Within a few years
of my departure, many communities, especially women's communities, changed
beyond recognition. The mandate of Vatican II for Roman Catholic
communities, which of course spilled out into Anglican communities—(which
always had one eye on Rome and another on England—so much for
authenticity)—had been for the communities to recall the spirit of their
founders and regroup accordingly, with new constitutions. Little did the
Vatican realize that it had opened a Pandora's box, because many of the women
founders of women's communities were radicals who had been forced into
enclosure and subjected to other strictures because of the misogynist and
restrictive eras in which their communities were founded. But now the women
took the bit in their teeth, and were off, especially in America.
Some, like the
Ursulines, recovered the spirit of their foundress, Angela Merici, and cast off
the enclosure which had been imposed on them, which often had prevented them
from optimally taking up the tasks of education of women and care of the needy
that she had enjoined. At the opposite end of the spectrum, others, like the
Carthusians, recaptured the vision not of their original simplicity (huts in
the woods, the simplest of food, clothing, and only the necessities for their
work), but rather the time of their greatest grandiosity when the Grande
Chartreuse was built and when they enjoyed the patronage of kings and queens
(at one time they owned the steel monopoly in France). Their new statutes ooze
with self-congratulatory phrases and Jansenism: we are the best, we are the
elite, we are a church within a church (meaning a law unto themselves and abuse
of the human person), and the distorted 'more masses more merits', 'suffering
is good for you' quasi-magical and sado-masochistic attitudes of the Counter-Reformation.
As far as the
women were concerned, the back-pedalling by the Vatican began almost
immediately. Pope John Paul II, that echt misogynist, wrote an encyclical on the
religious life, pointedly aimed at women, which said, yes, they'd always had
less money and poorer living conditions than the men, but that they should
submit and be content and stop causing trouble. Of course the encyclical neatly
overlooked the fact that in a number of cases, nuns had entrusted money to their brothers
to buy them (the nuns) some property, and instead the monks had used the nuns'
money to buy property (always the best pieces) for themselves. Today,
ironically, the remnants of these women's communities, who have been pioneers
for social justice and other causes in every corner of the world, are being
subjected to repeated scrutiny by the Vatican males—mainly for being uppity,
one suspects, which, being interpreted, means claiming their humanity.
The Anglican
communities, having been founded relatively recently, also had some
out-of-date, mainly Victorian, attitudes to break free from, as well as the
death-dealing, Manichean spirituality they had adopted wholesale from their RC
sisters (or which had imposed on them by their male founders) transmitted through von
Hugel and Evelyn Underhill. The Anglican view of habits, however, was
different: Anglican nuns
historically had to fight for the right to wear them, whereas among RC women it
was mandatory, and many RC sisters couldn't wait to ditch them. Many
communities went first to modified habits, which were often extremely ugly, and
then to secular clothes. A few dug their heels in and went in the opposite
direction, living an even more exaggerated and dehumanising life than was the
case at the beginning of Vatican II. Only a handful had the sense to retain
some sort of community dress for liturgy and formal occasions. No-one undertook
what was, I believe, at the heart of the Council's mandate, which was to rediscover
the reasoning, psychology and theology behind certain practices that made up
religious life at its best and give them contemporary expression.
All of the
communities, Anglican and Roman Catholic, went through a time of questioning
and change that was often ill-considered and far too rapid. The churches were
introducing changes into the liturgy, which were even more ill-considered.
No-one seemed to know what discernment meant any longer. No-one seemed to apply
consistent criteria to the changes under consideration. Silence was abolished. Talk
in the common room degenerated into discussion of individual pension pots and
ecclesiastical advancement.
The liturgy was degraded to hyperverbal
squawking; the attempt to make it more sensitive to gender was a disaster:
no-one had any idea what invaluable subliminal signals were being lost—for
example, the use of 'he' for God, when it indicates the reach, the stretch of
mercy and kenosis, which is far more
astonishing when it appears in men (who are physically stronger) than in women.
