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Growing up in a fundamentalist Protestant family,
Cheryl Reed wasn't allowed
to date Catholics.
She was taught that Catholics were miscreants who
went to mass on Saturday
afternoons so they could go drinking and sleep in
on Sundays. And nuns, in
their long, black habits and severe-looking veils
and wimples, haunted her
nightmares.
She might have been content to believe the lessons
of her childhood, but
Reed grew up to be a reporter.
Her book, "Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns,"
which will be released on
Tuesday, is part journalistic endeavor but more so
a personal quest to find
the truth behind the icons, to define the role of
modern women in these
ancient religious communities, and a spiritual
journey. In writing the book,
she found a deeper spirituality within herself and
an unexpectedly diverse
host of "spiritual godmothers" who also guided her
and prayed for her when
she most needed their help.
After years of in-depth reporting on subcultures
including street gangs,
AIDS-stricken prostitutes and married Catholic
priests, Reed, an
investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times,
decided to use a research
grant to investigate the subculture that had
fascinated her since childhood.
Her year of research was punctuated by several
newspaper and magazine
reports on nuns, but Reed knew there was more. So
she devoted the next three
years to living and working with nuns in 11
states, including Minnesota --
where she lived -- and Wisconsin.
Her experiences living and working with about 300
nuns in 50 orders
shattered many of the stereotypes Reed had
learned.
In the course of her interviews, Reed lived with
the women for days or weeks
and adopted their prayer and work routines. She
worked beside one of the
School Sisters of Notre Dame in a Chicago homeless
shelter and helped to
deliver a baby in a south Texas birthing center.
She attended protests with
the St. Paul-based sisters of St. Joseph of
Carondelet and hung out with
Visitation sisters working in a high-crime area of
Minneapolis.
"I expected them to be very habited, much more
cloistered," Reed said in an
interview. "I didn't expect them to be as
educated, as feminist, and
certainly not as progressive as they were."
She met nuns who rarely left the confines of their
monasteries, nuns who
used the streets in their outreach to the poor and
hopeless, nuns who embed
each piece of their traditional habits with prayer
and devotion to the
institutional church, and nuns who long ago shed
both their habits and their
blind obedience to the church's doctrines.
"Nuns are not what you think they are," Reed said.
"They aren't the meek and
subservient caricatures that we have long
portrayed them to be. They are
very complex women, very independent and
progressive and strong women, and
we can really learn a lot from them. They've spent
a lot of their lives
contemplating important issues. I look at them as
our spiritual guides and
mentors."
One of Reed's objectives was to determine whether
there was a place for the
modern woman in the Catholic vocations. The
sisters she interviewed spoke
candidly about sexuality and celibacy, their hopes
and regrets and their
spiritual struggles. They presented divergent
views regarding the value of
the habit, of being in the world or in the
relative degrees of cloistering;
and the role of prayer in their lives.
Although some of the more conservative orders
discouraged any challenge of
the church hierarchy or principle, many of the
nuns echoed criticism that
Reed had heard from other feminist women about the
direction of the church.
Rather than identifying with the church, many
sisters' loyalties lay with
their orders and their own communities.
"Some would say, 'I'm Catholic,' but they don't
feel really Roman Catholic,"
Reed said. "They feel really separate from the
institution."
Reed recalled the political activist St. Joseph
sisters in St. Paul and
Sister Margaret Traxler, who ran the Chicago
homeless shelter and who
publicly questioned the church's stand against
abortion, its treatment of
women inside and outside of the church.
"These were women who were very strong in their
opinions and weren't afraid
to challenge the status quo," Reed said. "They
were highly educated, they
were smart, they were quite accomplished, and yet
they didn't have to agree
with everything the Catholic Church said, and they
were very vocal about
what they thought."
These women, she said, also taught her a lot about
feminism.
"For women of my generation, using the word
'feminist' is probably not
something I would do," she said. "It has a certain
tainted feel to it. Being
around all these nuns, they used that word all the
time. I started using it,
not even realizing it. . . . I started to realize
that for them, being a
feminist is the same as someone who supports civil
rights. There is no
difference."
While Reed was inspired by the spiritual depth and
the relevance of many of
the orders she visited, she also had disappointing
experiences that seemed
to go a long way in explaining the long demise of
the vocation.
The mother superior of an order in Philadelphia,
for example, barred any of
the sisters from speaking with Reed without direct
permission; even
inconsequential chit-chat was forbidden. She was
turned away from a
fragmented order of Immaculate Heart sisters,
after one nun told her, "It's
Christmas, and our sisters don't want to be eating
with a stranger."
Of both experiences, Reed said, "I just couldn't
take it. I felt incredibly
claustrophobic. I felt like I was in prison. It
was horrible."
When Reed finished her research, she found herself
in her own spiritual
abyss. After the terror attacks in 2001, and a
series of professional and
health challenges, Reed found that her own faith,
deepened by time spent in
prayer and discussion with women of faith, didn't
feel like enough to get
her through "God's hazing."
"A lot of my own beliefs are Protestant in nature,
even though I'm not
Protestant anymore," she said. "If you pray and
you're a good person,
nothing bad's going to happen to you. . . . Then
horrible things happened to
me. Ultimately, that doesn't protect you from
life. Life happens."
Drawing on life philosophies she learned from the
sisters, she realized that
her understanding of God had to mature. She
learned patience, to trust in
the value of life's journey.
"Since then, I can say that there was a reason for
all those things," she
said. "I couldn't see that then, but it turned out
better than if my plan
had worked."
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