Ministries
East meets West
By MARGOT PATTERSON
Melbourne, Ky.
At a gathering of women religious
from the United States and Central and Eastern Europe, St. Joseph Sr. Mary
Savioe recalled an evening she spent with sisters in Eastern Europe several
years ago. Savoie, who like many U.S. sisters stopped wearing a religious habit
in the 1960s, asked the Europeans there why they chose to wear a veil after
more than 40 years in which it and other obvious manifestations of religiosity
were forbidden. As Savioe recalls the moment, the Eastern European sisters sat
a little taller in their seats and said proudly of the veils they wore,
“This is a sign of our freedom.”
It was a moment to give pause to American women religious. After
all, many American sisters had found it liberating to shed their habits. Now
many Central and Eastern European sisters were finding it liberating to don
them.
The incident speaks to the different perspectives of nuns from
East and West today. Many Central and Eastern Europeans sisters are
triumphantly reclaiming traditions that some American sisters see as
anachronistic and superfluous. But the revitalization of religious life in
Central and Eastern Europe is also giving American sisters fresh hope in the
future, even as many of them struggle to cope with aging populations and
dwindling numbers in the religious communities they belong to.
Conversation between the two groups of sisters intensified this
summer when they met to discuss the effects on religious life of freedom and
oppression, affluence and poverty in a month-long intercultural retreat for
religious women from the United States and Central and Eastern Europe.
Participants in the gathering, called “Forum for Sisters,” met in
four retreat centers around the United States to discuss their vocations,
traditions and journeys in religious life before coming together for a final
week in Melbourne, Ky.
For many, the intercultural retreat in the United States confirmed
that the similarities between the sisters went far deeper than their cultural
differences. “We have discovered our common unity,” said Sister of
Divine Providence Mary Christine Morkovsky, from San Antonio, Texas.
Others agreed, yet it was the differences rather than the
similarities that sparked most comment.
“It’s an eye-opener to see these women talking about
their spiritual life so openly,” said St. Joseph Sr. Kathleen Foley, one
of the organizers of the conference. “We are having experiences that are
truly Christian in a biblical sense.”
The European sisters take their prayer life very seriously, said
Foley, who added that they are far more articulate than Americans in talking
about their faith. “The American way of talking about faith is not to
talk,” Foley observed.
Dominican Sr. Lucienne Siers agreed. “We as U.S. religious
have stripped our language of the faith experience. That was a gift we received
from the Central and Eastern European sisters.”
U.S. sisters help in Eastern
Europe
The backdrop to the conversation among the participants in
“Forum for Sisters” was the reality that religious communities in
Central and Eastern European are experiencing something of a renaissance and
attracting young women to them while most U.S. communities are not. The
material hardships some sisters in Central and Eastern Europe face also emerged
in conversation. Twenty-three-year-old Orésta Pastúkh, a member
of the Greek Catholic Sisters of the Holy Family from Ukraine, mentioned that
many young Ukrainian sisters are dependent for money on the old-age pensions of
older nuns in their communities and are forced to rely on their families to
furnish them such basic necessities as shoes or a winter coat.
Sisters from several Eastern European countries said priests and
bishops commonly expect them to work for free. What will happen to these women
when they get old, they asked.
For their part, American sisters discussed the dangers to
religious life posed by affluence. “It is a challenge to live a religious
life in an affluent society because it is oppressive. There are so many options
for us, and in a way it clutters the mind and the soul,” said St. Joseph
Sr. Margaret Nacke of Kansas City, Mo.
Consumerism, the busyness of American life, the challenge of
living simply in a culture that bombards people with messages to buy, buy, buy
were mentioned as distractions to spirituality. But despite the general
affluence of American culture, it became clear in conversation that American
sisters were struggling with their own forms of want and limitation.
“I’m just not challenged by affluence. I’m
challenged by diminishment, by the age of our sisters. They are all getting so
old. We’re letting go of all of our institutions,” said Sr. Patricia
Kolas from Naperville, Ill., a member of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ.
American religious women spoke of the difficulty of paying for a motherhouse
with fewer sisters earning salaries, decreasing government payments to Catholic
hospitals, the loss of Catholic institutions that employ the talents of U.S.
sisters, and the growing tendency of U.S. women religious to determine their
location on the basis of work, not proximity to their community.
St. Joseph Sr. Genevieve Schillo gave voice to the fears of
American sisters most starkly. “Is our future simply to die?”
Sr. Irén Tari, a member of the Sisters of Social Service
from Hungary, reflected that the superabundance of choices in American life
make it more unlikely that any one individual will choose religious life.
