Hearing With a Listening Heart: The Sustained Calling to Contemporary Religious Life for Vowed Roman Catholic Women

Abstract

The aim of this qualitative study is to investigate why contemporary Roman Catholic women sustain their calling to the service of others within a vowed religious life. Secular changes have impacted on the long period of growth in Roman Catholic religious orders since the nineteenth century but the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s produced ongoing and formidable challenges to a sustained calling for women religious to serve others. I argue that, while explanations for calling sustainment may vary among contemporary women religious, such explanations are associated by their reference to a common language and meanings given to vowed religious life that are familiar to all women religious and are part of a discourse inherited by the communities of women they join. The ‘calling’ is understood by these women, therefore, as a primary link between past and present through which contemporary women religious explain their choices to serve others in terms of a two thousand year narrative rather than simply a unique experience. The language and meanings that explain the calling to religious life for Roman Catholic women may be examined in a number of different ways. At the individual level, we may understand the concept of the calling as women in religious communities enabled to establish a core identity and a vital source of agency through reference to those exemplars, within their narrative, who have come before them. The religious calling to service has social, political, and cultural implications for all vowed women given the patriarchal institutions of power within which they have historically operated. Sociologically, however, the calling these women refer to appears to be primarily shaped by dispositional and situational factors in the antecedent, experiential, and consequential stages of an individual’s life in her religious community. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine from a sociological perspective not only the processes that facilitate vocational perseverance for women religious, but also outcomes, in terms of personal and organisational transformation within Roman Catholic communities of women, of new and diverse ways of being and doing. In particular, I argue that women religious explain their perseverance in navigating the challenging path through a vocational journey that involves avoidance, expectation, resistance, and compliance because the language and meanings they associate with their calling continue to be a powerful presence within congregations of consecrated women geared for revitalization and transformation within different forms of intentional community. Their ability to identify, understand, regulate, and moderate the emotions within themselves and others generated by a calling to religious work has equipped these women with the energy and capacity to cope with challenge and change regardless of circumstance. Without understanding and placing their calling within a shared narrative, there would be less optimism or agency of the kind that enables women religious to serve others wherever, in global terms, the need arises. In this research I focus specifically on role modelling, emotional and faith maturity, reasoned argument, as well as altruistic and egoistic motivations that sustain women religious in their chosen way of life and embedded within the explanations they offer for their calling to service. My research is therefore focused on the ‘who, what, how, and why’ of the dynamic relationship between the ‘calling’ and the called in Roman Catholic communities of women religious today.

Thesis (PhD Doctorate)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

School of Arts, Media and Culture

Arts, Education and Law

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