"You've Come a Long Way, Baby"

UNDER a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the hall of Los Angeles' Immaculate Heart of Mary Convent, Sister Anita Caspary talked last week with a white-haired woman in a simple print dress. Sister Anita is 54. The older woman, who has been an Immaculate Heart sister for more than 50 years, is agonizing over a decision. Should she join Sister Anita and 315 other nuns in leaving the order to form a new "lay community of religious persons"?

"Even when they are much older than I am, they still call me 'Mother,' " explains Anita Caspary. Two years ago, she gave up her religious name, Mother Humiliata, and her title of Mother General of the order, to become simply "president" of the community. But old attitudes persist. "Some of them want me to make their decisions for them," she says. "If I told this woman to come with our group, she would do it as a mark of obedience. But what I am trying to do is get her to make her own judgment. Younger women do not feel that pull of obedience," she adds. "A young person coming in might tell me my skirt is too long. But we sit down and talk things over and share our points of view."

More conservative than revolutionary, Anita Caspary has been an important bridge between the old and new, as the Immaculate Heart nuns have transformed themselves from a traditional religious order into an experimental kind of lay community with a question mark for a future. As head of the order, Anita Caspary intended that the Immaculate Heart experiments in renewal should be guided by the rather vague proposals put forward by the Second Vatican Council. "But slowly," she says, "the whole thing exploded." To facilitate their engagement with the realities of secular life, the nuns abandoned their habits, gave up scheduled prayers, and went beyond their teaching apostolate to take up a wider variety of public services. Cardinal Mclntyre objected to many of these departures from tradition; so did the Vatican, which last year ordered the nuns to abandon most of their ventures in reform.

For Sister Anita, as for her nuns, Rome's uncompromising order amounted to giving up a new mode of Christian service that they believed in deeply; collectively, they decided that they could not step back into the past. "If you bought the whole package of self-determination," Sister Anita says, "and you were being stopped every little while, then it seemed logical to break away. While I saw the break as inevitable, I didn't really want it. But I wondered how much energy you could spend fighting authority when you could spend that same energy doing what you should be doing." Anita Caspary hopes to preserve the best of both worlds in the new community. "We'd like to be free of these legalities which bind us to this or that religious life, but at the same time we want the richness of tradition of Immaculate Heart that the older people embody."

Sister Anita has spent virtually her entire adult life in that tradition. One of eight children in an actively Catholic Los Angeles family, Anita "wanted to be a teacher, a writer perhaps, with a little play-acting thrown in," but she had always considered the possibility of becoming a nun. As a student at Immaculate Heart College, she was impressed by the sisters ("Even then they weren't all in lock step"). After graduating, she entered the convent and began teaching English in its high school. The order sent her to Stanford for a doctorate in English literature (1948), and she became college president in 1957. Six years later she was elected Mother General. Says Corita Kent, the ex-nun and artist who is the order's most famous alumna: "She is a quiet leader, perfect for the age of Aquarius, when, you know, there are no big heads."

In the next few years, Anita Caspary will need to prove all her capacities as a leader. The new Immaculate Heart Community, which will admit married couples as well as single men and women to membership, is something new in the church. Its goal is flexibility, which could be its salvation or its undoing; the degree of individualism in careers and life-styles offered to members might erode the sisters' present sense of solidarity. Anita, though, is confident. "Now I am convinced that if tomorrow permission came to do everything we're doing, I would not want to go back. The old structure simply is not geared to the 20th century woman." One sideline booster is her 84-year-old mother. After watching Anita explain the order's new directions on television last week, Mrs. Marie Caspary --with just a touch of quiet pride --spoke her judgment: "You've come a long way, Baby."

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