Garry: Sr Joan, the title of your upcoming talk is ‘Women of Faith Keep Going’; Irish religious sisters said in their contribution to the Synod that they were ‘holding on by their finger nails’ inside the Church – is this the experience of religious sisters around the world?
Joan Chittister:
“I would put all of this differently than most people. What we are coming to is the end of an age and it’s not peculiar to nuns. It has happened in banking, happened in typewriting, cars, refrigerators, a whole arena, a whole area, a whole piece of something once in touch with its culture, finds the culture running out and then everyone rushes to address the new need, the new technology, the new position and even the new understanding of the Spirit.
Who can tell a child anymore that God the Father is sitting on a cloud above their head looking at them? In the first place can you tell the child that that’s Father, that’s really ‘the Father” that he is seeing there.
This whole thing is so jumbled, you can’t talk about the fact that the past failed, the point is the past succeeded but that success became a problem, becomes nothing, becomes an obstacle to the development of a people both spiritually, psychologically, educationally and emotionally.
So the whole notion is of people hanging on by their fingernails, that’s like saying that your grandmother isn’t doing anything profitable in the family life. We have to look at all of this differently, our schools have changed, everything has changed.
I can tell you in my own community, we have lay women, young girls who come to participate in everything we do, they support us, care for us, they join the spiritual dimension of the community, are they entering the community as they have known it all their lives? No, they are not. Nor should they.
Joan: Do you understand what I’m trying to say there?
Garry: Yes you are referring I think to what Pope Francis calls a change of epoch?
Joan: Yes of course it is, we are not still running horses downtown, I mean it’s a simple analogy but it is so obvious.
Your life changed in the last 30 days and pretty soon if you don’t catch up you’re not going to be able to do journalistic work because AI (Artificial Intelligence) is going to be so far beyond you that you can’t possibly get it.
When they announced ChatGPT, when I heard about it, I remembered I ran a print shop with kids and those kids got jobs in journalism. I love the smell of ink and I miss it. Here we are now and they announced about a month ago an online computer system in the United States that is now coming (ChatGPT) and you could download it and of course I did.
All of a sudden I turned around to one of our sisters and I said “It’s over”. She said “what are you talking about?” And I said “It’s over. Within 6 months you will be studying AI or something like it and within a year all the money you have put into apps you will have lost as you won’t need them anymore”.
She said ‘Do you think it will be that fast?’ I said, “I am holding it here in my hands”. Yes it’s that fast. They’ve had this stuff on the shelf for the last five years, perfecting it, changing and adding, our jobs or almost all of them are in some danger unless we are willing to make the adjustments in our own lives to meet the new technology that is already way ahead of us.
This is the universal I’m talking about, I don’t sound like I am talking about religious life but I am. I am.
The sisters around the world who opened every hospital, took care of every infant, built every orphanage, opened every school, they gave us this entire epoch, or they prepared it for its next technological or industrial change. And they will do it again but they will do it differently.
We are moving into grief groups and they need some sort of order, or you need tutoring groups and they need order. We’re not going into buildings anymore, we’re not going into institutions, we’re going to the people who need us, up unto now they came to us, now we have to go out and work just as Jesus did, this is more suited to first century Jerusalem than it is to 23rd century United States. That’s where it’s at.
Garry: Digitally going out with AI or going out to the streets?
Joan: I’m not linking religious life with that technology, I am linking religious life with the effect of that technology on the rest of society and we’ll find our place there, we will go out on the street with people, we have done it all our lives but now we don’t build big buildings for it with 700 kids in them.
The people are coming to our monasteries, they are coming there for what people in the Middle Ages came to monasteries for, for peace, quiet, spiritual development, understanding and to be part of our own ministries, to be the lay religious around us.
For instance, I’m a Benedictine, we have had Oblates for almost 1500 years. So we’ve always had a lay dimension, the Franciscans always had a lay dimension, the Dominicans do the same, those are the very old orders and they worked with the people while they worked for the people.
It is my position that we are back at those same moments, where a new grass is growing through the cement under our feet and it all lies in our willingness, our ability, our movement, our outreach, to be with what the people need spiritually in every arena.
Garry: You said you got a “chill” listening to the drumbeat of issues separating people from the church listed in the Synodal consultation of Catholics around the world, do you think they will be listened to?
Joan: It’s people like you and me who work with these thought developing moments in life; it’s the media, the philosophers, it’s the social service system that will ask itself what will come out of this and will it change A or B, or not A and B at all.
There’s no doubt about that, it’s going to be evaluated by every known thought process on the globe when this is over. [It’s] a really vibrant moment, probably the most exciting moment for the Church since the 15 century and at that point what did we have, we had the whole Protestant reformation, now we have the entire technical reformation of our lives, the way we do things and who we will hear it from, this Pope has recognised that the old era is over, and the people have left the Church and a good many of them women.
We have to admit that men were never as identified by the Church; they were of course the only creatures that the Church wanted to see or work with but the fact of the matter was when the outside work got done it was women’s work and women woke up one morning and decided that they were no longer being perceived, defined or accepted as full human beings and they are leaving any institution that treats them like that. I saw it happen and everybody I knew, knew and they were sure it was going to stop and wanted to know when did I think there would be a turn around; there’s not going to be a turnaround! There’s going to be a ‘turn to’ answering the call of a different age.
That will be a spiritual call always, our role will be to help people find a spiritual home in a very secular world and to make out of that its own spiritual development to the fullest.
Garry: I’m probably answering my own question here but if I’m hearing you correctly you are saying it’s too late, it’s over!
Joan: You got that 100%, this is not salvageable, not in this form. Religious life will not die, it never has why would we think it will now?
There are people out there whose whole development is itself spiritual, they are spiritual people, they will form spiritual groups, they will make spiritual process with the whole world around them. I see the young women that are gathering near my own community and they’re wonderful. And they know every social, political, civic problem and question and they know their womanhood. And they will develop that whether the church encourages it or not.
Now if the Church closes down on religious life, then it’s over. If the Church in the 21st century says we don’t want this kind of religious life then fine, they can have what’s left over. But that’s not what Jesus did in the walk from Galilee to Jerusalem, doing good all the way.
And he brought a different form of spiritual presence too and it shook that community.
So I expect the community to shake a little, but the kids are going to kill ya!
Sr Joan Daugherty Chittister OSB, is an American Benedictine nun, theologian, author, and speaker. She has served as Benedictine prioress and Benedictine federation president, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women.
