The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [130]
With sentiments such as these simmering beneath the uniform image of the placid nun, it is not surprising that when the lid came off after Vatican II, it flew off with a vengeance. Many Benedictine sisters have explained to me that as other, more active religious congregations of women, founded not as monastics but as teaching or nursing orders, began to look, as Vatican II directed them to, at “both the charism of their founders and the needs of the present day,” they felt that they had good reason to abandon the traditional monastic dress that they’d adopted along the way. These active orders sometimes called the process “de-monasticizing.”
But for Benedictine women, the new situation proved a dilemma. The American church had long ago forced them into a mixture of contemplative and active religious life—the first Benedictine women who arrived in this country had been told that they would be cloistered nuns, as they had been in Bavaria, but soon found that they were expected to serve the growing immigrant population as teachers, catechists, or nurses. The women adapted, and like many other groups of Benedictine women who followed them, they served the church well for many years. But Vatican II and its aftermath led to an identity crisis. Were they monastic, or not? Contemplative nuns, or more active sisters? As one woman told me, “In all the ferment of meetings and talk of the late sixties and early seventies, we all too often got caught up in the fervor to be ‘with it,’ and let a lot of our living monastic traditions—somehow distilled in the habit—fall by the way.”
When Benedictine women speak of those days now, it’s often with bemusement. I can scarcely imagine the situation they found themselves in; having been made to dress uniformly for all of their adult lives, they were now, as one sister put it, “free to be me, at all costs.” She says of a friend in graduate school, “Her first fling was to make herself a kelly green habit, complete with veil.” Other sisters have told me about the confusion of shopping for clothes for the first time. One woman was seduced by an expensive, lavender silk slip in a store window, but having bought it, felt too guilty to wear it. Years later she finally gave it away, glad to have it off her conscience.
Unfortunately, the habit came to symbolize for many Benedictine women one’s political stance with regard to the Vatican II reforms. “The politics and conflict between factions in the early renewal period was something else,” one nun told me, adding that because the habit had symbolized so much of the old order, it quickly became a pawn in these political struggles. “This is what makes it difficult for sisters to discuss the habit without rancor, even today,” she said. In 1969, she wore the full habit as a graduate student and a part-time cab dispatcher. “In New York City,” she said, “anything goes, so I never felt out of place.” But when an older sister who was visiting told her that the community back home had essentially split into two factions, labeling people as liberal or conservative over whether or not they wore the habit, the younger woman said, “ ‘A plague on both their houses.’ We were on a noisy subway,” she explains, “and my sister was hard of hearing. I shouted out, ‘A plague on both their houses!’ just as the car screeched to a halt and everyone could hear me.”
Great diversity of opinion with regard to monastic dress still exists among Benedictine women. One former prioress dismissed