POVERTY, CHASTITY & DISOBEDIENCE
My Six Years in a Catholic Convent
by Susan K. Mattern
In this memoir, a woman recollects her unconventional decision to forgo a college scholarship and become a nun—and the challenging years she spent in a convent.
In 1966, Mattern won a prestigious four-year scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, her hometown. Her parents reacted with understandable pride but were then shocked to learn she had no intention of accepting; instead, she chose to enter a convent and become a nun. The author’s mother was a Roman Catholic but not the kind to be particularly enamored with the church or to pine for her children to become part of its official hierarchy. Mattern was motivated by a longing to understand and become closer to God, a desire she describes in lucidly thoughtful terms: “Most of my classmates didn’t seem to care much about God or religion, but I took it very seriously. I really did believe that God was the reason for our whole life. He had created me for a reason—he had created the whole universe, and it made sense for me to discover why He had made me.” Yet her experience at the School Sisters of Notre Dame was not what she expected. The women were anxiously sheltered from the outside world—the newspapers they received were marred by redactions. She was discouraged from getting too close to her fellow postulants for fear of such intimacy becoming a “Particular Friendship,” code for a lesbian romance. In addition, she came to realize that she was compelled to live under a mountain of nonsensical prohibitions that often seemed arbitrary, if not deliberately cruel. Eventually, Mattern became deeply disillusioned and, despite years of training, decided to leave.
The author’s brief remembrance is remarkably perceptive—she keenly observes all the ways in which the oppressive environment at the convent prevented the consummation of her spiritual desires: “We were eighteen and nineteen years old. Years where we should be expanding our world, meeting new people, women and men, learning, gaining new experiences, becoming ourselves. But we had been turned in on ourselves, forgetting who we were, striving to pour ourselves into a mold made hundreds of years ago in a different world.” Moreover, she believed the nuns unwittingly “reinforced the long-held patriarchal attitude of the church that we as sisters knew nothing,” frustrating her hopes of contributing to a more liberal, progressive church that treated women equally. Some of her superiors seemed more interested in quashing the last vestiges of her individuality than in offering encouragement. In one of the book’s most extraordinary remembrances, Sister Regina bitterly criticized Mattern after she delivered a piano recital, accusing her of narcissistic exhibitionism. With great intelligence, the author swings from personal reflection to a more objective critique of the Catholic Church. She considers the “massive exodus of nuns” from the church as a response to its failings. Mattern’s prose is perfectly suited to this dual function—it is as precise as it is informally candid. Moreover, while her appraisal has a powerfully personal element, it is free of the kind of bitterness that undermines rational arguments—for all her profound disappointments with her experience in a convent, the author proffers her criticisms with moderation and reserve.A frank, insightful personal account that delivers a discerning critique of the Catholic Church.