Being a woman in the Catholic Church, a nun who insists on asking difficult questions and holding those in power to account for what they say and do can make for a sometimes lonely and difficult life.
So, she has been asked more than a few times, “Why do you stay?”
There are a lot of components to that answer and they were gathered years ago into an essay for the magazine, Lutheran Women Today.
In the essay, one of the most requested pieces of her writing for years after it was published in 1996, she asks “how it is possible, necessary even, for me as a Roman Catholic to stay in a church that is riddled with inconsistencies, closed to discussions about the implications of them and sympathetic only to invisible women.”
She answers in ways that are available only to someone committed to the institution in a creative way, tolerant of the church as a process that’s never fully finished, and willing to hold both the institution and herself to account. It also is an answer available to someone who doesn’t shy away from the conflicts that seem inevitable but also necessary if the process is to move toward a greater acceptance of women.
In this conversation, she expands on certain ideas in the essay – that “the sexist church that I love needs women for its own salvation” and that “the church and women are sanctifying one another.”
She has stayed for a long time – this year marked her 70 th in the community of the Erie Benedictines – and she has no intention of leaving any time soon.
As a woman religious and spiritual leader of global significance, Sr. Joan Chittister came into contact with members of other faith traditions around the world. One of the results was the book, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World (Eerdmans, 2010), which understands those traditions in contemporary circumstances.
In this episode Joan describes how she came to understand the significance of other traditions. “These are the deepest, most ancient religious and spiritual traditions that the world has to offer. And in every one of them, you have to ask yourself: ‘Do you believe in God?’
If you believe in God, so do they, and how, if you believe in the One God, how can you not imagine, then, that that God is speaking to every one of us in another tongue, in other symbols, at other moments of both asceticism and celebration.”
Those convictions carry with them practical implications. In Joan’s case, one of the most visible is the Global Peace Initiative of Women, involving women religious leaders from a range of faith traditions.
The organization has been responsible over decades for meeting with women of different cultures and faith, including those in conflict with one another. Joan’s understanding of the wisdom of the world carries practical implications for each of us.
As a young sister teaching school, Joan Chittister one evening came across the small book, Women and the Church, by Sr. A.M. McGrath, a Dominican sister and a PhD historian and chair at the time of the history department at Rosary College.
The book, published in 1976, is a piercing march through the church’s historical attitudes about women, a mixture of deep history and polemic. Chittister read it in one sitting, and the book lined out a part of the path she took in advocating for women.
“It marked me,” Joan says of the book during this episode. “It marked me inside myself. Actually, I never forget the woman. I still have the book. I consider it a moment of grace for me.”
Her commitment to women and their place in the church and the wider world led her to such moments as the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing.
She still feels the negative effects of being a woman in the Catholic Church but she also thinks on many levels and in society, things have changed for the better from the time she came across the McGrath volume.
It wasn’t until 2011, during interviews that would ultimately become a foundation for the biography Joan Chittister: Her Journey from Certainty to Faith (Orbis 2015) that Joan spoke openly to anyone about a childhood that had been marked by fear of the violence her mother faced constantly at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather. She would carry the memories and effects of that trauma for the rest of her life. It was a childhood that involved a temporary escape with her mother, as well as instructions from her mother should “the worst” occur.
If it was at the time disorienting and frightening for an only child, it would also eventually become a source of insight and resolve.
Childhood memories became a significant force behind her relentless advocacy for women in all circumstances, in the church, in society, across cultures. It also provided her insight into the fragility of others and compassion for those on the margins and in precarious circumstances.
“So somehow or other, sitting here today,” she says in this episode, “I know where my life came from. It came from what I had to escape, what I had to find myself, and what I had to be able to name myself.”
She knows, too, where her courage comes from. Her mother would be with her in spirit when she had to stand up to the men who wanted to keep her from speaking, who wanted to silence her questions.
At the heart of the work, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Eerdmans, 2005) is a searing personal tale of a young Sr. Joan Chittister. Having been accepted to one of the country’s most prestigious writing programs, the permission to attend was inexplicably and, without warning, withdrawn by her superior at the last moment.
It was a cruel act without explanation and sent Chittister into a deep consideration of her vocation, of what it means to deal with this kind of unexpected, life-altering disappointment, and what it means, ultimately, to find hope.
In this conversation, she recounts that incident and the lifelong insights that emerged. Change, she says, is a condition of life in the 21 st Century and “real change is that place where struggle starts. … There’s nothing fixed here now. Our theology isn’t fixed, the culture isn’t fixed. The institutions are changing. Our relationships shift all the time, even the family. But if we are raised on absolutes then, then what happens? Is God responsible for these negative absolutes in my life?”
