The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (review)

In this innovative study,Amy Koehlinger combines the methodologies of history and anthropology to examine how "in just a few short years sisters had transformed themselves from virtual inmates of their own religious institutions into public activists agitating for the liberation of others" (p. 2). In the 1950s Pope Pius XII urged sisterhoods worldwide to modernize and streamline their rules to improve their relevance and effectiveness in their apostolates. The Sister Formation Conference within the United States emphasized expanding educational opportunities for sisters. These prefatory reform efforts prepared American sisters to capitalize on the unique opportunities that the historic confluence of the Second Vatican Council, the civil rights movement, and the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty presented them to engage the world in transformative ways.

Koehlinger identifies the Department of Educational Services (DES) of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) as the primary agency responsible for implementing racial-justice programs for the sisters and facilitating their placement in specific projects. The DES focused on racial justice between 1965 and 1968. She argues that by 1972, clerical opposition to the sisters' apostolic innovations preoccupied the DES, which "simply and gradually shifted its focus away from racial justice in American society and toward gendered oppression within the Church and by extension, away from African Americans and back toward sisters themselves" (p. 121).

Koehlinger's efforts to obfuscate the racial identity of the new nuns pose a problem. Her use of such phrases as "the inconclusive race of sisters in Selma" (p. 154),"Sisters' sense of nonwhiteness" (p. 155),"racial passing" (p. 157), and her bold assertion that "[n]either white nor black, ... sisters then constituted a third racial category, the category of 'sistah'" (p. 239) prove unpersuasive. Was the sisters' actual racial identity in question or their experience of their whiteness? What did it mean for the sisters to say,"For all practical purposes we are 'Negroes' living in a Negro community"? Were these sisters truly "no longer entitled to privileges attached to whiteness in a racist society" (p. 156)? The very fact that they could register to vote despite harassment meant that southern voting officials recognized their whiteness. In significant ways, the epiphanies the sisters had in the racial apostolate and subsequently applied to their internal religious reforms post-Vatican II replicated the epiphanies a century earlier that antebellum white women abolitionists fighting slavery had had and then applied to their own legal and economic restrictions as women in American society.

The racial apostolate had long historical roots. Indeed, several white sisterhoods throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had engaged in catechizing and educating black pupils, both briefly and long-term. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament had ministered to black and Indian peoples exclusively since 1891. Koehlinger cites Blessed Sacrament Sister June Fisher's frank statement of the preferred traits that historically black Xavier University in New Orleans sought in a prospective staff member in 1969. Fisher's enumeration eloquently attested the capacity of white sisters to identify effectively with African Americans, an example that eludes Koehlinger, who inexplicably identifies the Blessed Sacrament Sisters erroneously as "an African American congregation of women religious" (p. 226). Situating her treatment of women religious engaged in the racial apostolate in the 1960s more accurately within its historical context would have enhanced Koehlinger's portrayal of the new nuns. Nevertheless, in this otherwise thoughtful and elucidating study, Koehlinger poignantly chronicles the frustrations, tensions, and triumphs the new nuns experienced as they negotiated tortuous paths between their own moral imperatives toward racial justice and the recalcitrance and opposition of racist laity, clergy, and even other sisters.