The Sisters of Mercy
For this assignment, I decided to research the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic order of nuns. I never before realized that there is so much behind their amazing devotion to the Catholic Church and God. I must admit that they are beautiful examples of God's teaching, and I feel truly blessed to be involved with the Sisters of Mercy. Each and every one of them has a unique story to tell about her life, but none is more intriguing than that of Sister Mary Joel Hopkinson. Having only heard bits and pieces, and not knowing for sure the steps that each of these women had to take to become who she is today, I asked Sister Mary Joel to share her story with me.
When she was born into a Protestant family in New England, no one could have guessed that Sister Joel would end up becoming a Catholic, let alone a Sister of Mercy. But as it turned out, as Sister Mary Joel Hopkinson says, "There was no way to deny it; this is what God wanted for me." Sister Joel has been a Sister of Mercy for almost fifty years. What is so interesting about her story is that she has been a Catholic for only fifty years. Only a little more than a year after she converted to Catholicism, she found herself looking to enter a convent. She explained that all her life she had had Catholic friends. At one of her jobs, she was the only non-Catholic in the carpool. The Catholic Church intrigued her, and she was of a curious nature, but not until years later did she realize that God was sending her a sign. She puts it rather bluntly when she says, "God pushed me out of the window and into the convent." Sister Joel was not always a businesswoman; in fact, she worked in a building in Brooklyn, New York, cleaning windows on the second floor. It was a rather old building, and the chains on the windows had been painted over a number of times. Once, while struggling to pull the window down, she lost her footing and fell out the window. The reason she says God pushed her is that the only ambulance on call that day was from St.
Little is known of the early life of the Flemish Cistercian nun, Blessed Beatrice of Nazareth. Beatrice of Nazareth was born in the year 1200 in the town of Tienen, Belgium (Lindemann Ph.D n.d.). She was the youngest of six children (Lindemann Ph.D n.d.). De Ganck (1991, xiii) concludes that Beatrice is of middle class, “well-to-do, but not wealthy as has sometimes been asserted.”
Although the Catholic Church kept nuns enclosed in convents in order to regulate their sexualities, Jeanne de Jussie’s writings highlight some of her own experiences with violence, in addition to offering examples of the stories that Catholics circulated (Crawford 87). In the chronicle, Jeanne de Jussie mentioned issues of domestic conflict incurred by the Reformation; many women were caught between their husband’s wrath and their Catholic faith (de Jussie 95). She also described some of the violence committed by heretics against Catholics; for example, before the heretics locked away the Lords of Bern in an inhumanely small cell, they “villainously grabbed him and pulled him from the pulpit and treated him harshly, so that he almost died there and then” (de Jussie 94). According to Jeanne de Jussie’s accounts, religious people from both sides of the conflict went to war with each other; she described that “good fathers went to battle with many other monks because it was for the religion but they did not bear arms” (de Jussie 79). Women and children also instigated Catholic violence against the heretics; “many of the women . . . carried rocks in their bodices to throw at the Lutherans. Along with the women there were at least seven hundred children between twelve and fifteen who were determined to do their duty with their mothers” (de
The pain she causes herself is Mariette being the vessel of God’s grace. Mariette’s intention to suffer displays a severe ambition and pride that she has a calling for a higher purpose. This purpose is also explored through Mariette’s experience with the stigmata. Mariette suddenly appears with the wounds of Jesus Christ, and Hansen creates a disturbance of power between female and male relationships to Christ. Mariette has been chosen above the male figures of the Church, and she shares in the appearance and bleeding of Christ wounds. Hansen connects female reproduction to Christ suffering. This ideology fits with Mariette because she has the capacity to perform the transfiguration of Christ, bringing the Grace of God to the World. This feminization of Christ allows Mariette to have a deeper connection with Him and reinforces the idea she has been chosen. Mariette’s intimacy in Christ’s pain is her desire to be more than just a sister, and even more than a Saint. Mariette associates His wounds with her own wounds, thus taking His ability to redeem as her having this capability too. Hansen uses Mariette’s relationship with Christ to draw on the theological formulation of Christ’s wounds as female reproduction. This idea challenges the notion of power within the priory and Roman
From quite a young age, when many people do not know what they are doing with their lives, Mary had already decided that she wanted to be a nun and help people as much as she could, she wanted to help the poor and less fortunate than her. Mary worked with people and children and ...
