For more than fifty years, people calling for change in the Catholic Church have rooted their ideas in the Latin maxim Ecclesia semper reformanda. Attributed to St. Augustine and made familiar by the modern Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, it means “the Church is always in need of reform.” It informed the liberalizing, modernizing Second Vatican Council, and, after the Council concluded, in 1965, became a credo for progressives such as Hans Küng, the Swiss Catholic theologian who believed that the Council hadn’t gone far enough. Twenty years later, under Pope John Paul II, it became a rationale for traditionalists seeking a sort of Counter-Reformation. In 2016, Pope Francis pushed back, stating that there will be no “reform of the reform,” at least not in liturgical practice. Now, with people in Rome anticipating the completion, after more than two years, of one of Francis’s signature initiatives—a reform of the Vatican bureaucracy, known as the Curia—the Latin maxim is back on the agenda.
Many observers are waiting to see whether the Curia reform will change the Church’s approach to an issue that the decades of tumult, controversy, liberation, and reaction have left little altered: the role of women. In 2021, as it was sixty years ago, the preponderance of leadership roles in the Church are held by men: Pope, cardinals, bishops, and priests—but also seminary rectors, diocesan chancellors, college presidents, advisory-board members, and the like. At the Vatican, the imbalance is enforced by canon law, which reserves many key roles for clerics—ordained men—and thus puts them beyond the reach of Curia reform. And it is so pervasive that, when an exception emerges—as happened earlier this year, when Nathalie Becquart, a French nun, was named an under-secretary of the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops—it is taken as an augury that change is finally at hand.
A new documentary, “Rebel Hearts,” directed by Pedro Kos, which had its virtual première during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, shows why many remain skeptical. The film tells the story of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, of Los Angeles, an order of nuns best known for the high school and the women’s college that they ran, in Los Feliz—and for their battles with the Archbishop of Los Angeles. In the early nineteen-sixties, the order was thriving, as women educated by the I.H.M.s, as the sisters were known, became I.H.M.s themselves. The film shows them presiding in classrooms and bustling around the lush, Mission-style college campus, clad in the order’s fulsome habit—ankle-length black cloak, white wimple, black veil—looking at once exotic and incongruous in the Technicolor sunlight of sixties L.A.
One of the nuns, Sister Corita Kent, a printmaker and an art historian keenly attuned to new cultural currents, took students to Andy Warhol’s first solo painting show, at the Ferus Gallery, in 1962, and brought Alfred Hitchcock, Buckminster Fuller, and John Cage to the campus. As the bishops at Vatican II authorized a period of “experiment,” the nuns, too, experimented. In March of 1965, one of the women took part in the march from Selma to Montgomery. The next May, they turned their annual day of tribute to the Virgin into an outdoor festival, with balloons, crafts, and students and nuns dancing footloose on the grass. The sisters protested the war in Vietnam, and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden spoke at the college.
By 1967, the nuns, by collective decision, chose to make the habit optional. Vexed by their boldness, the Archbishop, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, took the opportunity to move against them. They wanted to try new things; he expected them to represent stability when so much else in the Church was changing. They incorporated their properties, including the college and the high school, placing them beyond McIntyre’s financial reach; he ordered a “visitation,” authorized by Rome. Eventually, the women were required to sign a document indicating whether they would stay (recognizing the archdiocese’s authority), join a different order, or seek dispensation from their vows and religious life. Several hundred sisters gathered for a community reckoning: about fifty remained in the order, continued to teach in the archdiocese’s schools, and set up a convent at a grand Mediterranean-style estate made available to them by a wealthy Catholic. (In 2015, the archdiocese tried to sell the estate to the singer Katy Perry, but legal challenges from the few sisters still living there blocked the sale.) The majority formed the Immaculate Heart Community of California—which was eventually opened to women and men of all faiths—and continued running the high school and the college. The college closed in 1980; the high school is still open—its alumnae include Tyra Banks and Meghan Markle.
