| This organic inquiry explores the personal lived experience of 11 Catholic vowed women who have lived as professed religious women—as distinguished from vowed married women—in a variety of Congregations from 25 to 53 years. The study was initiated by a recognition that the only communicated information about women's vowed religious life lies in a theological, ecclesiastical, or anthropological realm, and that such writing was not effecting real change in the lives of the women themselves. Furthermore, it was prompted by an awareness that while the written documents of the Congregations are written in feminist, collaborative, and egalitarian language, the lived reality shows a high degree of incongruence with the written values. Both of these insights led to one more: that the experience of this particular group of women echoes the continuing paradoxical dilemma of women in general in North American culture.; This inquiry discovers that a hidden and hitherto voiceless transformation of the structures themselves has begun to take place as some members of Catholic vowed women's communities shift from conforming to outer authority towards a self-authoring epistemology, even inside the structures themselves. Their paradoxical dilemma echoes that of women in general who find their “original fire” in the sense of inner, purposeful vitality, oppressed by structures of patriarchal authority in which they have no voice. |
