cases, excommunication. Below, I will examine two particular hegemonic forces in which I see evidence of Acker’s descriptions of gendered workplaces in the Catholic Church, particularly in post-Vatican II America.

The habit

Yet not all religious orders abandoned the habit in the wake of Vatican II, and within some orders there remain sisters who still wear the habit today. Kaylin (2000) writes that the decision to wear or not wear the habit is often viewed as a statement of one’s political leanings within the Church. Unlike those who dress in plain clothes, those sisters who cling to the habit are seen as traditional, conservative, and reticent toward change or progressive ideologies. Therefore, the issue of the religious sister’s habit raises questions related to structure versus agency. It is clear that for some sisters the habit is not so much a tool of Church hierarchy to render sisters inferior and controlled in the institutional structure, but rather their way of visibly embracing their vocations in the world. While this does point to an alternative reading of the habit’s function in the structure/agency debate, ultimately I do believe that the habit has served over the years to limit religious sisters’ position in the Church. Though fashioned in a minimalist way, the habit remains a conspicuous reminder of one’s religious vows. Given that the habit and veil function to remove the sister’s gender identity and individual distinction as a woman from her performance in society, I argue that it serves as a useful tool of the Church hierarchy to keep religious sisters in their place in the institutional structure. By requiring or strongly encouraging the habit, Church leaders construct the controlling image of the religious sister as void of femininity and thus simply a meek servant of the Church. Sisters who willingly choose to wear the habit, though exercising personal agency, could be seen as capitulating to the wishes of the Church hierarchy, given the long history of the habit as a tool of confinement. Rather than reading this action as evidence of free will, I submit that religious sisters who retain the habit and continue to serve the Church in stereotypical gender roles further symbolize hegemonic control in the 21st century.

Finally, one may recognize that many of the sisters’ more progressive actions and public challenges to the patriarchy occurred simultaneously with their abandonment of the habit in the years after Vatican II. I suggest that this is not merely coincidental, but rather reflects another kind of agency in the discussion – one whereby these women rejected the prescribed norms of their dress. Instead, religious sisters began to look more like secular women in 20th-century American society, who of course were leaving their traditional roles as homemakers and mothers confined to the house in order to pursue their own professional careers in the work world.

Women’s ordination

Another, perhaps even more obvious, way in which gender inequality is manifested in the Catholic Church is through the institution’s ban on the ordination of women. The modern Church’s official position prohibiting women’s ordination, as adopted and maintained by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, was originally put forth by Pope Paul VI in 1976 (Daigler, 2012). Known as in Persona Christi, the argument asserts that women cannot be ordained priests, because their gender prevents them from sharing a physical resemblance to Jesus Christ. Similarly, Church authorities argue that the Scriptures are the primary source of Church law and no evidence can be found in them that Jesus Christ ordained any women during his ministry (Daigler, 2012). Byrne (1994) goes further in suggesting that women’s bodies and essentialized gender roles have been used powerful means of supporting the ban on women’s ordination. For example, Byrne (1994: 100) argues that ‘our theology of the proper role and dignity of women is … skewed because it is determined by our biological function.’ Perhaps even more clearly, the author continues:

[T]he present system is based on two theological presuppositions. One has a scriptural basis; it says that Jesus chose women to be disciples and men to be apostles. The other has its basis in the symbolic ordering of reality: it says that the Father sends the Son into the world and so it establishes a male chain of command. Both of these are about leadership and the exercise of authority because, inexorably at present, in the Catholic system, you cannot exercise fullness of any leadership role unless you are male and you are ordained. Only the ordained may lead. [emphasis added] (Byrne, 1994: 103)

Emboldened by Vatican II’s focus on social justice and the document Gaudium et Spes in particular, which called upon Catholics to fight abuse and anything that devalues human beings, many Catholic men and women began to revisit the question of women’s ordination in the latter part of the twentieth century (Briggs, 2006: 133–134). Recognizing that they had been victims of injustice through gender discrimination, religious sisters also became more vocal about demanding equality through the priesthood. Briggs (2006) discusses two groups in particular that raised the issue in the wake of Vatican II, the LCWR and the Women’s Ordination Movement (WOM), founded in 1975.

