by Samuel Huard
As an enterprise for which universality is a fundamental and continuous project, the Catholic Church has continuously expanded its presence across the world. Religious orders played – and still play – an active role in this entangling of worlds. As their members crossed borders, these orders became spaces of domination and emancipation, of ethnocentric impositions and intercultural encounters, of violence and love. They became spaces both for the reproduction of the world’s social injustices and for the creation of concrete utopias. Today, as the Catholic Church’s center of gravity is moving from the North towards the South, at least demographically, these tensions create new challenges and opportunities.
Since the second Vatican Council (1962-1965), religious orders have been asked to put fraternal and sororal charity at the center of their lives, as their members are bound by their vocation to practice charity with “greater perfection” (Ad Gentes, §40, cf. Perfectae Caritatis, §15) and – as any other Christian – to “foster a universal love for man”, devoid of any racial prejudice (Ad Gentes, §15). Yet escaping the unequal and at times oppressive structures of power of the social world can be tricky even for those who have fled it. One such structure is coloniality, omnipresent in our modern world, impacting the ways in which we think about and interact with ourselves and Others. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres has argued, “modern subjects breath[e] coloniality all the time and everyday”[1]. Members of religious orders do not escape from this colonial air. Yet they breathe it through the mask of their vocation, a vocation centered on an ethos of brother- or sisterliness.
Surprisingly, the tension between these two opposing structures (coloniality and sisterliness), to which members of transnational religious orders are inevitably exposed, has seldom been studied anthropologically. I argue that such studies are necessary if we are to understand both how global and abstract structures of power such as coloniality are enacted at the micro level, even within fields that could seem, at first, to follow opposite logics; and, conversely, how the ideal of love put forward in the Gospels – Weber’s “acosmistic love” – is enacted despite and against the “world”. Between the vertical, exclusionary and subordinating character of coloniality, and the horizontal, inclusive and equalizing character of ideal sisterliness, the sources of tension are numerous.
In 2019, I spent a few weeks among the Sisters of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, a congregation founded in Quebec in the 1870s, which expanded to Latin America in the 1960s. During my research, I realized that the friction between the verticality of coloniality and the horizontality of sisterliness engendered many contradictions in the discourses of some of the sisters I met, discourses that emphasized both sameness and alterity, equality and subordination. These contradictions were lucidly summarized by Sister Annie[2] when, in her concluding remarks to our interview, she mentioned both the “equal responsibility towards the charism-mission to embody” shared by all the sisters of the congregation, and the “subtle complex of superiority and of droits acquis of the sisters of Quebec” (regarding their Latin American counterparts). During my fieldwork, I realized that this generally tacit contradiction was jeopardizing the capacity of the congregation to adapt to its evolving demographic reality[3]. However, some sisters, in Quebec and Honduras, were starting to address this tension by opening up spaces of dialogue in which sisterliness allowed them to question and deconstruct North-South domination.
As the Catholic Church goes through a similar moment of redefinition of the relations between its historically Northern center and Southern “peripheries” that are always less peripherical, fostering studies of this type will allow both anthropologists and members of the Church to improve their comprehension of the ways in which unequal relations of power and brother- or sisterliness intersect in transnational contexts, notably across the North-South axis, and of how these unequal relations are reproduced and challenged, embraced and refused. This could generate precious lessons far beyond Catholicism regarding the ongoing coloniality of multiple worlds, a pressing issue that concerns us all.
[1] Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 243.
[2] This sister is from Quebec. “Annie” is a pseudonym.
[3] For more details on these demographic changes, see Samuel Huard, “Decolonizing the Convent: Transnationality, North-South Domination and Sisterhood among the Sisters of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 49, no. 4 (2020): 564-586.
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