Spirited Lives

How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920

Carol K. Coburn, Martha Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780807847749, 9780807824733
• eBook ISBN: 9780807875711
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Made doubly marginal by their gender and by their religion, American nuns have rarely been granted serious scholarly attention. Instead, their lives and achievements have been obscured by myths or distorted by stereotypes. Placing nuns into the mainstream of American religious and women's history for the first time, Spirited Lives reveals their critical impact on the development of Catholic culture and, ultimately, the building of American society.
Focusing on the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, one of the largest and most diverse American sisterhoods, Carol Coburn and Martha Smith explore how nuns directly influenced the lives of millions of Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic, through their work in schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other social service institutions. Far from functioning as passive handmaidens for Catholic clergy and parishes, nuns created, financed, and administered these institutions, struggling with, and at times resisting, male secular and clerical authority.
A rich and multifaceted narrative, Spirited Lives illuminates the intersection of gender, religion, and power in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America.

1

The French Connection

When I see what the times are like, I feel it is not right to repel spirits which are virtuous and brave, even though they be the spirits of women.

-Teresa of Avila

Founders, Origins, and Early Activities

In spite of a storm of opposition from church authorities and social elites, legions of Catholic women responded to the social and religious exigencies of seventeenth-century Europe by becoming religious activists. Although the Council of Trent had renewed an earlier papal order man-dating strict enclosure for all women religious, and five papal decrees after Trent reinforced this ruling, these edicts were soon followed by the creation of dozens of new uncloistered communities of nuns.¹ They were especially numerous in France, where more than ninety congregations founded between 1600 and 1720 became active in teaching, nursing, and other charitable work.² Among them were the Sisters of St. Joseph, established at Le Puy around 1650. Like their sister communities, they appeared at a time when prevailing norms precluded almost any type of female leadership in the public sphere. A brief look at the context in which the CSJS emerged is helpful for understanding this community and others like it that pioneered new roles for women in society and the church and provided the foundation for the American CSJS almost two centuries later.

When first established, the new service-oriented religious congregations were suspect in the eyes of both civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Unlike officially sanctioned female monasticism with enclosure, solemn vows, and daily chanting of the Divine Office, the new communities engaged in work outside their convents, took simple vows, and were in constant contact with lay people.³ The Council of Trent had forbidden nuns to mix with the world, and respectable society saw an uncloistered religious lifestyle as improper and undignified. Members of the new women’s communities were labeled “Jesuitesses” and “galloping girls” and criticized for trying to do men’s work.⁴ French parlements condemned women religious “seen in the streets of the town and faubourg though forbidden to be out” and ordered that they be returned to their convents immediately “under good and secure guard” at the convent’s expense.⁵

Actually, uncloistered women religious had been numerous in earlier European society. Even after official papal prohibition, many medieval women continued to live like religious, though not in traditional monasteries. Such groups as tertiaries, beguines, and Sisters of the Common Life lived in communal houses or with their families, devoting themselves to prayer and helping others. Some were mystics, like Catherine of Siena; others, like the Grey Sisters, nursed the sick in hospitals or in their homes.⁶ They continued this unorthodox lifestyle as long as rules on enclosure were not consistently enforced, but the Reformation’s focus on abuses in the church prompted religious authorities to take a harder line on violations of canon law. Like earlier Catholic reformers, church leaders emphasized stricter control of females, and papal decrees after Trent signaled a renewed and serious intent to suppress all organizations of activist women.⁷

In seeking to restrict female endeavors, the Catholic Church followed long-established doctrine and practice. From earliest times Christian theology had taught the inferiority of women. St. Paul said: “Wives be subject to your husbands as to the Lord” and “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”⁸ Aquinas argued that “woman is by nature subject to man, because the power of rational discernment is by nature stronger in man.”⁹ Canon law, like many civil law codes, entitled men to beat their wives. In the post-Reformation church the drive to enforce clerical celibacy produced a more intense hostility toward the “guilty” sex. Attempting to eliminate priests’ wives and concubines, preachers and confessors frequently described women as threats to male virtue and instruments of the devil.¹⁰

Prevailing social trends also limited women’s roles in early modern Europe. The economy’s emphasis on large-scale production gave females fewer opportunities as independent artisans and entrepreneurs, and increasing political centralization encouraged greater legal subjugation of wives to husbands. New laws gave male heads of families more control of property, curtailing the ability of married women to control their wealth. They could be punished and imprisoned at their husband’s wish. Both civil and religious authorities became more hostile toward unmarried women.¹¹ Symptomatic of the mentality of the times was the persecution of witches, which reached its height between 1600 and 1650. Although estimates have varied, recent figures indicate that more than 100,000 people were prosecuted throughout Europe on charges of witchcraft—80 percent of them women. The Papacy legitimized the persecution in Catholic areas by defining witchcraft as a heresy to be eradicated.¹²

