Karen Armstrong taking her vows at the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus

There’s been much written about the dramatic decline of religious orders in the West – stemming from cultural, theological, and historical changes. The orders couldn’t easily adapt to changes in society, and in the Catholic orders adjust to changes brought in by the Vatican. What has been called ‘cloister mentality’ meant that altering asceticism and the theology of the nineteenth century was almost impossible.

Karen Armstrong in her book about the seven years she spent as a Catholic religious sister in the 1960s, describes in one chapter how the severe novice mistress struggled to translate the new teaching from the Vatican on obedience. The nuns had been taught not to use their critical faculties, never to question, and to obey their superior at all times. The Ignatian teaching included the example of a novice who for years had watered a dry stake at the command of the superior ‘knowing that it would never flower but never once questioning the inherent worth of the action performed under obedience.’

So, with the changes advocated by the Vatican council the behaviour and the training of Armstrong’s novice mistress in the 1960s,

‘… oscillated violently. At the time I could see nothing of all this, and her methods seemed arbitrary and inexplicable, frightening me into an ever-deepening distrust of my own mind… I had thought that I’d understood the principles of Ignatian obedience. Yet as Mother’s admonitions to use our common sense continued, usually in the form of a severe reprimand when one of us had been practicing obedience as preached last year, I felt more and more confused.’

When a notice was put up about wearing slippers the novices used their common sense and decided not to – at this the novice mistress became furious:

‘“You all exercise your critical faculties far too much. You all think it is important to use your ‘common sense’. Obedience, Sisters, is literal and total’ … where did the truth lie? the pendulum swung madly … the thing to do was to abandon thinking altogether. St Ignatius said that obedience had to be ‘blind’. Right, I’d got it now. I was blind in that I couldn’t understand the underlying principle. And that was what I was supposed to be.’

The traditional thinking in the teaching of the novitiate was to break down through hard work, deprivation and what seems like constant criticism the individual nature of the sisters until there was no self left – only God. Pushed to breaking point Armstrong writes that feeling self-pity was only another form of self-love. And leaving the convent she would only be left with herself: ‘If I stayed and won my battle, I would have God … I must continue unto there was no self left – only God.’

But there was increased questioning of this way of growing closer to God. With more people having access to tertiary education, and critical thinking more and more the ethos of the religious life came into question. Added to which the women’s movement showed up discrimination against women in general and in particular the treatment of women including women religious in the church making it increasingly unattractive. Gradually the church became ‘a marginal institution’ and religious culture ‘the interest of few’.  And as the idea of the church of the laity developed this further reduced the importance of religious orders.