The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (14 page)

Widows emerged as a particularly powerful group within the sisterhood of the Jesus Movement. In the New Testament, widows were especially loved and protected by God, and therefore held in high esteem. These women who chose not to remarry become a spiritual ideal in Christianity, completely open in their newly unmarried state to the influence of God and the freedom to do works of charity. Alone as they were after the deaths of their husbands, and many of them wealthy with their inherited estates, it’s not surprising that widows organized themselves into sisterhoods and gave their lives to liberating the oppressed. Ever mother and ever virgin became the new Christian ideal for widows: women who gave their unmarried lives forever to prayer, virginity, and charity.

In the New Testament, Peter is written about as having organized three “orders” of widows—two communities devoted to prayer, prophecy, and counsel, while the third cared for sick and poor women. Many wealthy widows who had no intention of marrying again discovered new and liberating lives in the Jesus Movement. Most funded the building of new Christian communities, and most house churches were sponsored and supported by wealthy widows. Quite clearly, women did not join the sisterhood in Christianity to withdraw and escape from the world. That was their old life. That’s the life they lived before being liberated by Christ.

On the contrary, celibacy freed widows completely, just as it did the vestal virgins, to restore the heart and soul of society’s oppressed, to keep all our sacred fires burning. So much so that by the power of these three orders of widows, all kinds of celibate sisterhoods emerged in the early church, including
communities of virgins, hermits, and contemplative nuns. While the women of Galilee became Christianity’s first nuns, the sisterhood of widows emerges as the first order of nuns in the church, Christianity’s first unordained women priests.

Given the freedom and independence generated naturally within the sisterhood, the church continued to do everything in its power to make sure that women never transcended fully their submissiveness through the virginity movement. In liberating women from the traditional roles of wife and mother, celibacy became for women a divine way to pursue unorthodox lives, always a major source of concern, worry, even alarm for the church. Holy disobedience is what the Church Fathers fear most in their consecrated virgins. Women who don’t accept their voice as God’s must be silenced and forced to submit, forced to give at least the appearance of holy obedience; forced at least to act as though they’re not listening to any other divine voice than that of their ultimate religious superiors, the Church Fathers.

Because virgins were never known in the ancient world as silent or submissive women, any trace of insubordination, any spark of new life reminiscent of their evil pagan past and the full force of church authority, is brought down upon them. Control of its virgins became an ongoing Crusade of the Church Fathers; only with the women, it was not control of their sexually active bodies that was the problem, it was control of their divinely inspired, holy, disobedient souls—that’s the problem with women and for women in the sisterhood. Disobedience is a sure sign that the virgins are listening to some other divine voice, a clear sign that the sacred fire within them has not yet been extinguished. The Goddess is still at home. That meant only one thing to Church Fathers: The Church Mothers and their sisters must be forced to submit, body and soul.

Stripping virginity of its sacred transforming powers received its crowning blow theologically when the Church Fathers baptized the sisters’ virgin souls with their new role as “Brides of Christ,” only not in a loving, mystical sense. Once freed in virginity from all sexual stereotyping, women now became “brides” and not “virgins” of Christ, divinely submissive in the eyes of God and the laws of the church, divinely independent no more. As brides of Christ, the church’s virgins became subject to the control of “Christ” on earth, meaning the male priesthood acting
in persona Christi.
All sanctity in the sisterhood was invested in holy obedience to the laws of the church and the teachings of its fathers. Canon laws still regulate the lives of nuns today, and the Vatican demand for holy obedience still attempts to govern the virgin souls in all of its orders of sisterhood, attempts to bind its sisters in “holy silence.”

Because celibacy is chosen freely and gladly in the sisterhood, it never was and never will be the problem that it is in the priesthood. Holy obedience became the soulful problem of the Church Mothers, making sure that the divine voice these virgins are obeying comes from the “right God,” meaning that of the Church Fathers. While control of the virgin sisterhood, legally and theologically, appeared early in the church’s history, I don’t see that it ever worked. Not in the beginning, and most certainly not in the Middle Ages. There are sacred fires burning within the souls of virgins that can never be extinguished. That’s been true since the very beginning, and continues to be true as we look at sisterhood in the Middle Ages.

5
Sisterhood in the Middle Ages

T
HE GROWTH OF SISTERHOOD
in the Middle Ages, particularly in the twelfth century, is seen as absolutely remarkable by historians, all commenting on the large numbers of women who entered religious life then. While part of the growth would have been proportionate to the general increase in population at that time, something else was going on. Convents couldn’t open up fast enough to keep up with demand, and when they did, they were never big enough. In writing about the order of Clarisses, or Poor Clares, Jo Ann Kay McNamara notes,

By 1400, there were about 400 houses. 250 in Italy, and most of the rest in Spain and France, with a few scattered in England, Germany and eastern Europe. One or two houses may have held more than 200 women but most ran between 50 and 80. In all, probably 15,000 women belonged to the order.
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Those numbers are astounding, and not just by today’s standards. I don’t think the sisterhood has seen anything like it since; which is not to say that it can’t happen again.

In order to understand the rapid growth of sisterhood in the Middle Ages, it’s important to know what other life choices there were for women at that time. For example, girls were destined for “marriage” at the age of twelve, an arrangement that was more of a real estate deal than anything else. The girl went along
with the property the man inherited in marriage. Love and companionship for men seemed to happen outside marriage with mistresses and courtly lovers. If it was true love that the medieval woman wanted in life, she would not have looked for, or expected to find it, in marriage. Obviously the medieval man didn’t, either.