In view of prevailing opinion and custom, the mass movement of Catholic women into active religious communities at this particular time was profoundly countercultural. The impetus for what Elizabeth Rapley called a “fantastic conventual invasion” came from the wars, natural disasters, and grim socioeconomic conditions of the time and the intense spiritual fervor generated within Catholicism by the Catholic Reformation. Initiative, however, came from the women themselves. Far from being “called forth” by the church, they struggled to win acceptance, often against great odds, from ecclesiastical leaders. Eventually they met less opposition as the value of their services was recognized. Their existence was still contrary to papal decrees, but in France, religious and civil officials who supported them had precedents for ignoring unwelcome mandates from Rome. The patronage of influential elites also helped them survive.¹³

Life in Seventeenth-Century France

Ravaged by bloody civil and foreign wars, devastating plagues, famines, and epidemics, and torn by religious fanaticism and peasant unrest, France in the seventeenth century was a nation of extreme contrasts. The magnificence of classical literature and baroque architecture, the grandeur of Versailles, and the wealth of great aristocrats led earlier historians to write of the “splendid” century. More recently the research of economic and social historians has suggested that this was a tragic century during which most of the population suffered grinding poverty, misery, and often untimely death. Like other European states of the time, France was predominantly an agrarian society where approximately 90 percent of its eighteen to twenty million people lived in small towns and villages or were dispersed throughout the rural countryside. By the early 1600s the traditional agricultural economy was becoming increasingly inadequate to support the population as concentration of land in the hands of privileged elites expanded. Since most peasants, wage earners, and day laborers made a precarious living in the best of times, they were extremely vulnerable to adverse developments whether of natural or human origin.

Unfortunately, early modern France had no shortage of adversity. In the late sixteenth century, Europe had entered into a “little ice age” when average temperatures fell, shortening the growing season, reducing harvests, and causing famines. Malnutrition and starvation brought heavy mortality and a deeper and more widespread poverty. France had four deadly famines between 1630 and 1694 and several others almost as severe. The people also endured almost continuous warfare—international wars, civil wars, and a number of peasant and lower-class uprisings. These brought widespread devastation and destitution and inflicted the dreaded passage and/or billeting of soldiers upon peasants and townspeople. Periodic outbreaks of the plague increased the general misery.¹⁴

Contemporary observers painted a grim picture of appalling conditions. A physician in Blois wrote in 1662:

I have been practicing medicine in this part of the country for thirty-two years. I have never seen such desolation, not only in Blois[,] where there are about four thousand poor, including migrants from neighboring parishes in addition to the local indigent, but in the whole country. The famine is so great that peasants have no bread and consume decaying carcasses. As soon as a horse or any other animal dies they eat it.... Malignant fevers are beginning to spread, and with the heat, and so much humidity and rot, all these miserable people who are already weak will die very quickly. If God does not give us extraordinary assistance we can expect an enormous death toll.¹⁵

Children were particularly at risk under such circumstances. Some of those placed in the Couche of Paris, a home for the orphaned or abandoned, “were sold at eight sols apiece to beggars who broke their arms and legs so that people would be inclined to give them alms, and then let them die of hunger.”¹⁶

These tragedies coincided with the vast outpouring of religious energy produced in France by the Catholic Reformation. In part a reaction against Protestantism, the spiritual renewal within Catholicism found official expression in the Council of Trent, which met in several sessions between 1545 and 1563. Insisting, in opposition to Luther, that salvation requires the performance of good works in addition to divine grace, the council set the tone for Catholic post-Reformation spirituality. It was to be active and apostolic, directed outward toward the world and the salvation of souls. The individual search for holiness, including prayer and meditation, was to be combined with service of God in society.¹⁷

In France, the Catholic Reformation began with the close of the Wars of Religion at the end of the sixteenth century. By that time, decades of military combat between Catholics and Protestants and the partial toleration granted to Protestants in the Edict of Nantes had created religious zeal of exceptional intensity, in some cases fanaticism, among many adherents of both faiths. By recognizing two hostile churches in a society where Catholicism had been entrenched for centuries, the French government set the stage for an impassioned contest for souls. Besides trying to transform ignorant and nonobservant Christians into informed and devout believers, Catholic reformers struggled to win back Protestants to the “true faith.” The large scale of the institutional church, its network of parishes and personnel throughout the country, and its intimate connections with the upper levels of French society made its influence powerful and pervasive.¹⁸ As religious zeal became fashionable among French elites, prominent aristocrats and royal officials joined religious leaders in a crusade to implement the reforms of Trent and address the social problems of the age.¹⁹ Seeing monasticism as essential for the vitality of the church, they placed the reform of existing monasteries and creation of new ones among their first priorities.²⁰

The interest of early French reformers in monasticism, especially for women, was partly inspired by the printing press. In the late sixteenth century many important religious works were published in the vernacular and disseminated in France, including those of Teresa of Avila. Her humility, humor, and forthright common sense captivated her readers, mostly upper-class French women, who adopted the “devout” life and became active reformers. One of them, Madame Acarie, made her home a center for frequent meetings of the French devots, including government officials, leaders of the clergy, and prominent aristocrats.²¹ Madame Acarie sponsored a foundation of Carmelites in Paris in 1605 and later entered the order herself. Carmelite foundations increased to fifty-six in the next forty years, and Teresian spirituality came to permeate the community of French devots, promoting the revitalization of existing groups of cloistered nuns and the creation of many new congregations of religious women.

