"Surprise and Pain" in the Cloister

By Richard N. Ostling

Roman Catholicism's religious orders prize their independence, especially when it comes to writing the constitutions that govern their lives. Thus it was no routine matter last week when the Vatican confirmed that it is usurping this traditional prerogative and writing a new constitution for the Discalced* Carmelite nuns.

Pope John Paul has a longstanding personal interest in the order. He refers to its founder, the mystic St. Teresa of Avila, and her colleague St. John of the Cross, as "the spiritual teachers of my interior life," and as a young priest he unsuccessfully sought permission to join a related Carmelite order. The Vatican said that the intervention is "an expression of the great interest and the paternal attention of the Holy Father" to safeguard the Carmelites' "unity" and "fidelity." But the action also reflects the Pontiff's insistence that Catholic nuns hold to the old ways of discipline, dress and decorum.

The Carmelite rule calls for a strict regimen based on silence and prayer. However, an experimental charter approved by the Vatican in 1977 allowed more leeway for the 13,000 nuns, who live in 826 convents across 72 nations, with the largest group in Spain. Though four-fifths of these nuns favor the moderate reforms, a strict traditionalist faction has been lobbying against them.

The Vatican takeover was ordered last October by Secretary of State Agostino Cardinal Casaroli. In a harsh private letter to Father Felipe Sainz de Baranda, superior of the female and male Discalced Carmelites, the Cardinal indicated that Rome would side with the traditionalist minority in the new constitution. Those who dislike the result, Casaroli said, can seek "other forms of consecrated life"--in other words, leave the order.

Reform-minded nuns reacted with "surprise and pain," according to a sister in Rome. Father Sainz de Baranda wrote to the Pope, "Permit me, Your Holiness,

to express my displeasure . . ." Adding to the turmoil was the fact that the Carmelites had revised their charter at Rome's initiative. The Vatican, complained an exasperated nun, "has summarily dismissed an experiment which it ordered these women to undertake, and is now accusing them of infidelity for doing so."

The Carmelite case, reminiscent of the Pope's temporary seizure of the Jesuits' administration, is expected to be the only instance in which John Paul's Vatican will directly rewrite a constitution. However, it may signal future problems for many other orders that are awaiting Vatican approval of their revised constitutions. Says a ranking nun from another order: "Nothing this important is done without the intent to send a message."

Founder St. Teresa also aroused intense controversy in 16th century Spain when she organized a branch of Carmelites to return to the severe solitude and renunciation practiced by the early Christian hermits. For centuries thereafter, the order was among the strictest in the church. Nuns meditated and prayed on behalf of others and speech was restricted. Members lived entirely behind high walls and spoke to outsiders only through metal grates or other barriers.

% Though the general pattern of spiritual life remains, convents have adopted new practices since 1977. Nuns in tropical climates, for example, need not wear the customary woolen habit. Daily hours may be shifted to local needs, and a prioress no longer has absolute sway over her convent. Beyond that, however, in rare cases nuns have abandoned the habit altogether. Also, sisters are occasionally leaving the cloister for personal missions like visiting a sick parent, and, with special permission, for more mundane matters like schooling. A prioress in Barcelona even appeared on a TV talk show. "These are the exceptions that get publicity," says a Carmelite in Rome. Nonetheless, such liberties would once have been unthinkable; to traditionalists like Mother John, prioress of a convent in Schenectady, N.Y., the language of the reformed charter "was so broad that it was not safeguarding the essential dimensions" of the Carmelite vocation.

The traditionalists, centered in Spain, want a strict charter based on the order's constitution of 1581. The legalistic 1581 document, written by Carmelite priests a year before Teresa died, specified everything from a strict regimen of fasting to the material from which sandals were to be made. Casaroli's letter declared that the 1581 constitution is the "genuine expression" of Teresa's desires. The great majority of the nuns, however, maintain that the important matter is not such details but the saint's spiritual vision, and that this is best perpetuated by following the simpler rule she wrote in 1567, which was the basis for the experimental charter.

Progressive sisters are now praying and writing the Vatican to plead for a modernized constitution. The prioress at the convent in the Roxbury section of Boston, Sister Therese, clasps her hands and smiles with confidence as she speaks in hushed tones of the traditionalist campaign. "All we know is that what they are asking is impossible. We're living in 1985."

FOOTNOTE: *Or "unshod"; sandals are worn to signify humility.

With reporting by John Kennedy/Boston and Roberto Suro/Rome