Religion: Surprise and Pain in the Cloister

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% Though the general pattern of spiritual life remains, convents have adopted new practices since 1977. Nuns in tropical climates, for example, need not wear the customary woolen habit. Daily hours may be shifted to local needs, and a prioress no longer has absolute sway over her convent. Beyond that, however, in rare cases nuns have abandoned the habit altogether. Also, sisters are occasionally leaving the cloister for personal missions like visiting a sick parent, and, with special permission, for more mundane matters like schooling. A prioress in Barcelona even appeared on a TV talk show. "These are the exceptions that get publicity," says a Carmelite in Rome. Nonetheless, such liberties would once have been unthinkable; to traditionalists like Mother John, prioress of a convent in Schenectady, N.Y., the language of the reformed charter "was so broad that it was not safeguarding the essential dimensions" of the Carmelite vocation.

The traditionalists, centered in Spain, want a strict charter based on the order's constitution of 1581. The legalistic 1581 document, written by Carmelite priests a year before Teresa died, specified everything from a strict regimen of fasting to the material from which sandals were to be made. Casaroli's letter declared that the 1581 constitution is the "genuine expression" of Teresa's desires. The great majority of the nuns, however, maintain that the important matter is not such details but the saint's spiritual vision, and that this is best perpetuated by following the simpler rule she wrote in 1567, which was the basis for the experimental charter.

Progressive sisters are now praying and writing the Vatican to plead for a modernized constitution. The prioress at the convent in the Roxbury section of Boston, Sister Therese, clasps her hands and smiles with confidence as she speaks in hushed tones of the traditionalist campaign. "All we know is that what they are asking is impossible. We're living in 1985."

FOOTNOTE: *Or "unshod"; sandals are worn to signify humility.