Founded in 1956 as the Conference of Major Superiors of Women, the LCWR faced one of its first major issues of contention with Rome when it looked to change its name in 1971. Church leaders initially objected to the use of the word ‘leadership’ in the title of LCWR, as they feared it conveyed a false sense that the group was deferring less to male authorities and taking matters into its own hands (Briggs, 2006; Quiñonez and Turner, 1992). In response to its calls for social justice and, in turn, women’s ordination, the LCWR and the WOM were in effect told that this form of gender equality was beyond the scope of what the term justice meant. Church leaders and theologians once again attempted to quell the call for women’s ordination through a reminder that

God had created the Church as a hierarchy of authority, whereas the world was run by political arrangements on a human level. According to this line of thinking, the Church worked in a top-down fashion, God revealing the sacred truths through the pope and the ‘teaching authority’ of the bishops downward to the people. It wasn’t for ordinary Catholics to bring their own standards of social justice to these truths, which included a ban on women priests … Those things, the Church authorities had decided, were beyond categories of social justice; they were what they were because God said so. (Briggs, 2006: 141)

I submit that this reasoning provides further evidence of Weber’s (Weber et al., 1978 [1915]: 227) pure type of traditional authority, in that he argues that ‘it is impossible for law or administrative rule to be deliberately created by legislation. Rules which in fact are innovations can be legitimized only by the claim that they have been “valid of yore,” but have only now been recognized by means of “Wisdom.”’ In other words, the Church hierarchy was able to dismiss the calls for women’s ordination by religious sisters and others based solely on the notion that it has been invalid since the beginning of Christianity, and as such cannot be changed now just because some people wish it.

As the movement gained momentum, however, religious sisters were not the only Catholics calling for women to be ordained as priests. In fact, Daigler’s (2012) detailed history of women’s ordination in the United States highlights the fact that the movement did not originally begin with vowed religious sisters, but rather with laywomen. Flowing from the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, founded in England in 1911 to secure right to vote for women, the St Joan’s International Alliance expanded its mission ‘to promote the equality of rights between women and men in political, social and church life’ and specifically to work toward the ordination of women (Daigler, 2012: 13–14). The St Joan’s Alliance quickly expanded across the globe, establishing chapters in 24 countries on five continents by the 1970s (Daigler, 2012).

Though Vatican II may have helped to bring the issue to the forefront of Catholic consciousness, there is evidence of women being ordained in the Mediterranean region going back to the first few centuries of the Christian Church (Byrne, 1994; Daigler, 2012). Considered rogue and not sanctioned by the Church, some bishops took to ordaining women not just as priests, but also as bishops, thereby making the ordination of women a self-sustaining process through the Church’s tradition of apostolic succession (Moon, 2008). Similarly, Daigler (2012) points to considerable evidence of theologians, priests, and bishops offering their support for gender equity in the Church in regard to women’s ordination. Perhaps more encouraging, however, is the fact that advocates of women’s ordination found papal support over the years, through speeches, encyclicals, pastoral letters, and similar official documents that promoted the advancement of women’s issues and calls for increased roles for women in the Church. The author quickly qualifies this, however, with the observation that this support was ‘almost certainly unintended’ (Daigler, 2012: 107). In other words, any perceived connection between support for women’s roles in the Church and women’s ordination was a misinterpretation. Certainly, the prevailing view of the Vatican, particularly in the past two decades, has been categorical denunciation of women’s ordination, first with Pope John Paul II’s 1994 writing Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: On reserving priestly ordination to men alone, which not only required that all of the Catholic faithful recognize that ordination was the exclusive province of men, but also forbade further discussion of the subject (Byrne, 1994; Daigler, 2012).

In contextualizing the Catholic Church’s prohibition on women’s ordination, several womenpriests have drawn comparisons with the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s (Moon, 2008; Ronan, 2007). In pointing to the ways in which it discriminates against women, the womenpriests argue that the Church is compromising its position as a moral and ethical authority and the validity of its views on injustice of any kind. Daigler (2012) offers examples of women claiming that their support for women’s ordination was a matter of conscience (2012: 77). Through women’s ordination, the womenpriests are choosing not to obey what they consider to be an unjust law – in this case Canon 1024, which excludes women from ordained ministry and, in turn, any potential governing power within the Church (McDermott, 2003: 21). Lusvardi (2012) specifically argues that the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes provided Catholics with some of the clearest writings on the primacy of conscience to date. For instance, the author quotes the first paragraph in full, which says:

In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. (Lusvardi, 2012)

Therefore, womenpriests and their supporters justify their disregard for Canon 1024 by characterizing the ban on women’s ordination as an unjust law that was imposed upon them and one which violates moral conscience because of its implicit gender discrimination.