“If you have too many choices, there will be just a few
people who choose religious life. I don’t know how young people get to
know the religious life. Just sending out a brochure is not enough. You have to
be touched by the sisters. It has to be personal contact,” Tari said.
Individualism and community
The changing identity of American religious women and their
European sisters is the subject weaving in and out of their discussion. For an
outsider, what is interesting is how the conversation evolves elliptically and
more in private than in public. Controversy is minimal. Hot button issues like
the ordination of women, homosexuality, inclusive language, allegiance to the
pope - issues that would tend to divide the group along cultural lines, with
U.S. nuns more likely to be at odds with official church teachings than the
Central and Eastern European nuns - don’t arise in conversation.
Tari said she thinks that is for the best. “Our time together
is really not for that, to bring up heavy topics and have arguments. We have to
be bridges, not walls that separate us,” she said.
Religious life in Central and Eastern Europe is generally more
structured than in the United States, where many American women sisters live on
their own rather than in communities. Foley mentioned that most congregations
in the United States really don’t have a traditional “mother
superior,” whose permission must be sought by nuns for matters both major
and minor.
“In our country, each congregation has a prioress and we live
in communities,” explained Slovakian Sr. Katerína
Simalciková, an Ursuline. “In this country, there are sisters who
live alone, or two or three, without prioress. We are more dependent on our
prioress and our understanding of obedience and poverty is different.”
Indeed, even when American sisters talk about their ministry to
the poor, the European sisters tend to see them as expressing a materialistic
understanding of the vow of poverty.
“Our reach is God. This is our reach, not how money is
spent,” said Sr. Teresa Murányi of Romania.
Murányi believes deep-rooted differences in European and
American social structure shape the faith experiences of Americans and
Europeans. Despite the more individualistic lifestyle of many American sisters,
Murányi’s impression is that Europeans approach God more personally
and Americans more communally.
“In U.S. culture, faith is approached somehow through
society, through the society’s side or the human side,”
Murányi said. “In European experience, God is mostly ‘the Holy
One’ who always is and will be a mystery, who is the governor, the Lord. I
am a human being, a server. In the United States, the society is so strongly
engaged in this atmosphere of equality that somehow it’s very hard to
understand we are not equal with God.”
Like Irén Tari of Hungary, Murányi and fellow
Romanian Sr. Brigitta Klein are members of the Sisters of Social Service, an
order founded in 1923 by a Hungarian who became the first woman to take a seat
in the Parliament in Budapest. The Sisters of Social Service do not wear habits
and part of the mission of the order is to press for political and social
change that will benefit women and families. But Murányi and Klein
believe the equal dignity of women does not necessarily translate into women
and men always doing the same job. And like many Europeans, Murányi and
Klein think that American women have lost some of their femininity.
“When sisters from the United States are struggling for their
place in the church, they are struggling for equality between men and women on
a worldly level. As Europeans thinking on our place in the church, we feel
ourselves very feminine women in the church, as the heart of the church,”
said Murányi.
Culture and community
To an onlooker, the intercultural retreat underscores the not
unsurprising fact that while many American sisters see themselves as
countercultural they also very much reflect the values and experience of the
larger society they belong to. Their mobile, independent lifestyles, their
individualism, their professionalism - the European sisters noted that American
sisters always introduced themselves in terms of the job or the ministry they
held - seem typically American. The U.S. sisters were more affected by
advertising and more concerned with “image” than the European
sisters, the group decided. In conversation, the European sisters appeared to
assign greater value to both tradition and community. While reluctant to say
anything that could be construed as criticism, the Central and Eastern European
sisters said that common prayer is very important to them; they felt it
appeared to be less so for American religious.
“Individualism is very dangerous for us because really we are
invited to live in community, in real community with our struggles and with our
joys together,” said Simalciková. “And I think that in our
culture, the witness of community is very strong. In a society where family is
destroyed, where people are more individual, they need that we are a real
community and live together. So it is a witness because it isn’t
easy.”
The countries of Central and Eastern Europe all have their own
history and traditions. Sisters from one Eastern European country mentioned
tensions between older nuns who joined the underground church during the
communist era and younger women who became nuns after the collapse of
communism.
In conversations among themselves, the Americans brought up
concerns related to so many American sisters living independently.
Humility of Mary Sr. Veronica Ternovacz, an American from
Pennsylvania, voiced concerns about passing on the values of a religious
community. “You have to be there for a significant period of time to learn
the love of the heritage, to learn the spirit,” she said.