Active Communities of Woman

Among forerunners of the csJs in France as active women religious were the Ursulines, Visitandines, and Daughters of Charity. In 1607 Madame de Sainte-Beuve, a Parisian devote, founded an Ursuline convent in Paris.²² The order had been introduced into France some years before in Avignon, and by 1630 over eighty houses of French Ursulines had been established, some by bishops but many by groups of local women who set up their own individual convents and later were officially absorbed into the Ursuline order.²³ In 1610 the Visitation order was founded by Jane Frances de Chantal and Francis de Sales. De Chantal, a noblewoman and widowed mother of four children, had taken a vow of chastity after her husband’s death and devoted herself to charity, nursing the sick, and assisting the poor in her neighborhood. Seeking a more complete religious life, she placed herself under de Sales for spiritual direction. The community they founded was designed for women like herself who desired a life of prayer and meditation but whose health, age, or family circumstances disqualified them for the austerities of traditional monasticism. While emphasizing prayer and contemplation, the sisters also undertook charitable work among the sick and poor because the founders thought a life combining prayer and good works was most pleasing to God. The order soon became extremely popular and had seventy-two foundations when de Chantal died in 1641.²⁴

The experience of the Ursuline and Visitation nuns illustrates the formidable obstacles faced by the first generation of active women religious. In spite of their intention to be active “in the world,” both eventually had to accept solemn vows and cloister. In the case of the Visitation, Francis de Sales acceded to the objections of a fellow bishop who argued that exceptions to the rule of cloister would cause “scandal” and permit nuns without solemn vows to leave their convents and legally claim succession rights to family properties if they so desired. Upper-class families, from whom most candidates for the convent came at this time, saw this possibility as highly objectionable. De Sales accepted defeat when he saw that both secular and ecclesiastical elites were prepared to oppose him. For the Ursulines the decision to adopt cloister occurred gradually as one convent after another yielded to pressure from the hierarchy, local notables, or from some of the nuns themselves. Both Ursulines and Visitandines, however, deviated from traditional monastic discipline by continuing to educate girls and young women within their convents. They expanded the options for women religious by becoming “active contemplatives.”²⁵

Many pious women unable or unwilling to follow their peers into convents found an alternative in personal prayer and charity, motivated by the suffering they saw around them: “What misery we saw before our eyes and what importunings assaulted our ears from the innumerable poor vagabonds who filled the streets and churches, never giving our spirits repose; our sacrifices brought no silence nor our prayers response.”²⁶ Besides visiting hospitals, prisons, and the homes of the sick, they gave religious instruction and alms to the poor in Paris and in rural areas. Their efforts in the countryside were inspired and guided by Vincent de Paul, one of the most effective friends of the poor in the history of the Catholic Church. Of peasant origin, de Paul rose rapidly to a position of influence in both religious and secular society. A friend of most of the devout reformers of Paris, he also had close connections to the powerful at court, and for a time he belonged to one of the royal councils. He began working in a small rural parish near Lyons in the 1620s and created a confraternity (lay organization) of well-to-do women to provide food, medicine, and spiritual counsel for those in need. Similar confraternities soon appeared in many other villages, most often under the patronage of the lord or lady of the locale, usually a Parisian dévot.²⁷ Local women volunteers, assisted by some from Paris, did the actual work. One of de Paul’s helpers, Louise de Marillac, was the cofounder with him of the Daughters of Charity, a major prototype of the CSJS.

The Daughters of Charity, the largest and best known of the early post-Reformation women’s communities to survive without cloister and solemn vows, evolved from a confraternity established to aid the poor in Paris. The organization soon had problems because upper-class Parisian ladies, often reluctant to perform personally the menial services required, sent servants, who sometimes neglected or abused the poor whom they were supposed to help. Some young peasant women whom de Paul had met on one of his rural missions offered to do the work that was repugnant to the Parisian devotes, and Louise de Marillac took them into her home to provide some preliminary training for their work in the city. At first simply secular women, free to go and come as they wished, they soon bega...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 - The French Connection
• 2 - Creating an American Identity
• 3 - Educating the Good Sister
• 4 - Expanding American Catholic Culture
• 5 - Promulgating the Faith
• 6 - Educating for Catholic Womanhood
• 7 - Succoring the Needy
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography