Errata to Promises unfulfilled: American religious sisters and gender inequality in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church by Ryan P Murphy, published in Social Compass 61(4): 594–610. DOI: 10.1177/0037768614547487 . The publisher would like to apologize for the following errors in this article. On p. 597, the sentence: Further, the CDF criticism of the LCWR is notable for the ways in which it largely ignores the work that American nuns have done toward poverty reduction, immigration reform, education, and racial equality. Should read: Further, the CDF criticism of the LCWR is notable for the ways in which it largely ignores the work that American nuns have done toward poverty reduction, immigration reform, education, universal healthcare, and racial equality. On p. 603, immediately following section heading ‘The habit’, the following paragraph was omitted: American sisters’ collective reformation before, during and after Vatican II is perhaps in no other way more visible than the shedding of the religious habit. While each religious order’s habit and accompanying veil are unique and have changed over time, the patriarchy did prescribe a general pattern that was originally designed to model the plain clothing that widows wore at the time the specific order was founded in the 17th–19th centuries (Briggs, 2006). Though religious orders could design how their habits looked, it was the Church hierarchy who ultimately dictated how religious sisters should appear. Unlike the priestly collar, the habit could not to be taken off at any time, especially in public (Kaylin, 2000: 58). Quiñonez and Turner (1992) contend that the identity of ‘woman’ was not important or valued in everyday life for religious sisters, so the habit served to render them gender-neutral. Fialka (2003) points out that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious contended that the habit functioned by ‘covering up your sexuality’ (Fialka, 2003: 273). Kaylin (2000) suggests that prescribed codes of dress like the habit served not only as a way to identify religious orders, but also acted as an evocative, visible outward sign of one’s vow profession as a religious sister. With the changes of Vatican II, more and more religious orders began altering the habit and many shed them altogether in the years that followed. Kaylin (2000) argues that the eschewing of the religious habit is akin to the post-Vatican II transition to the English mass, in that it is both ‘humanizing and democratizing’ (Kaylin, 2000: 58). On p. 607, the sentence: Consequently, Ronan (2007) levels harsh criticism at the comparisons between the exclusion of women in the priesthood and institutionalized racism through apartheid, and calls on the RCWP to ‘revise its goals, theology and actions in [the] light of the massive and world-historic ruptures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ (Ronan, 2007: 159). should read: Consequently, Ronan (2007) levels harsh criticism at the comparisons between the exclusion of women in the priesthood and institutionalized racism through apartheid, and calls on the RCWP to ‘revise its goals, theology and actions in light of the massive and world-historic ruptures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ (Ronan, 2007: 159).
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Jun 9, 2015
I-Ling Shen + 1
Open Access