Word: loretto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DeWitt said. Also in the delegation are Bishop James Armstrong of the United Methodist Church who headed the clergy's campaign for Senator George McGovern, Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Los Angeles, Robert McAfee Brown, a Presbyterian theologian at Stanford, and Sister Mary Luke Tobin of the Sisters of Loretto...
Many American nuns have been able to update their life-styles without leaving their orders. Perhaps the most successful are the Sisters of Loretto. Under the leadership of their former mother general, Sister Luke Tobin (the only American nun to attend Vatican II), the Loretto community became the prototype for renewal in American sisterhoods. The Loretto nuns were among the first in the U.S. to modernize their convent schedule and dress-the habit is often exchanged for the civilian garb appropriate to their work-and branch out into professions other than the teaching, nursing or running of orphanages...
Like the independent Immaculate Heart Community, the Loretto nuns have broadened their definition of community to include men and married couples as well as non-Catholics. But since the Lorettos are still under the authority of Rome, these lay people, called "co-members," take no vows and thus are not officially part of the congregation. The sisters no longer make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in the old formula, but write their own expressions of dedication, which retain the essence of all three vows. "Poverty," says Sister Luke, "should mean detachment, not dependence. Obedience should be to the needs...
Marlboro Country. In addition to the internal reforms being made by many communities similar to the Loretto, U.S. nuns have organized their reform activities in a proliferation of groups that bear a marked similarity to secular Women's Lib federations. The feeling among many sisters, says Jesuit John C. Haughey, an associate editor of America magazine, is that the church has been "Marlboro Country as far back as they can see, and will continue to be so as far in the future as they care to look." The organizations include small ethnic groups such as the National Black Sisters...
Even more than priests, nuns leaving church service these days rarely do so with a sense of failure. Says Leonora Kountz, a former Sister of Loretto who is now teaching in Chicago: "My order is one of the most progressive in the U.S. I certainly had no quarrel with them. Quitting was a sort of shifting the weight of my life. One's life has a certain weight, or direction, at one time, but it dawned on me that the weight had shifted toward another direction...