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1. If we want to engage in the conversation about Catholic women and religious orders, we need to respond to what the women are actually saying. Nobody is saying "There should be no rules." Nobody is saying "An order rejected me and therefore no orders are good." No, what's....
2...being said boils down to something that has come up again and again, and I'm just going to say it as clearly as possible: Catholic women do not, for the most part, have the experience of being valued in the Church.
NOTE WELL: I did not say "...BY the Church." The...
NOTE WELL: I did not say "...BY the Church." The...
3...Church as a loving mother loves and values all of her children. Nor am I dragging up tired secular feminist tropes: good, holy, faithful women do NOT want to be priests or deacons, do NOT want birth control or abortion, and do NOT want the Church to applaud...
4...the tenets of secularism at all, let alone secular feminism. In fact, good, holy, faithful women are the lifeblood of most parishes, spending thousands of hours doing unpaid volunteer work in every area imaginable: teaching children, assisting at Mass as...
5...lectors, choir members, EMHCs, etc., running fundraisers from small bake sales to huge parish festivals, assisting the paid parish employees during busy seasons when extra paperwork must be filed, and doing so much more it can't all be listed. And most of that work...
6...is invisible and thankless. When it's not, guess what? We hear complaints. From men. "Look at this modernist parish with all these women. You won't get priestly vocations from boys who have to serve at the altar with girls. Ewww, women giving out Holy Communion--that's...
7...gross. You want boys and men involved in parishes? Get all those bleeping women off the altar." And on and on it goes, yet the men do not simply take over and sign up to do All The Things, because they cannot be bothered.
And in the midst of all of this...
And in the midst of all of this...
8...in spite of the attitudes and the eye-rolling, some young women still feel God's call to religious life. They know that the boys who discern are welcomed with open arms to visit the seminary and talk to the bishop. They don't expect that, but they do hope their...
9...pastor or the parish vocations director will encourage their vocation. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes they get told, "Oh, well, I don't know. Does the order have a website? Maybe you can contact them directly." Meanwhile that creepy older dude at the parish...
10...makes jokes in their presence about how religious life is only for girls who can't attract men, and they should just wait for Mr. Right to come along because they're too pretty to be a nun. But they love Jesus and are nurturing this call to religious life...
11...and then they see the requirements. "You must have a bachelor's degree but be debt free and we only take women up to age 30. You cannot have any physical or mental health issue including food allergies or insomnia. You must schedule three discernment visits...
12...of increasing length while maintaining your full-time job because we're not promising anything, and it will require more time off than your job allows. If we accept you, we can ask you to leave any time before your final vows for any reason whatsoever."
Meanwhile...
Meanwhile...
13...a young man in the parish who has indicated an interest in the seminary has had, shall we say, a very different experience, because, as the Church's representatives will tell the young lady again and again, the priesthood is vital and necessary and important, while...
14...her vocation is not. The Church doesn't actually need nuns for anything, they'll tell her. The Church could order all the convents closed tomorrow if she wanted. The Church is doing her a favor to let her consider religious life. She should just get over herself...
15...and prove her worthiness by spending $80,000 on the cheapest bachelor's degree she can find, paying off all the debt between graduation at 22 or 23 and that magic cut-off age of 30, simply not having any physical or mental health issues, and jumping through...
16...the hoops, however impossible, of every religious order to which she applies. If she can't do these things, then she probably doesn't have a vocation anyway--but, hey, the parish still needs tons of unpaid, mostly-female volunteers to do all the things, so...
17...you can still be useful.
Now: this is not my story as I always knew marriage was my vocation. But it is the story of other Catholic girls, and I find their stories heartbreaking. I find it even more heartbreaking when their stores are dismissed with the usual eye-rolling.
Now: this is not my story as I always knew marriage was my vocation. But it is the story of other Catholic girls, and I find their stories heartbreaking. I find it even more heartbreaking when their stores are dismissed with the usual eye-rolling.
