Some orders have claimed to have moved 'beyond Jesus' which only illustrates further what is wrong with many religious orders of women today.Īlso, the one mention of the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma is condescending as if they (the Almas) were the rebels when they (the larger group of Mercies) were the rebels who went against what Venerable Catherine had in mind for her religious order. And what happens? Sisters leave in droves, those who stay twist the charisms of their orders according to the mind of the world and started to drift from the original purpose of their vocation: the unify themselves and other more perfectly to Christ. What happens? The sisters 'modernize' aka pick up the mind and heart of the world and ditch that which made them great. The first two-thirds, to me at least, is a great chronicle of the contributions of women religious to the Church and the nation but then. It basically exhibits the history of religious women (particularly the Sisters of Mercy) in the United States from the founding of the nation to the present day. I enjoyed the book until it got to the tumultuous time following the Council. In Sisters, Fialka reveals the strength of the spiritual capital and the unprecedented reach of the caring institutions that religious women created in America. Currently there are about 75,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. As their numbers began to decline in the 1970s, many sisters were forced to take professional jobs as lawyers, probation workers, managers and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. In the 1900s they built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems and brought the Catholic Church into the civil rights movement. Their work was often done in the face of intimidation from such groups as the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan. They provided aid and service in the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes in the California Gold Rush and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals run by both armies in the Civil War. In the 1800s nuns moved west with the frontier, often starting the first hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges. They became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Nuns were the first feminists, argues Fialka. Sisters is the first major history of the pivotal role played by nuns in the building of American society.

Sisters by John J. Fialka