A Matter of Conscience: American Women Religious, Feminist Agency, and the Catholic Church

Abstract

Background In 2012, the long-simmering tension between American women religious sisters and Catholic Church leadership was brought into sharp focus when the largest group of American sisters—the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—was reprimanded by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Doctrinal Assessment and subsequent Apostolic Visitation concluded that American religious sisters embraced a secular and radical feminist spirit that was incompatible with Church doctrine. Purpose While American women religious were publicly criticized, this conflict is not a unique American phenomenon. In fact, it is representative of the gendered challenges that women religious and lay women continue to negotiate around the globe. In many respects, religious sisters are the faces of the Church to many faithful—as teachers, social workers, advocates, and ministers—yet their structural position as women prevents them from leadership or decision-making power in the Church they serve. Methods In this research, I explore how sisters navigate these gendered boundaries in the Catholic Church in their day to day ministries. Specifically, I analyze in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 23 Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia. Results Sisters in this congregation employ various forms of feminist agency to assert their power within the Church's confining structures. I find that individual sisters in the congregation use resistance and empowerment agency to claim space for their own voices in ministry. These actions do not directly challenge the sisters’ own subordination in the Church, but instead focus their individual and collective agency on satisfying the unmet pastoral needs of the faithful. Through these accumulative actions, other sisters are empowered to contest gendered institutional Church boundaries and individual clergy who reproduce them. Conclusions and implications These sites of empowerment and resistance agency are liminal spaces that point toward greater inclusion of women religious in the institutional Catholic Church, especially as they increasingly meet the ministerial needs of the faithful. Religious sisters in this congregation act with socially-just consciences, standing with the marginalized, and are empowered to increase their spheres of influence in the locations where they minister.