Nuns for the 21st Century

From Columbia University last year, a Roman Catholic nun working for her M.A. in Russian flew off to the Soviet Union to do interviews on the 1917 Revolution. At the University of California in Berkeley, one of the nation's best centers for Hispanic studies, another nun, expert in Spanish, has just been offered a job as a teaching fellow. In New York, sisters attending Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart avidly study the sometimes shocking works of Samuel Beckett, and other nuns press curiously into a Second Avenue loft to take in the blasphemous black mass of Jean Genet's The Blacks.

Many such horizon-widening studies for U.S. nuns are planned and sponsored by the Sister Formation Conference, an organization successfully dedicated to raising the educational standards of the nation's 104,000 teaching nuns. Says Sister Bertrande Meyers of Missouri's Marillac College, which runs a year-round training program for the conference: "We prepare nuns for the 21st century."

How Many Hail Marys? Until recently, most U.S. sisters were barely prepared for the 19th. In 1952, one survey showed that only 13 out of the 255 religious communities had training programs to provide their nuns with bachelor's degrees, while 118 had no educational facilities of their own. So heavy was pressure from bishops to get nuns, even if badly trained, into expanding parochial-school systems that thousands of sisters were sent out to teach after two years of a spiritual novitiate. By secular standards, few were qualified to do much more than keep order in class and provide a "one Hail Mary and two Hail Marys make three Hail Marys" level of instruction.

Sister Formation has helped change that. Founded in 1954 by the National Catholic Education Association and superiors of the principal U.S. sisterhoods, the conference has set up four fulltime accredited centers for nuns at Catholic women's colleges, organized dozens of summer courses for sisters already committed to parochial-school teaching. It has persuaded well-fixed orders to open their facilities to less affluent sisterhoods, and to Episcopal nuns as well. About nine-tenths of the nation's sister hoods have added in whole or part a standard five-year curriculum for nuns --heavy on liberal arts, light on professional education courses. Sister Formation's summer courses, and its monthly bulletin edited by Sister Ritamary of Washington, sometimes offer more avant-garde theology than most seminaries for priests allow.

A Wider Mission. The aims of Sister Formation are not narrowly professional or narrowly Catholic. According to Sister Annette Walters, the Minnesota psychologist who has been its executive director since 1960, the conference seeks to integrate a nun's spiritual and educational training. One current debate within the conference involves this spiritual training; some religious superiors, like Mother Regina of the Sisters of Mercy, believe that the conference should take its norms from the zealous Better World Movement, founded by Italian Jesuit Riccardo Lombardi.

Sister Formation believes that nuns should take a wider and more active mission role in the world. Thus nuns majoring in sociology at Marillac spend long hours in St. Louis courts learning how the law operates, and those at Mundelein study civil rights and the psychology of poverty. In pursuit of higher education, nuns sometimes exchange their habits for dresses (as did the Columbia student who toured Russia) or get ecclesiastical permission to study writers, such as Sartre and Gide, whose works are on Rome's Index of Forbidden Books. And when nuns go on to graduate school, says Sister Mary Ann Ida of Mundelein, "the best type of university is often a state or large private university, and not necessarily a Catholic one."

"We must be dedicated to being the best-prepared teachers possible," says Sister Mary Emil of Detroit's Mary-grove College, who believes that "we are within ten to 15 years of establishing the sisterhoods as the best-trained teachers on the American scene." Since one-tenth of the nation's children attend Catholic parochial schools, Sister Formation represents a national asset that will pay off not just in better-educated sister-teachers but also in better-educated Americans.

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