UNDER a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the hall of Los Angeles'
Immaculate Heart of Mary Convent, Sister Anita Caspary talked last week
with a white-haired woman in a simple print dress. Sister Anita is 54.
The older woman, who has been an Immaculate Heart sister for more than
50 years, is agonizing over a decision. Should she join Sister Anita
and 315 other nuns in leaving the order to form a new “lay community of
religious persons”?”Even when they are much older than I am, they still call me 'Mother,' ”
explains Anita Caspary. Two years ago, she gave up her religious name,
Mother Humiliata, and her title of Mother General of the order, to
become simply “president” of the community. But old attitudes persist.
“Some of them want me to make their decisions for them,” she says. “If
I told this woman to come with our group, she would do it as a mark of
obedience. But what I am trying to do is get her to make her own
judgment. Younger women do not feel that pull of obedience,” she adds.
“A young person coming in might tell me my skirt is too long. But we
sit down and talk things over and share our points of view.”More conservative than revolutionary, Anita Caspary has been an
important bridge between the old and new, as the Immaculate Heart nuns
have transformed themselves from a traditional religious order into an
experimental kind of lay community with a question mark for a future.
As head of the order, Anita Caspary intended that the Immaculate Heart
experiments in renewal should be guided by the rather vague proposals
put forward by the Second Vatican Council. “But slowly,” she says, “the
whole thing exploded.” To facilitate their engagement with the
realities of secular life, the nuns abandoned their habits, gave up
scheduled prayers, and went beyond their teaching apostolate to take up
a wider variety of public services. Cardinal Mclntyre objected to many
of these departures from tradition; so did the Vatican, which last year
ordered the nuns to abandon most of their ventures in reform.For Sister Anita, as for her nuns, Rome's uncompromising order amounted
to giving up a new mode of Christian service that they believed in
deeply; collectively, they decided that they could not step back into
the past. “If you bought the whole package of self-determination,”
Sister Anita says, “and you were being stopped every little while, then
it seemed logical to break away. While I saw the break as inevitable, I
didn't really want it. But I wondered how much energy you could spend
fighting authority when you could spend that same energy doing what you
should be doing.” Anita Caspary hopes to preserve the best of both
worlds in the new community. “We'd like to be free of these legalities
which bind us to this or that religious life, but at the same time we
want the richness of tradition of Immaculate Heart that the older
people embody.”
