Will the Vatican’s Crackdown on Nuns Work?

The Vatican is likely to shoot itself in the foot when it takes peremptory actions against nuns and sisters in religious orders.

Catholics around the world certainly vary in their devotional lives and adherence to different doctrines, but there is an almost universal recognition that the highest form of Christian witness is service: healing the sick, helping the poor, welcoming the marginalized, educating the young.

Nuns and sisters represent a rare voice inside the church. They speak on behalf of other lay people.

That service is how Christianity won admirers and converts in its early years, and more than any other segment of the church, nuns and sisters have personified that witness over the centuries. 

“Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours,” the 16th-century Spanish saint and mystic Teresa of Avila wrote in a famous exhortation.

In today’s world, the appeal of service is even more powerful – both inside and outside the church – because people mistrust religious institutions, which are seen, too often with good reason, as self-protective organizations whose leaders demand that their followers do as they say, not as they do. 

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses,” as Pope Paul VI put it in 1975.

Since then, however, Rome has often seemed more concerned with promoting teaching while the sisters (nuns generally remain inside convents living a quiet life of prayer and work, though the term is commonly used to refer to all women religious) have remained focused on serving those in need and advocating for those without a voice. 

In recent decades, women religious have developed their theological chops, as well, and in this ministry, too, their approach tends to be based in the lived experience of faith, just as it is for so many believers.

If that troubles authorities in the Vatican, it resonates deeply with folks in the pews. Sisters – who are also lay people and barred from ordination to the priesthood – represent a rare voice inside the church. 

They speak on behalf of other lay people, and out of the same gospel values of service and justice for others that they have long embodied. 

And this their fellow Catholics hold dear.

So when the Vatican takes on the Catholic sisters, it does so at its own peril.