“We have to set up viable communities for the young people
coming in,” remarked Sr. Karen Kappell, a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual
Adoration from LaCrosse, Wis. “They really want that.”
Morkovsky hypothesized that the future of U.S. sisters may be to
address a different set of needs than those that preoccupied American sisters
in the past. Whereas active religious orders for women developed out of the
needs of an emigrant community in 19th century America, those needs have
largely been met today by a well-educated laity, one American sister
observed.
“Maybe our ministry is to be relationship builders, not
institution-builders,” said Morkovsky.
Schillo brought the conversation full circle. “We have not
been able to attract young women to our congregations. My future rests on my
ability to say we need to look to our European roots,” Schillo said.
Passion and pragmatism
Intercultural dialogue can highlight not only the differences
between cultures but the paradoxes within each culture as well. The Central and
Eastern European nuns commented not only on the kindness and openness of the
American sisters but on their practicality as well. “They try to always
realize a problem and at the same time to find a proper decision,” said
Pastúkh. “We are more concentrated on our problems.”
But in other areas, the Central and Eastern Europeans sisters
appeared every bit as practical - less polemical and more down to earth than
American nuns when discussing poverty and injustice.
“Social justice is a big word here. It is not yet a big word
in Hungary,” observed Tari. “The question in Hungary is not what we
could do for social justice but what needs to be done right now.”
One young nun from an Eastern European country said she felt her
community could learn something from the individualism of American sisters.
“We can be too disciplined. We lose our personality. I don’t think
it’s God will to break personality.”
Ironically, for all the permissiveness of American life, the U.S.
sisters seemed burdened by inhibitions the sisters from Central and Eastern
Europeans lacked.
Foley remarked that U.S. sisters don’t mention God often.
“In a religious community, you ought to be quite free to talk about
God,” she said.
Spiritual freedom always comes from a person’s inner self and
always faces obstacles, noted Murányi. “In a repressive regime such
as communism was, spiritual freedom means to be faithful to your own inside, to
church, to your culture. In a consumerist society, the obstacles of spiritual
freedom are those material values offered by society which come from every
side, from TV, from shops, from society’s libertine way of thinking,”
she said.
Sharing their call
The women in Melbourne, a core group of about 22 culled from the
larger number that met in separate retreats, have decided to plan a book on the
sisters’ experiences. It will be organized around the themes of call,
journey and transformation/regeneration, the topics that dominated their
discussions in the four retreats.
The theme of call was especially important. By all reports, the
American women were mesmerized by the accounts sisters from Central and Eastern
Europe gave of their call to consecrated life and the risks they took in
responding to it, many of them joining the underground church on pain of
imprisonment or death.
Klein, for instance, joined the underground Sisters of Social
Service in 1958, nine years after all the religious communities disappeared in
Romania. “The mother superior was courageous enough to accept me. It was
dangerous for her and for me,” Klein said.
Murányi, who also joined the underground church in Romania,
said she knew of only one sister in Romania who left the order during the
communist era. “Those sisters who were already sisters remained. They were
very faithful.”
She and other Central and Eastern European nuns were clearly
mystified why so many sisters in the United States left their religious
communities during the 1960s.
The American sisters described the stories of the Central and
Eastern European nuns as not only moving but transformative, prompting them to
reflect more deeply on their own spiritual journey.
“It’s been overwhelming to hear what they have gone
through. They had no role models. They didn’t even know other sisters in
some cases,” Foley said.
For their part, the Central and Eastern European sisters expressed
admiration for the open and easy way American sisters communicated with each
other and surmounted disagreements. In their communities in Europe, there is
too often an unpleasant spirit of domination and mistrust, several said.
The Europeans said they were struck by the happiness of American
life.
Klein noted, “All the people here in the United States are
smiling, and in our country nobody is smiling.”
But for almost all the women, the cultural differences they
detected seemed less important than the commonalities they shared as religious.
Even in the very different historical experiences of American and Central and
Eastern European sisters during the past half-century, the women found
surprising parallels.
“In Europe, the sisters lost members because of communism,
and in the United States they lost members because of Vatican II . ... The U.S.
sisters unknowingly did what the Europeans consciously did. The U.S. sisters
did not foresee the long-term consequences of their decisions. Today U.S. women
are looking for a community that they don’t see,” wrote a European
sister on the last day of the meeting in Kentucky.
“Is my task in Europe to be a bridge-builder between our
sisters before and after communism and the new generations of sisters? Is
bridge-building our real mission on both sides of the Atlantic?” she
asked.
Margot Patterson is NCR senior writer. Her e-mail
address is mpatterson@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, September 20,
2002
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