American Nuns vs. The Catholic Church
AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program. And now turning to the Catholic Church, which recently released a report criticizing nuns here in the United States. It alleges that they stray from church doctrine, and it cites radical feminist themes in their programs. My next guest is a practicing nun and a former president of the group that represents the majority of nuns in the U.S., Sister Joan Chittister, welcome to the program.</s>SISTER JOAN CHITTISTER, FORMER PRES., LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE OF RELIGIOUS WOMEN: Thank you, Christiane.</s>AMANPOUR: So this has come out, this document, and it's criticized you. And let me just say a couple of things that it cites. As we said, radical feminist themes: silent on the right to life, confusion about the church's authentic doctrine of faith -- in other words, straying from the Vatican party line.</s>CHITTISTER: Exactly.</s>AMANPOUR: How do you respond to that? Those are serious charges.</s>CHITTISTER: Well, I'd like to start with the first one, because I think -- I really believe it's the pillar upon which they build the rest of the case. They call us radical feminists. Now that's embarrassing. And I'll tell you, it's not embarrassing to me. It ought to be embarrassing to them. And I'll tell you why. The term "radical feminism" is a very precise philosophical term. If you're going to accuse somebody of it, you ought to know what it is. Now radical --</s>AMANPOUR: What is it?</s>CHITTISTER: Well, comes out of the `60s with a bumper sticker. The bumper sticker says, something like this, "A woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle." It is about separatism, in other words, exclusion, exclusion of the sexes. I don't know one woman and no nun who believes that or ever believed that or works in that behalf. The --</s>AMANPOUR: So why are they saying it, then?</s>CHITTISTER: Because --</s>AMANPOUR: Why do they use that term?</s>CHITTISTER: Because the problem is not radical feminism, it's radical patriarchy. That's where exclusion is built right into the DNA. Women are nowhere on any of these commissions, on the writing of any of these documents. So how would they know what a woman's answer is to these things? It's a measure of wanting to make the rest of the world part of your world and real.</s>AMANPOUR: So you -- well, the nuns of your organization met with the Vatican, who's in charge now, trying to figure this out. What was the result of that meeting? It seemed like the Vatican basically gave some very strict marching orders. You either stay in line or you get out of Dodge.</s>CHITTISTER: Well, in the first place, let's make it clear. I am not now an official member of the LCWR. I was in the past. So, no, I wasn't part of that elite, and like everybody else, I read the articles and they are clear. But the fact is that in that -- in that meeting, the women laid out, I'm sure, the plan. More importantly, they laid out the process. They're about to be a model for the whole church. They're saying we aren't going to make this decision. We aren't answering you. We will go back and survey the sisters in the United States, our members, and we'll tell you what our corporate mind. That isn't happening in -- on the other side of this equation.</s>AMANPOUR: So let me push you on this, because you say corporate mind, and clearly you have forged where you believe your doctrine and your teaching and your mission and service leads you. But you are part of the Roman Catholic Church. This pope, as well as his predecessor, has made it very clear that they are back to basics, no more Vatican II, no more of the liberal reforms. So if you want to stay a Catholic nun, do you have to toe the line?</s>CHITTISTER: Well, what line are we taking about? What line should the church be talking about? The sisters will tell you that their corporate mind comes out of the Gospel, that they're ministering to people. I believe that that's where this tension is setting up. I think we're seeing the distinction between the ideals and the street, the law and the people. We have here an instance where we're confronted with a difference between the medieval and the modern mind. The medieval mind says there is an answer to everything, only one. It's either right or wrong, and we'll tell you what it is. The modern mind, borne in a scientific age, says there are many answers to many things, and we really have to look at them all to know which one is best.</s>AMANPOUR: So let me ask you, in that regard, then, how do you respond to the second major charge that they cite, and that is silent on the right to life?</s>CHITTISTER: Oh. That's almost humorous. The sisters live in the life questions. The sisters live beyond the pro-birth issues, to birth and the pro-life issues, from womb to tomb, everything we do is about the value of life. In 1977 or '78, we said then, in an official LCWR document that we believe in what later became known through Cardinal Bernardin, the seamless garment, that all life issues are life issues, and that we didn't want to concentrate on any single ones, as if the rest of them were unimportant.</s>AMANPOUR: So when you say life issues, you're specifically talking about your ministry, about reaching the poor, about helping the dispossessed, about social justice?</s>CHITTISTER: Well, I won't call it social justice. It is life in this country at this time. When the sisters left the schools, where they had spent 100 years, healing the pain of illiteracy, they saw the pain in all these other places now. The state had taken over the responsibility for literacy. We saw the pain in the streets. We saw the pain in poor families. We saw the pain in the prisons. We saw the pain in health care. Different sisters with different backgrounds went into each of those places, where they minister to the poor. Now they don't just minister to Catholic poor. They don't use ministry as a ground for preaching documents. They use the ministry that they would say comes out of the model of Jesus and the Gospels, and that is whoever is down, we will help rise up. Whoever is dead, we will try to give new life. If that's not a pro-life issue, I don't know where to go.</s>AMANPOUR: And do you think the Church doesn't want you to do this?</s>CHITTISTER: Well, it's their sentence. They're spending too much time on social justice issues, and not enough time on these issues. It isn't that those issues are unimportant. No sister has ever said they are. But abortion, contraception, homosexuality, those are -- those are issues of theology and issues of science. Those are living dynamic issues. This society is struggling with them deeply. Nobody has solved them. Nobody can say with a kind of certitude, this is life. We got a -- we got a clone called Dolly, and none of us know any more. But --</s>AMANPOUR: The sheep, you're talking about.</s>CHITTISTER: The sheep, yes, that we cloned, confused the whole definition of life. And these questions aren't going to go away.</s>AMANPOUR: I want to go back to what you said before, it's about patriarchy. And of course we've had this amazing picture that we've put up on our screen, and it does show the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the pope and all his men, all his cardinals and archbishops. We also know, and we have a chart to show this, that the number of religious sisters here in the United States, nuns like yourself, is plummeting. And why is that, I want to ask you? You know, from 1965, when there were 180,000 to 2011 when there are 56,000?</s>CHITTISTER: Sure. Well, there are lots of reasons for that; many of them social. The Rotarians will tell you the same thing and so will the Tiresians (ph). The -- those numbers of entrance into institutions are now playing Nintendo games or something else. But more than that, where women are concerned, up until this period, the options for women to really serve and make a significant difference in this world, were very limited, to mother, nursing and teaching. So what we have now is a very serious, very spiritual group who are concentrating then on the place of Christian ministry on the streets.</s>AMANPOUR: And when you tell the male hierarchy, the bishops and those who are charged now with investigating the situation, that it hasn't been nuns who've been responsible for the sexual scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church, what do they say, or do they not worry about their own credibility as they're attacking you?</s>CHITTISTER: I have no idea. They simply overlook that topic. They're making no relationship there whatsoever that I know of. But this much I do know: all religions, male-dominated religions, always exalt the place of women and then ignore them entirely, on any major issues. They're not in that picture; they're in none of those pictures. You can look around the globe. We're being led into the fullness of women by you and this business and the businesses around you. The church is not leading on the issue they should be leading on.</s>AMANPOUR: We will continue to follow your story, Sister Joan Chittister, thank you very much for coming in.</s>CHITTISTER: Thank you, Christiane.</s>AMANPOUR: And we will be right back.