Risking the Questions

Gone are the convents filled with sisters draped in long, dark dresses called “habits,” clothing from much earlier centuries often topped with starched wimples of various designs that squeezed the wearer’s face and allowed a view of only chin to just above the eyebrows.

Gone are the Catholic elementary schools filled with children of the baby boom taught almost exclusively by the sisters, who worked for a pittance.

Gone are the mother houses where young women flocked to be educated and trained in the disciplines of particular religious orders.

Gone, for the most part, are the habits and the women, many of whom left, as did their male counterparts in religious life, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The much smaller and aging corps of women remaining is often, understandably, viewed as the final remnant of religious life. It is easy to conclude, from that view, that religious life is over.

“Wrong,” says Sr. Joan Chittister, in this episode, a discussion that emerges from her classic book, “The Fire in These Ashes: A Spirituality of Contemporary Religious Life.”

For many women religious who are re-imagining religious life in the future, the book is foundational.

The old forms of religious life, the “shape” of it, is certainly a thing of the past. “What’s left,” she says, “is a culture of young people looking for a way to live out their spiritual life, their contemplative understandings, their need to serve and their commitment to Jesus.” Religious life isn’t dead. It is changing.

In episode two, Chittister and Roberts explore the impact of the Second Vatican Council on religious orders, focusing particularly on the council's direction to religious orders "to go back to their founder, decide what you were founded for, what you were doing now and what was needed now."

The result was a deep examination of purpose, of history and how the wisdom and practice of centuries applied to contemporary life. The changes that began in the mid-1960s have picked up pace during the Francis papacy. In this episode, Chittister speaks of synodality and says, "I'm so glad I lived for this moment, and I'm watching this with happy tears in my eyes.

Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister has a well-earned reputation as one who dares to ask big, bold questions — of civil and church authorities, of long-held assumptions about women and their place in the church and the wider world, about religious life, about the church itself.

This first episode in her new podcast, "Risking the Questions," fittingly explores her book Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir, a detailed exploration of one of the important arcs of change she experienced in religious life.

A joint project of Benetvision and NCR, "Risking the Questions" invites you into conversations that most of us only have in our own minds. Sr. Joan Chittister — whose courageous and surprising spiritual insights come from 70 years as a Benedictine sister — and her friend and biographer, former National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Roberts, discuss deep and universal topics in this series.