Overcoming two-class systems

Saint Benedict’s

[The question of who was “more Benedictine” arose for the sisters in the 1880s.]

In St. Benedict’s Convent there were two divisions, choir sisters and lay sisters.  The lay sisterhood was an institution introduced from Europe where conventual conditions were different, and it can be traced back to the Middle Ages.

Where the Divine Office was solemnly chanted and the enclosure of Benedictine convents was strictly observed, there was need for “outdoor” or lay sisters.  Sisters capable of reading Latin and reciting the Office were placed in the group whose chief duty was to chant the divine praises from the Psalter.  They were referred to as choir sisters.

Those whose education was deficient or who lacked ability for such duty were placed in the class of lay sisters.  Instead of chanting the Divine Office, these sisters recited the rosary, litanies, and other prayers in the vernacular in common and were engaged chiefly in domestic work rather than in teaching.

Their dress differed from that of the choir sisters as did their rank.  Though a sister’s rank was generally determined by the date of her entrance into the convent, the lay sister always took a place below the youngest choir sister in chapel and in the refectory.

In another and more vital matter they differed from the choir sisters.  They were not members of the conventual chapter and had no voice in determining the policy of the convent.  The constitutions of the proposed new union or congregation did not declare the system of lay sisterhood abolished—it did not even mention the group, but a clause at the beginning of that document would tend in time to do away with that institution.

It declared: “The chapter consists of all sisters who have made vows.”  There was also the statement that “dress is to be the same for all sisters in any particular convent.”

[From M. Grace McDonald, OSB, With Lamps Burning, American Benedictine Academy, Historical Studies: Monasteries and Convents, 4. Convent of Saint Benedict (St. Joseph, Minnesota: Saint Benedict’s Convent, 1957), 141-42.]

Saint John’s

[At Saint John’s the development occurred about a century later.]

For most of our history we were two distinct communities.  Men who entered the monastic novitiate were “choir monks.”  They prayed the lengthy Divine Office prescribed by the Rule of Benedict in Latin and had a protracted training of several years’ duration before being ordained priests.

The men who came with less formal education or were not interested in studies and ordination were called “lay brothers.”  During their novitiate they had periodic conferences from a monk appointed by the abbot to be the “brother master” but essentially got right down to work.

These groups prayed separately, lived in different parts of the monastery, had separate places in the refectory, and gathered in different recreation rooms for conversation, reading the newspaper, and playing cards.  The “fathers” wore clerical collars with their habits; the “brothers” did not.  The brothers took more or less the same vows as the fathers, but theirs had a different, and lesser, canonical status.

Brothers did not vote in the monastic chapter, where important business is done and abbots are elected.  They were almost all craftsmen and laborers.  Thomas Merton opined that the lay brothers at his Trappist monastery were probably leading the life Benedict had in mind.

With Vatican II [1962-65] the legal distinctions were abolished, and things started to become more integrated.  The word is deliberate: “brothers’ rights” echoed the larger social shifts in American culture toward greater equality, at least before the law.  But as late as 1979 the brothers’ mailboxes were still in the basement recreation room formerly reserved for them, while the fathers collected their mail in a recreation room just behind the abbey church on the main floor.

[From Columba Stewart, OSB, “A Little Rule for Beginners,” Chapter 2 of Hilary Thimmesh, OSB, ed., Saint John’s at 150: A portrait of this place called Collegeville 1856-2006 (Collegeville: Saint John’s University Press, 2006), 20-21.]