Most of the I.H.M. nuns weren’t rebels so much as women set against what one of them, in the documentary, calls “the primary evil, hypocrisy—and especially religious hypocrisy.” They were women of their time, taking part in the dramatic transformation of women’s lives through education, work outside of the home and family, and community organizing independent of men. And they were, many of them, young women, expressing the optimism and openness that were characteristic of life then in California. To a striking degree, the nuns of today are those nuns of yesterday—they entered religious life as young women and, over the decades, they have taught, earned Ph.D.s, written books, run hospitals, sustained parishes, worked for social justice, and joined rallies for causes great and small. What they have not done is attract younger women to join them. In 1970, there were a hundred and sixty thousand consecrated Catholic women in the U.S. Today, there are forty thousand, and their average age is almost eighty. Attrition has taken a particularly grim turn during the pandemic. While Pope Francis and his subordinates in the Curia tussle over the fine points of Vatican reform, a cohort of American Catholic nuns is dying.
Among them is Dianna Ortiz, who died last month, of cancer, at sixty-two. One of eight children born to a family in New Mexico, Ortiz joined the Ursulines in 1977, taught kindergarten in Kentucky, and then went to teach in Guatemala. In November, 1989, she was abducted by armed men, raped, and tortured. But she survived, escaped, and eventually sought justice. She prevailed against American diplomats who claimed that she was fabricating her story; went on a hunger strike outside the White House, demonstrating to the American government how U.S. policy played a role in sponsoring human-rights abuses; and joined with eight Guatemalans to sue the country’s former foreign minister, Héctor Gramajo, who was then at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in federal court, where a judge found him guilty of waging an “indiscriminate campaign of terror” against civilians and awarded the plaintiffs damages of $47.5 million. (Gramajo returned to Guatemala; the plaintiffs never received the money.) In 1998, Ortiz founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International, and served for ten years as its executive director.
It’s against this history that the appointment of Nathalie Becquart stands out. Becquart was born in Fontainebleau in 1969; earned a degree from business school; and worked in marketing before entering religious life, in 1995. She is a member of the Congregation of Xavières, an order of women whose spirituality is rooted in that of the sixteenth-century founders of the all-male Jesuit order. Her training has balanced studies of theology and ecclesiology (the latter at Boston College) with outreach among working-class youth in their neighborhoods and in retreats for young people held at sea (she is an adept skipper). She is an expert in “synodality,” a process of decision-making rooted in assemblies with advisory powers, which Pope Francis is affirming as an alternative to the “clericalist” Curial bureaucracy. In 2019, Francis named Becquart and three other women as consultors to the Synod of Bishops. In her new role, she will join dozens of bishops in voting on policy recommendations, possibly including contested issues such as divorce and remarriage. She will serve alongside another new under-secretary, Father Luis Marín de San Martín, of Spain; following his appointment, he was named a bishop.
Becquart represents the change that many women who serve in the Church seek. But her significance depends on how robust a decision-shaping role she is given, which will depend, in turn, on the success of the reform of the Curia—if and when it finally takes place—and on Francis’s willingness to appoint more women to roles that are technically already open to them. Certainly, Becquart’s appointment makes an immediate difference. So do the actions that Pope Francis took, earlier this year, to define the roles of lector and acolyte (altar server) as open to male and female Catholics. And so does the attention he has given to the prospect of ordaining women (as well as men) as deacons, which would make it easier for women to lead parishes in places where priests are scarce—such as in much of the U.S.—and would move women a step closer to priestly ordination.
Those changes still feel like beginnings, however. They are far short of the reforms that even the most cautious progressive might have expected when the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary drew national attention, fifty years ago. They are laughably out of step with the accomplished roles of Catholic women in secular American society—two Supreme Court Justices, a House Majority Leader, and an Inaugural poet among them.
One area of the Vatican where women are prominently represented is in the diplomatic corps, and Joe Biden, the second Catholic President, ought to appoint a woman as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. The Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon was the Ambassador in George W. Bush’s second term; Callista Gingrich held the position in the Trump Administration. The Ambassadors to the Holy See from the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Argentina, and Australia are women. They interact directly with the Pope and with the members of the Curia, presenting themselves with diplomatic authority—and without veils.
