What with all the bad news God gets every day from every corner of the world, the pledge from a 38 year old woman in Fort Wayne Indiana to keep her clitoris out of action must make it all seem worthwhile.
I can remember a piece in a paperback from the 1980s, probably by Azimov, explaining that to void off impending overpopulation, government and society action would be needed over the next 50 years to vastly increase non-reproductive sex, homosexuality, celibacy, asexualism, monks/nuns etc. etc…: anything except normal mating.
Every little helps.
Indeed. In some times and places, becoming a nun has been effectively a sort of treatment for promiscuity. I know someone who became a nun, who was most assuredly not a virgin.
Consecrated Virgin is, like, a job title. Only it’s an unpaid job. You perform acts of repentance and prayer and you don’t get to have sex. But it doesn’t include joining a religious order, like a Nun, or the solemn vows of poverty and obedience.
Sister Wendy, for example, (y’know, the art lady from BBC?) is a Consecrated Virgin and Hermit, but she’s not a Nun. I know, I was shocked too. I always thought she was a Nun. Nope. She was a novitiate, and called to Holy Life, but not as a Nun.
Nuns take a solemn vow of chastity, whether or not they were virgins before they became nuns. But not all of them are Consecrated Virgins, and those that are will be referred to as Nuns. Like if you are a CNA and then get your RN, you will be called an RN, even when you are doing CNA job duties like bathing patients.
Consecrated Virgins are much rarer than Nuns. And Nuns are much rarer than Sisters, who are women most of us call Nuns but who work in public life and have taken only simple, temporary vows. (Just to keep things confusing, Nuns are often also called “Sister So-and-So”, but they’re not really Sisters once they’ve taken their solemn vows.)
There are actually quite a few different roles for women in the RC church that all get rolled into “nun” in public opinion.
Wait, are you sure that’s right? According to the Dominican sister who taught my OCIA class fifteen years ago, sisters work in the world, whereas nuns are cloistered. I can’t link to it from my phone, but www.anunslife.org says that both vow lives of perpetual poverty, celibacy, and obedience; the only significant difference is a nun gives up ownership of all goods, but a sister can retain (but not use or derive revenue from) inherited property.
The distinction (which doesn’t make a difference to most of us, but is important within the Church) is that a Sister has taken simple vows, and a Nun has taken solemn vows. The practical difference has waned over time, as some Nuns are no longer cloistered, and some Sisters rarely leave the convent, but still generally speaking, those who are out working in the community are more likely to be Sisters than Nuns.