The patriarchal hierarchy order of the Church places nuns at the bottom of the order so while Sister Aloysius plays a prominent role at the school, she is foremost seen as a nun and is therefore required to submit to the authority of all other clerical po...
became a nun to give back to the community which gave her good Christian morals
Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, better known as St. Teresa of Avila, was a Spanish Catholic Saint and Carmelite nun who was most prominently known for her journey towards contemplative life through mental prayer. In her reflective and analytical autobiography, The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel, Teresa reflects on her interactions with others as a child, as a woman and as a nun, and bases her opinion of her own freedom and free will on these reflections. In this paper, I will argue the dual nature of freedom in Teresa’s life; on the one hand, Teresa is free in that she breaks free from the traditional role of the woman and society’s honour codes- despite citing honour as providing some guidance in her life-,
Trueman, Chris. “A day in the life of a nun.” historylearningsite.co.uk. Web. 25 March 2011. .
Schüssler-Fiorenza, Elizabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1983.
Being a devout Catholic, O’Connor’s “faith consciously informed her fiction. The difficulty of her work, she explained…is that many of her readers do not understand the redemptive quality of ‘grace,’ and, she added, ‘don’t recognize it when they see it. All my stories are...
To some the causes and effects of things are mutually exclusive, and coexistence with one another. When observing specific equipment or even life, the question stands that there must be an account that took place before such items ceased to exist. Particularly, Aristotle argues that each thing, whatever it may be, will have causes, or types of explanatory factors by which that thing can be explained. The significant knowledge of causes allows for specific accounts to be known. It’s like questioning what occurred first the chicken or the egg. Anything in life offers a question of cause; something must have been in order to bring about the nature of today. These causes are apparent in answering everyday questions, which in turn explains that the causes of life clarify the being of which stood before it and such causes amount to same entity.
August is the eldest Boatwright sister, and she is the most successful at dealing with grief. She experienced the suicides of two sisters, but she managed to retain her optimism and perspective, unlike June or May. One way August relinquishes grief is through religion. She is the leader of a group called the Daughters of Mary – a group of African-American women who worship Our Lady of Chains. August “manifests the Madonna’s wisdom and protection, balancing out June’s excessive intellectual qualities and May’s excessive emotional qualitie...
Kraemer, Ross Shepard, and Mary Rose D'Angelo. Women and Christian Origins. New York: oxford University press Inc., 1999.
The comedy itself is entertaining to watch, yet, it holds an important message that human beings need to understand. The main character battles between her desire to live her exotic life, while her reason to live a simple life in the convent exemplifies the power struggles that human beings face every day. Just as Mary Magdalene was condemned and saved by Jesus, Deloris has found her sanctuary and has reached salvation. Director Emile Ardolino utilizes the empowering female roles of nuns to shed a new light on the power structure of religion and discover a unity between religion and ordinary
To know a thing, says Aristotle, one must know the thing’s causes. For Aristotle the knowledge of causes provides an explanation. It is a way to understand something. Because of the importance of causality to knowledge and understanding, Aristotle developed something like the complete doctrine of causality, distinguishing efficient, material, formal, and final causes, and later concepts of causality have been derived from his analysis by omission. Aristotle’s four causes gives answers to the questions related to the thing to help ascertain knowledge of it, such as what the thing is made of, where the thing comes from, what the thing actually is, and what the thing’s purpose is. The thing’s purpose is used to determine the former three, in addition to the purpose being basically the same thing as what the thing actually is, as the purpose of the thing is used to determine whether or not a thing is what it is.