Can clothing really matter all that much?  Some nuns choose to wear habits, and some don’t. It’s as simple as that.  Or is it?  Perhaps there is a deeper significance in the habits of nuns, a significance which is caught up in the uniqueness and beauty of the calling to follow Christ as a nun.  Ted Papa explains that the habit may help the nun in her special vocation to find her true identity in Christ within her community.

There it was again—that grim, serious, and especially professional “hello” from Sr. Joan, the parish DRE and a nun who has chosen not to wear a habit. Her very greeting threatens to drag me into the struggle expressed by her choice of garb.

Only this time I ask myself, as I stroll into Mass, why this same desperate war plays itself out in almost every nun I know who considers the religious habit a hindrance to establishing her true identity. I don’t think I’m just a “conservative”; some (OK, one) of my favorite nuns eschew the habit—but even she is not without that faint struggle over identity, over vocation, over her place in the world.

Whence this “identity crisis”? Perhaps the infamous post-Vatican II battle between the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters in Southern California and their archbishop, Francis Cardinal McIntyre. In a move that ultimately split the order and resulted in hundreds of lost vocations, in 1967 the IHMs initiated a series of reforms that included leaving individual nuns free to choose their garments.

The order, to that point renowned up and down the Pacific coast for the excellence of its teachers, within months was shut out of the Los Angeles archdiocesan school system. Sr. Corita Kent, the free-spirited leader of the “modernization,” who later left the order, summed up the IHM’s new-found ethos, admittedly unusual for nuns: “To be beautiful, human, and Christian.”

To be fair, a depersonalizing “homogenization” had taken place among Catholic orders of nuns, especially those monolithic orders that so heroically staffed the booming U.S. Catholic school system. The root of the IHM initiative was a legitimate effort to grant members more say in the pursuit and development of their gifts. A suppressed, or at least impeded, natural process of self-development was at the heart of the issue.

At the same time, there is undeniably an element of “losing oneself” in religious life. Thomas Merton describes the “disappearance” of a postulant into the Trappist community during the week-long retreat that preceded his entrance into Gethsemani Abbey:

The first thing you noticed, when you looked at the choir, was this young man in secular clothes, among all the monks.

Then suddenly we saw him no more. He was in white. They had given him the oblate’s habit, and you could not pick him out from the rest. The waters had closed over his head, and he was submerged in the community. He was lost.

Merton echoes Christ’s words that “He who loves his life will lose it, while he who loses his life in this world will discover who he is.” So the irony of Sr. Joan’s identity crisis is that when she finally arrives at her true identity—she will be wearing a habit!

You see, a religious is one who chooses an identity in Christ, even while living in this world. The habit, either of a priest, a monk, or a religious sister, only facilitates and concretizes the decision to not understand oneself according to the world’s standards. When a nun opts for an identity in the world by the choice of secular dress, she unavoidably fixes herself in a “false” identity. She can’t help but do so, because religious life of its nature doesn’t take its standards from the world. Listen again to Merton:

The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order, or union with God, the principle of all perfection.

In contrast to what my mildly conflicted IHM friend alluded to above, my favorite group of nuns wears the habit and is a habitually joyful, free, and alive group of women. Identity is not an issue—or rather it develops in a healthy, secure way. Indeed for these nuns life is a daily, surprising discovery—a gift from the one whom they have given their lives to, and lost their lives for—Christ.

Copyright © 2000 Joseph T. Papa