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Mrs. Carole Tegeler is a Chicago housewife who was a Franciscan nun for 14 years; with her husband, she runs a halfway house for ex-priests and nuns. She takes a similarly open approach to leaving religious life. "When people tell us they are about to leave, we always ask them not what they are departing from, but what they are leaving for." The former Sister Corita Kent, who taught in the art department of Immaculate Heart College, felt that she needed time to unwind. "I have put a lot of shows on the road," says Corita, who lives and works in Boston. "Now I have a quiet job to do with myself. Young people carry forward a great deal of visible energetic action. When that's done, you have something else to do."
Perhaps even more than priests, nuns often retain a warm affection for the communal life of religion they have left. Corita says of her former community: "So many super people gathered under one roof. It was a rich experience." In 1967, the mother superior of the Glenmary Sisters of Cincinnati led 44 of her nuns out of the small, rural-oriented order. The situation was a prototype of the Immaculate Heart dispute: a progressive faced the opposition of an archbishop (Karl Alter of Cincinnati, now retired) who felt that things were moving too fast. The Glenmarys' mother superior, now Miss Catherine Rumschlag, proposed that the liberal majority of sisters go secular. Today the group functions as a service organization called FOCUS, and does teaching and social work in three regional centers throughout Appalachia.
The 315 Immaculate Heart nuns who are leaving the order next month will continue to run Immaculate Heart College, the high school and the infirmary. The difference, say the nuns, is that they will "be free to follow what Vatican II asked us to do in the first place." As for the old, orderly convent regime of prescribed prayers, meals and periods of silence, Sister Ancilla O'Neill, 77, says: "All those rules kept us from thinking. You never had to make a decision because all the decisions were made for you." Now the sisters have more responsibilities, but more distractions as well: wardrobes, hair care, cars —and with lay status, taxes.
What will be the outcome of today's clerical exodus? Where and when will it end? Neither the exiting priests and nuns nor those who remain strongly faithful to their vows have an easy answer. Maryknoll Psychologist Eugene Kennedy of Chicago predicts that in the next decade "the most creative and healthiest will continue to depart in mounting numbers, leaving their conservative colleagues with the balance of power" in the church. He predicts that this will be "an illusory victory for the traditionalists" since they will not be able to recruit the kind of successors they want. "At this stage, which will be reached before 1975 in many places, a basic reworking of the religious life will finally be seen as necessary to the mission of the church."
Signs of Vitality