Her answers might surprise. They are drawn from years of dealing with her own and others’ struggles, and from realizing where, in those struggles, are our sources of hope.
This is a conversation, based on a talk developed and refined over years, in which Sr. Joan Chittister describes how, in a life dedicated to serving God, neither God nor her idea of God remained static.
In the talk, she notes that belief in God is not an exceptional matter.“Every people on earth, in fact. Has come to the juncture where only God is an answer to questions for which there are no answers. … It is not the idea of God that sets us apart in the history of humanity. It is the kind of God in which we choose to believe that in the end makes all the difference.”
So what kind of God does she believe in today? And how did she come to that understanding?
Joan takes us from her experience of God as a youngster alone in a church to her rejection of the all-male stereotype of a God imagined by men to a God that can’t be contained or boxed or fit into convenient descriptions.
Leaning on the 6 th Century wisdom of St. Benedict, her order’s founder, she states: “He says, in essence, you really don’t have to worry about searching for God. You have God. We’re all born with God. Why? Because we’re born of God.” Deep in her own tradition, she finds fascinating new ways of understanding and imagining God with us today.
One example of the change occurring in religious life is Sr. Valerie Luckey. She is 36 years old, entered the Erie Benedictines in 2016 after completing a degree at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and a stint as a school teacher. She made her final vows in 2021.
She joins the conversation today with Sr. Joan Chittister. In some ways, the differences between them and their path to religious life is stark. Joan first attempted to join the community at age 15. She had to return a year later when she turned 16, the earliest the community would accept applicants in the 1950s. Joan entered at a time when religious life seemed an immutable certainty that would go on forever, only to see it alter dramatically over time and arrive in this current era riddled with questions about the future.
Valerie, on the other hand, opted for religious life at a time of great uncertainty about its future and embraces the challenges ahead. But more than a little common ground exists in the sense of calling to be there for others, in the community’s outreach and ministries, and in the deep connections among members as they engage in a life of contemplation and action.
The old and the new meet in this conversation and provide a look at where tradition sparks and new and engaging future.
Gone are the convents filled with sisters draped in long, dark dresses called “habits,” clothing from much earlier centuries often topped with starched wimples of various designs that squeezed the wearer’s face and allowed a view of only chin to just above the eyebrows.
Gone are the Catholic elementary schools filled with children of the baby boom taught almost exclusively by the sisters, who worked for a pittance.
Gone are the mother houses where young women flocked to be educated and trained in the disciplines of particular religious orders.
Gone, for the most part, are the habits and the women, many of whom left, as did their male counterparts in religious life, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The much smaller and aging corps of women remaining is often, understandably, viewed as the final remnant of religious life. It is easy to conclude, from that view, that religious life is over.
“Wrong,” says Sr. Joan Chittister, in this episode, a discussion that emerges from her classic book, “The Fire in These Ashes: A Spirituality of Contemporary Religious Life.”
For many women religious who are re-imagining religious life in the future, the book is foundational.
The old forms of religious life, the “shape” of it, is certainly a thing of the past. “What’s left,” she says, “is a culture of young people looking for a way to live out their spiritual life, their contemplative understandings, their need to serve and their commitment to Jesus.” Religious life isn’t dead. It is changing.
In episode two, Chittister and Roberts explore the impact of the Second Vatican Council on religious orders, focusing particularly on the council's direction to religious orders "to go back to their founder, decide what you were founded for, what you were doing now and what was needed now."
The result was a deep examination of purpose, of history and how the wisdom and practice of centuries applied to contemporary life. The changes that began in the mid-1960s have picked up pace during the Francis papacy. In this episode, Chittister speaks of synodality and says, "I'm so glad I lived for this moment, and I'm watching this with happy tears in my eyes.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister has a well-earned reputation as one who dares to ask big, bold questions — of civil and church authorities, of long-held assumptions about women and their place in the church and the wider world, about religious life, about the church itself.
This first episode in her new podcast, "Risking the Questions," fittingly explores her book Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir, a detailed exploration of one of the important arcs of change she experienced in religious life.
A joint project of Benetvision and NCR, "Risking the Questions" invites you into conversations that most of us only have in our own minds. Sr. Joan Chittister — whose courageous and surprising spiritual insights come from 70 years as a Benedictine sister — and her friend and biographer, former National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Roberts, discuss deep and universal topics in this series.