Unlike The Ideal Wife revealed in the Book of Proverbs, The Ideal Medieval Wife presents a different portrait. She is submissive to her husband, obeys every request without question, manages the perfect household, cooks a well-balanced meal, and raises as many ideal children as her body can bear, preferably boys. If you’ve seen the movie
The Stepford Wives
, that’s the contemporary image that comes to mind, women modeled by men whose sacred fire is extinguished in marriage. Marriage, child-bearing, and a lifetime of submissiveness are what the medieval world expected of its women, as did the Catholic Church. I don’t believe that’s changed very much, either.

Not only was there an emotional climate of zero tolerance for questioning male authority, but disobedient wives and children were routinely beaten into submission. In the early Middle Ages, wife beating for insubordination was sanctioned by the Catholic Church in its Canon Laws, but its practice was legalized worldwide long before then, and still is in many places of the world. In Africa, for example, women (not men) are still stoned to death for adultery. Like children, slaves, and animals, women were to be controlled, and if necessary, beaten into submission. Violence remained the method of choice in the church for maintaining control and resolving disputes, and physical abuse was accepted widely in Christian households.

As recently as 1913, the Catholic Church sanctioned wife beating in Canon Law, specifying the rod couldn’t be thicker than your finger and you couldn’t draw blood. The Book of Deuteronomy also advocates beating wives into submission, if
necessary. In patriarchy, it’s a man’s sacred marital duty to head the household and maintain control of his family, using force if necessary. Each one of those beaten women are holy virgins and martyrs we’ll never know. And that kind of married martyrdom was not something women dreamed of in the Middle Ages. Marriage was nowhere near the safe and sacred life for medieval women that it can be today.

No thinking woman would choose to be married given those circumstances, and no loving parent would subject their daughter to a lifetime of cruelty and abuse. McNamara estimates that in the tenth and eleventh centuries, “anywhere from a quarter to a third” of the women in convents were widows or married.
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Avoiding medieval marriage became a very compelling alternative for women in the Middle Ages, many of whom got themselves into the nunnery for a good education (and a life of prayer and service) and many of whom got sent there against their will. Nowadays “Get thee to a nunnery!” is no longer a life sentence for any unwilling woman and religious communities are no longer dumping grounds for society’s misfits or the wild daughters of overprotective fathers. The Dark Ages were, indeed, dark in the sisterhood, and nowhere is that clearer than in the medieval nunneries.

In the sixteenth century, half of the rich daughters in Italy were locked up in convents, some as young as three years old. Medieval nunneries were little more than virgin safe houses, virtual prisons with escapees often beaten by nuns and locked up in solitary confinement for years. Many were victims of sexual abuse by nuns and one another. Sexual sinners were sent by priests to the convents for rehab, and the deformed, disabled, and dissolute were sent there for safekeeping (and slave labor). It’s no wonder all hell broke loose in the medieval nunneries. They were full of women who never wanted to be there and who
hated every day that they were. In that regard, no God was there. Life became literally hell on earth for unwilling nuns and their unwilling victims.

According to Elizabeth Abbott, the nunneries in Italy (like its papacy and priesthood) appear to have been the worst.
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In Venice, fifteen nunneries were known as public bordellos. Some nuns in convents “had servants, ate lavish meals, and carried pet lap dogs.” They also received male callers regularly and maintained rather sophisticated, sexually active lifestyles. Italian nunneries often earned the reputation of being little more than high-class whorehouses with wealthy playboys among their most frequent patrons. And where there were double monasteries—monks’ and nuns’ residences connected by underground tunnels—there were notoriously nasty habits between the two. Abbott notes, “Bishops routinely issued edicts barring the free intercourse—in all senses—between the male and female sides.”

Babies were routinely conceived and born in the abbey, with one English abbess giving birth to a whole convent of kids, twelve to be exact. The worst excesses were in Venice, where nuns and priests engaged freely in public sex, as well as privately in one another’s cells (bedrooms). In the fourteenth century, thirty-three brothel-like convents were sued for sexual abuse and prostitution:

The Benedictine Saint’ Angelo di Contorta convent was the most outrageous, though its nuns were drawn from the Venetian elite. The nuns, and two abbesses, did not even bother with discretion but enjoyed sex at picnics and—putting Madre Marcela’s vaunted solitude to a more mundane use—in their cells. Babies were conceived and born, lovers quarreled, and jealousy abounded. The pope shut down Saint’ Angelo in 1474, but it was just one of many egregiously misbehaving religious institutions
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Throughout history, nuns act just as priests do when celibacy is forced upon them. Once again, it’s the old divine law of human nature: The more sex feels prohibited, the more it just goes underground and flourishes so much that it is eventually forced aboveground as well. Everybody acts that way when celibacy is forced upon them. It twists their souls, demonizes their God, and drives them crazy. That kind of craziness became rampant in the medieval sisterhood, and in that regard, the church’s nunneries became a clear reflection of its priesthood. They were full of women called by everyone and everything but God. But even at their very worst, nuns were nowhere near as corrupt as the priests. For example, “between 1430 and 1450, 12 out of 220 nuns in Lincoln were found guilty of immoral behavior. In 1514, a general visitation in Norwich found one nun of Crabhouse who had gone wrong out of 8 houses with 72 nuns.”
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As McNamara notes, “Criticism went hand in hand with correction.” The sisterhood never accepted sexual permissiveness as part of their religious life.