Convent life
Mary Kenny
In Habit: An anthropological study of working nuns Suzanne Campbell-Jones (Faber £9.95) Nuns are misunderstood people, and the institution of the convent is badly evaluated. The long-running comedy. Once a Catholic, still playing in the West End, presents a typical general vision of the nun in the convent school: prudish, naive, gullible, simple-minded, comic in her superstitions, droll in her fetishist purity. Part of Once a Catholic's success lies in its predictable view of the convent, and the superior sophisticated position that the onlooker can take of himself in contrast: 'Fortunately, I am not such a foolishminded simpleton as to believe in the predictions of Our Lady of Fatima.' (More's the pity perhaps. Our Lady of Fatima predicted that Communism would bring misery to millions.) Nuns can be naive and simple-minded; they can also be cunning and tough, articulate and voluble, decisive, serious people with a clear idea of what they want from life; often it is power. Like any other group of people, their communities are comprised of individuals, but it is a fact that social atmospheres draw out different characteristics in people. and convents often do seem to produce types. My own experience of nuns led me to believe, from an early age, that the world was full of powerful, competent women who could manage estates, invest money prudently, teach mathematics and read Latin and Greek. In my girlhood, the nuns were a good example of seriousminded women hellbent on education whose existence proved that there was salvation outside of looking like Rita Hayworth.
Suzanne Campbell-Jones has understood this point very well in her book on nuns. Despite the nun's vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. despite her apparent renunciation of personal fulfillment, the nun is a social expression of woman as feminist, woman as worker, woman as intellectual; in 19th-century England and 20th-century Ireland. the woman who joined the convent might very well be the person who wanted to be herself and not subsumed into marriage and childbearing. Is obedience to God any worse than obedience to man, after all? A Papal Encyclical of 1930 defined Roman Catholic marriage thus: ' . . . the order of love which includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience . . . It is recognised that certain false teachers assert that husband and wife should have equal rights. They do not scruple to do away with the honourable and trusting obedience which the woman owes the man.' Speaking infallibly. the Pope said that these laws could never be changed, since they came from God. For many a country girl from County Mayo, raising 12 children and being 'subject in obedience' to some frightful thug who addressed you as 'woman' was a less dignified way of life than the comfort and selfrespect of the convent. _ Suzanne Campbell-Jones studied two convents; one a traditional, enclosed order; the other a progressive, open convent. She calls it an anthropological study for a good motive; the sociologist analyses groups of people and explains the social and economic reasons for their behaviour; the anthropologist describes their customs, their rituals, their relationships, their symbols — but does not judge. Her book is a sincere and useful study of nuns today, and the enormous changes they have been through in recent times, but she does not quite succeed in getting away from the sociologist's inclination to patronise people. In trying to answer the difficult question of ' why girls still become nuns, she tends to the explanation that they are merely 'socialised' into it. They do it because they are brought up to it. But it doesn't really answer the question of human sacrifice: why do people want to give themselves to causes, to ideals, to abstract ideas which may be expressed as 'truth', 'love', or 'God'? Even when they are not 'socialised' into it, they invent such missions, as the recent events in Guyana showed.
What I liked about In Habit was that the author's knowledge of history, literature and educational development is so thorough. even though some of her views are depressingly predictable. (Why do all modern sociological writers automatically dismiss all Victorian women as sexually repressed? Was Lily Langtry 'sexually repressed? Was Kitty O'Shea? Was Queen Victoria herself? Human nature doesn't change that much from one generation to the next.) An element of the institutional life of the convent that is frequently overlooked is their role in geriatric care — for each other; in every modern convent a younger sister has responsibility for the care of an ageing nun; a daughterly relationship often not acted out in 'real' life. And there is something very effective in the way that nuns work; all this business about taking the veil may be crazy, but the worst comprehensive school improves when it is taken over by nuns and a hospice for the dying set up by nuns is a joyful place next to the sadly mechanical terminal hospitals run by unionised medical staff. Obliquely, the author recognises the fact that nuns do less harm to the world than sociologists.
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