Dit is 'n aangrypende stuk (in vandag se NYT) wat nie eintlik oor 'n kerk gaan nie - die een hier onder oor Amerikaanse vroue-gelowiges. Dit gaan indirek oor 'n denkwyse wat in alle kerke, groepe en samelewings endemies is. Maar diep, diep gaan dit oor geloof wat 'n mens soms bring tot die punt dat jy ook onreg, verskriklike onreg verduur.
Gelukkig is daar sterk vroue, maar ook ander mense, wat deesdae sulke onreg met groot moed aanvat. My gebede is by hulle.
Hier is die artikel:
THE recent Vatican edict
that reproached American nuns for their liberal views on social and
political issues has put a spotlight on the practices of these Roman
Catholic sisters. While the current debate has focused on the nuns’
progressive stances on birth control, abortion, homosexuality, the
all-male priesthood and economic injustice, tension between American
nuns and the church’s male hierarchy reaches much further back.
In the 19th century, Catholic nuns literally built the church in the
American West, braving hardship and grueling circumstances to establish
missions, set up classrooms and lead lives of calm in a chaotic world
marked by corruption, criminality and illness. Their determination in
the face of a male hierarchy that, then as now, frequently exploited and
disdained them was a demonstration of their resilient faith in a church
struggling to adapt itself to change.
Like other settlers in the West, Catholic nuns were mostly migrants from
Europe or the American East; the church had turned to them to create a
Catholic presence across a seemingly limitless frontier. The region’s
rocky mining camps, grassy plains and arid deserts did not appeal to
many ordained men. As one disenchanted European priest, lamenting the
lack of a good cook and the discomfort of frontier travel, grumbled, “I
hate the long, dreary winters of Iowa.”
Bishops relentlessly recruited sisters for Western missions, enticing
them with images of Christian conversions, helpful local clergymen and
charming convent cottages. If the sisters hesitated, the bishops mocked
their timidity, scorned their selfishness and threatened heavenly
retribution.
The sisters proved them wrong. By steamboat, train, stagecoach and
canoe, on foot and on horseback, the nuns answered the call. In the
1840s, a half-dozen sisters from Notre Dame de Namur, a Belgian order,
braved stormy seas and dense fog to reach Oregon. In 1852, seven
Daughters of Charity struggled on the backs of donkeys across the
rain-soaked Isthmus of Panama toward California. In 1884, six Ursuline
nuns stepped from a train in Montana, only to be left by the bishop at a
raucous public rooming house, its unheated loft furnished only with
wind and drifting snow.
These nuns lived in filthy dugouts, barns and stables, hoped for
donations of furniture, and survived on a daily ration of one slice of
bread or a bowl of onion soup along with a cup of tea. They made their
own way, worked endless hours, often walked miles to a Catholic chapel
for services, and endured daunting privations in housing and nutrition.
There appeared to be no end to what was expected of the sisters. In
1874, two Sisters of the Holy Cross, at the direction of Edward Sorin,
the founder of the University of Notre Dame, opened a Texas school and
orphanage in a two-room shack with a leaky dormitory garret that the
nuns affectionately labeled “The Ark.” The brother who managed the
congregation’s large farm informed the sisters, who were barely able to
feed and clothe the 80 boarders, that he could not give the school free
produce — though they could buy it at a discount. The sisters also did
18 years of unpaid housekeeping work on a farm run by the men.
Sisters adapted to these physical, spiritual and fiscal exploitations
with amazingly good humor. Still, they chafed against their male
superiors’ unreasonable restrictions and harsh dictates. When they
directly questioned policy, bishops and priests moved to silence them. A
single protest could draw draconian reprisals on an entire
congregation.
In 1886, four Texas priests demanded that Bishop John C. Néraz replace a
superior, Mother St. Andrew Feltin, saying that she had “spread gossip”
and warned her sisters “to beware of priests.”
Bishop Néraz threatened the sisterhood with disbandment and removed
Mother St. Andrew from office. He hounded her for years, disciplined
other nuns she had befriended, suspended her right to the sacraments,
warned other bishops not to grant her sanctuary, undercut her efforts to
enter a California convent and even urged her deportation to Europe.
Finally, Mother St. Andrew laid aside her religious clothing, returned
to secular dress and cared for her widowed brother’s children.
Six years after Bishop Néraz died, Mother St. Andrew petitioned her
congregation for readmission. Donning her habit, she renewed her vows
amid a warm welcome from sisters who understood too well what she had
suffered.
Then as now, not all priests and bishops treated sisters badly, though
the priests who reached out to nuns in a spirit of appreciation,
friendship and equality could not alter the church’s institutional
commitment to gender discrimination. And, as now, some bishops,
dismissive of the laity, underestimated the loyalty secular Catholics
felt for their nuns.
In the case of Mother St. Andrew, tenacity and spirituality triumphed
over arrogance and misogyny. The Vatican would do well to bear this
history in mind as it thinks through the consequences of its unjust
attack on American sisters.