Chant was suppressed. Ancient hymns and glorious music were exchanged for
endless, repetitive, simple-minded explorations of the key of C, and the banal
and sentimental words one might hear in a third-rate cocktail lounge. As Annie Dillard once
put it, 'Who gave the nice Catholics [and Anglicans] guitars?' [Annie Dillard, Teaching
a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
(New York: Harper and Row, 1982) 18-19]
There
is a singing group in this Catholic church today, a singing group which calls
itself "Wildflowers." The lead is a tall, square-jawed teenaged boy,
buoyant and glad to be here. He carries a guitar; he plucks out a little bluesy
riff and hits some chords. With him are the rest of the Wildflowers. There is
an old woman, wonderfully determined; she has long orange hair and is dressed
country-and-western style. A long embroidered strap around her neck slings a
big western guitar low over her pelvis. Beside her stands a frail, withdrawn
fourteen-year-old boy, and a large Chinese man in his twenties who seems to
want to enjoy himself but is not quite sure how to. He looks around wildly as
he sings, and shuffles his feet. There is also a very tall teen-aged girl; she
is delicate of feature, half serene and half petrified, a wispy soprano. They straggle
out in front of the altar and teach us a brand-new hymn.
It
all seems a pity at first, for I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic
upbringing in order to attend Mass simply and solely to escape Protestant
guitars. Why am I here? Who gave these nice Catholics guitars? Why are they not
mumbling in Latin and performing superstitious rituals? What is the Pope
thinking of?
The community in
which I had been a novice was no exception. Most of the original nine founders
left or died. The new sisters, following Sister Q, were hell-bent (I used the
phrase advisedly) on getting ordained and becoming celebrity gurus, whether or
not they had anything to teach.
The superior, who had been my nemesis, tired of men, tired of the double life
she was leading, and, way ahead of the times, left the community to live with a
woman with whom she had fallen in love. With all this drive towards careers and
stardom and sex, and a growing sense of entitlement, the community became more
like a women's club than a religious community, forgetting, as if it had never known, that human beings are not limited to, are far more than sex, ambition and consumption. These activities may bring short-term self-esteem in some cases, but it is bought at the price of long-term self-respect. The pornografication of global populations, now blatant and overt, was already well under way.
The rich lady's money was
accepted, and the baroque harpsichord duly made its appearance in the austerely
beautiful, starkly modern chapel; Gregorian chant disappeared. The Offices were cut
both in number and content. The two most essential elements of religion—mystery and beauty (not just aesthetic beauty, but the difficult, often upside
down beauty of Christianity)—were suppressed without anyone's seeming to notice.
Ambition,
competition, fashions, politics, careerism; any pretence of community life, in
the sense of supporting one another in the way of contemplation, overflowing into loving and
serving the community and the world without counting the cost, vanished. Every
passing fad was, at least for a short time, enthusiastically embraced until the
members got tired of it or something more diverting came along. This is a key word, for conversion, the basis of monastic and Christian life, was exchanged for diversion. The house was
no longer a home but a hotel.
As time passed, the rich woman's legacy
disappeared through profligacy—frugality was evidently no longer an integral
part of the life—and the house, and other houses, had to be sold. What is
left of the community has retreated to a small convent in a distant state where
they lick their wounds, wondering whom to blame, and what went wrong.
While many
Catholics, both clergy and laity, were demanding that the Council's vision of
full participation for all in the church be realised, the Anglican rush to ordination meant that the
Episcopal Church and the Church of England (and other Anglican churches) were
becoming more clerical: laity were and are considered by many clergy no more than necessary nuisances, numbers of
bums in pews bearing pocketbooks that need to be picked, however genteel-ly.
Again, there was and is little regard for discernment—not only have the criteria been lost, but the selection committees seem to be looking for salesmen rather than those who seek holiness and wisdom—but then, the whole idea of vocation has degenerated into a sense of
entitlement. The seminaries have been just as bad as the religious communities, and
there was and is little or no resistance to the heedless, rudderless juggernaught that has been
unleashed. Is it any wonder that religious have left their communities in droves and
the laity have disappeared from the churches?
While the cultural
context has contributed much to the degeneration of the churches and the
communities, there has not, on the other hand, been any attempt to resist or even
discriminate what was and is appropriate to inculturate and what is not. The situation has been complex,
but my feeling is that the catalyst for the attitudes that have led to the dead end (with the emphasis on dead) of western Christianity in which we find ourselves is due in large measure to one person: Thomas Merton.