Ronan (2007) suggests that the debate on the women’s ordination movement is appropriately situated within the context of the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, yet she cautions against the use of universalist language that characterizes second-wave feminism. Moon (2008: 128), too, in her interviews with several womenpriests, finds the movement’s tendency to universalize women to be problematic. She asserts:

Other women described women’s ‘ministerial gifts,’ listing qualities stereotypically associated with women (caring, nurturing, life-giving, loving, and empathic, for example). While these are all good qualities, they are good qualities for both men and women. Essentializing women only further privileges that which male supremacy considers as attributes of women.

Ronan (2007) argues further that liberal worldviews like those of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP) movement and Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) risk forwarding the causes of white women while essentializing women of color and women in the developing world. In focusing almost exclusively on the ordination of women in European and American societies, Ronan contends that these groups fall victim to perpetuating the Western hegemony that so many feminists of the third wave seek to eliminate. Consequently, Ronan (2007) levels harsh criticism at the comparisons between the exclusion of women in the priesthood and institutionalized racism through apartheid, and calls on the RCWP to ‘revise its goals, theology and actions in [the] light of the massive and world-historic ruptures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ (Ronan, 2007: 159).

Daigler (2012) and Moon (2008) point to other troubling issues with the womenpriests movement. Daigler remarks that the movement has been largely devoid of racial and class diversity, essentially belonging to privileged white women. Similarly, Moon questions why those in favor of women’s ordination feel the need to legitimize the movement through an adherence to apostolic succession, which she criticizes as fundamentally patriarchal and therefore a device that perpetuates institutional hierarchy. Instead, the author suggests the movement rethink its model and embrace one that disregards this convention altogether. Moon’s (2008) condemnation of womenpriests’ adoption of apostolic succession also falls in line with many third-wave feminist critiques of white feminist movements, and the argument bears a striking similarity to Audre Lorde’s famous essay The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde, 1984). While Moon’s (2008) point is well taken, it is difficult to imagine the goal of legitimizing women’s ordination being attained through channels other than those set forth in Church doctrine for priestly ordination. In order for women to achieve equal footing with their male counterparts at the altar and to have their ordinations recognized in the eyes of the Church and Catholic faithful, it is ultimately necessary for the process to be identical for both men and women; otherwise, there is risk of further gender subjugation.

I agree with Ronan (2007) in her refutation of the discursive tendencies of second-wave feminists and believe that the comparison to apartheid proves to be an awkward and unnecessary distraction from the larger discussion. The RCWP and those women and men around the world who wish to challenge the ban on women’s ordination would benefit from focusing on how the Church’s current intractable position on the issue weakens its overall authority to correct other forms of injustice. Rather than call time on the whole movement to advance women’s ordination in the Catholic Church, it would behoove these groups to adopt more inclusive language and work toward fighting other types of social injustice in the world in addition to pursuing their present goal.

Conclusion

The Church has long been an institution founded upon patriarchal authority and for centuries has structured its power in such a way that women play a subservient role. Through the lens of Weber’s (1978 [1915]) classical frameworks on authority and twentieth-century explications of gendered organizations, this paper offers a sociological perspective illuminating some of the dynamics of gender inequality in the Catholic Church, especially those that relate to American sisters.

The Second Vatican Council in the 1960s heralded the potential for dramatic change in the Catholic Church. Given its focus on ecumenism and social justice, many Catholics, including religious sisters, understood Vatican II to be a long overdue response to the changing times. As a result, orders of women religious embraced the Council’s calls to revisit their own specific missions and continue to adapt to the evolving needs of the world, which many orders had already begun in the previous decade.

Ultimately, though, the Church’s promises generally remained unfulfilled for religious sisters, especially those in the United States, and I point to several places where gender inequality persists. In the light of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2012 doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, American sisters find themselves looking inward to decide how they will respond to the changing landscape of the Catholic Church and the world. Given Pope Francis’s recent affirmation of Pope Benedict XVI’s critique of the LCWR and NETWORK, American sisters and women in the Church in general find themselves at a crucible moment once again.