Be Not Silent

Sister Joan Chittister Speaks Out On War, Feminism, And The Catholic Church

When Bill Moyers interviewed Sister Joan Chittister on his PBS news program NOW, he began by saying, "It's always surprising to me to discover that nuns look like you." Chittister chuckled and replied, "Well, what does a nun look like?" She doesn't behave according to the common, mostly unflattering image of nuns: part demure acolytes prostrating themselves at the altar rail, part embittered schoolmarms smacking mischievous students' knuckles with wooden rulers. Chittister is demure in neither stature nor stride, and if she harbors any bitterness, it seems she has alchemically transmuted it into an untiring advocacy for the common good.

When I first heard Chittister enthrall more than a thousand people at a 2004 conference in New York City, I discovered that she is one of the most outspoken and articulate social critics and religious leaders of our time. As she spoke in that hotel ballroom, the sheer authority of her voice and the force of her indictment of religious hypocrisy, economic injustice, and political intolerance made me feel as if I were being pressed back against the plush, red-cushioned seat, as when a plane takes off. She delivered a staggering list of statistics on the rising percentage of civilian casualities in war: from 15 percent of total wartime casualties in World War I to 93 percent of the total casualties in Iraq. "Why are we surprised?" she asked. "It has been the century of total war: an age of genocide, of civilian slaughter. Sixty million in the twentieth century alone. But what is forgotten today — what is unnoted, unmarked, and unmemorialized — is the fact that most of these dead, most of these civilians on whom war falls most mercilessly, are women and children."

Now seventy, Chittister has been a nun for fifty-five years. She entered religious life in 1952 and took final vows as a Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1957. In the 1960s she saw the Church undergo the renewal of the Second Vatican Council. "It did not feel like 'renewal' then," Chittister writes in her 2005 book The Way We Were: A Story of Conversion and Renewal (Orbis Books). "It felt like disaster, like loss, like liberation, like life gone wild. And it felt like all of them all at once." After Vatican II, the Benedictine Sisters opened soup kitchens, halfway houses, and retreat centers. They worked on educating the poor and housing the elderly. They even wound up in jail for protesting the Vietnam War.

Over the years, Chittister has been a leader in numerous Catholic women's organizations. She is the founder and executive director of Benetvision, a resource-and-research center for contemporary spirituality in Erie, Pennsylvania. And she is the author of more than thirty books, including Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men; The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman's Life (both Eerdmans); Illuminated Life: Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of Light (Orbis Books); and Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir (Sheed and Ward). A regular columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, Chittister has received eleven honorary degrees and awards from universities and countless recognitions of her work for justice, peace, and equality — especially for women — in the Church and in society. She serves as co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders, a partner organization of the United Nations facilitating a worldwide network of women advocating for peace, particularly in Israel and Palestine.

Chittister and I met in a well-appointed room on the twenty-second floor of a hotel near Times Square in New York City. The day before, she had returned from Syria, where she had been part of a delegation promoting citizen-to-citizen dialogue between the United States and the Middle East. It was a clear November afternoon, and the window looked west, across the Hudson River. As we spoke, the sun went down over the smoldering industrial plains of New Jersey, which had an incongruous beauty in the orange glow of sunset.

Kullander: You're engaged in political affairs, but you're also a religious person. Do you feel more politically engaged than religiously engaged? Or is this a false dichotomy?

Chittister: I wouldn't be involving myself with social questions if I weren't a Benedictine Sister. I am not a politician. Nor was Jesus. But he kept pointing out how the system failed the people it purported to serve.

Benedictines read from the Scriptures three times a day, every day. We start on page one of Genesis and continue on, reading a little at a time, until we reach the last page of Revelations. Then we start all over again. I would not be doing what I'm doing now if I were not hearing the psalmists and the prophets dealing with much the same problems in their time, and if I did not have the story of Jesus walking from Galilee to Jerusalem, picking people up out of the dust, raising people from the dead, curing lepers, and giving sight to the blind.

Kullander: I had an Old Testament professor at Union Theological Seminary who said she saw the trials and tribulations lamented by the psalmists and the prophets every day in the headlines of the New York Times.

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