Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns [Hardcover]

Kenneth Briggs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 2006

This groundbreaking exposé of the mistreatment of nuns by the Catholic Church reveals a history of unfulfilled promises, misuse of clerical power, and a devastating failure to recognize the singular contributions of these religious women.

The Roman Catholic Church in America has lost nearly 100,000 religious sisters in the last forty years, a much greater loss than the priesthood. While the explanation is partly cultural—contemporary women have more choices in work and life—Kenneth Briggs contends that the rapid disappearance of convents can be traced directly to the Church’s betrayal of the promises of reform made by the Second Vatican Council.

In Double Crossed, Briggs documents the pattern of marginalization and exploitation that has reduced nuns to second-, even third-class citizens within the Catholic Church. America’s religious sisters were remarkable, adventurous women. They educated children, managed health care of the sick, and reached out to the poor and homeless. They went to universities and into executive chairs. Their efforts and successes, however, brought little appreciation from the Church, which demeaned their roles, deprived them of power, and placed them under the absolute authority of the all-male clergy.

Replete with quotations from nuns and former nuns, Double Crossed uncovers a dark secret at the heart of the Catholic Church. Their voices and Briggs’s research provide compelling insights into why the number of religious sisters has declined so precipitously in recent decades—and why, unless reforms are introduced, nuns may vanish forever in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Briggs, a former New York Times religion editor, spent eight years researching and writing this report on the disappearance of Catholic nuns from the American church scene. During that time, some 25,000 sisters died and the number of American nuns fell to under 70,000, compared with 185,000 in 1965. In setting out to learn what happened to cause this marked decline, Briggs interviewed legions of nuns who lived through the cataclysmic Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965, which brought major reforms to the church and religious life. Although nuns were largely excluded from the council, Briggs suggests that it gave sisters a mandate to renew their communities and the freedom to determine how. But when bishops, priests and eventually the Vatican stood in their way, the sisters were "double-crossed." Briggs believes that had the sisters been allowed to interpret Vatican II as they understood it, their decline might not have been so sharp. However, he also points to cultural shifts and church politics as factors that affected the sisterhood's vitality. Moreover, he observes that the sisters may have contributed to their own demise by remaining loyal to church authority. Readers sympathetic to the cause of sisters who sought greater reform than was achieved will most appreciate Briggs's work on this important topic. (June 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Briggs revisits the pivotal Vatican II years in this compelling expose of the plight of American nuns. Since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church in America has lost approximately 100,000 religious sisters. Although much of the decrease is because many older sisters retired from active duty and subsequently died, multiple cultural and political transformations also contributed to the shrinking of the ranks. Still, according to Briggs, the most significant factor was the promise of reform promulgated by Vatican II, a promise that never materialized on a practical level. Excluded from most of the doctrinal discussions, female religious leaders nevertheless understood they would be granted the freedom to review and reorganize their individual orders. That freedom was short-lived when the nuns were in fact double-crossed by the male church hierarchy. Disillusioned and betrayed, nuns left their convents and communities in record numbers, effectively devastating the most productive educational, medical, and social arm of the Catholic Church in America. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday Religion; 1St Edition edition (June 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385516363
• ISBN-13: 978-0385516365
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,031,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A story whose time has come to be told AND don't be put off by the book's cover!, January 4, 2007

By 

M. I. Johnson "Sister Margaret" (Moscow, Idaho) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns (Hardcover)

Being a woman religious and having lived through a good part of the research Mr. Briggs has done, I found what he had to say quite accurate. I found him redundant at times, but his findings are, sadly, true. He has done a very good job researching and telling facts that have needed to be told. I applaud him and I recommend this book to all who want to know about America nuns' experience these passed 40 plus years.
PS Don't let the cover put you off!

79 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb book--well researched and well written, June 30, 2006

By 

HistoryProf (Syracuse, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns (Hardcover)

Ken Briggs is worked on this book for 10 years--and it was worth waiting for. Based upon copious research and (especially) interviews with a large number of sisters, Briggs produced a book that demonstrates a depth of knowledge and insight that is rare in books of this sort. He clearly has a point of view--sympathy with the more progressive sisters about whom most of this book is written--but he also allows others to speak for themselves. What is especially remarkable is that the author is not only not a sister, he's not a Catholic. That might not be evident to those not aware of the fact; the book SEEMS to reflect a kind of cultural familiarity that one would expect mainly from a Catholic author. Briggs did a lot of research in both popular and scholarly literature, too. Needless to say, I highly recommend this book.

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important story about a little-known subject, December 2, 2006

By 

Anyechka (Rensselaer, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns (Hardcover)

I did personally feel that this book felt a bit academic at times, as opposed to giving us this fascinating information mainly through longer personal stories and remembrances, but writing style aside, it really gets the subject across. The fact that Mr. Briggs put 8 years into this book really shows, not only in the compelling material and telling personal stories, but also in his knowledge of Catholic history and theology in spite of not being Catholic himself. This book was interesting to me as a feminist, as one interested in Catholic history and nuns, and someone who, several times, thought semi-seriously about becoming a nun when younger (the religion I ended up choosing was not Catholicism, so the sisterhood was obviously ruled out for me).

The history of nuns in America is a very long and fascinating one, and the numbers of American sisters steadily grew over time, till their ranks were swelling in the decades just before Vatican II. Even though some sisters might not have considered themselves such (for various reasons that Mr. Briggs explains throughout the book), nuns really were the original feminists. They were liberated women ages before the ordinary secular American women were. They might not have been liberated from things like hierarchical control and institutionalised sexism in the Church, but they were liberated insofar as they were out there working, going to college, getting advanced degrees, being administrators of hospitals, schools, and social welfare agencies, having their own identities instead of being identified through a husband, and being childfree, in an age where pregnancy could be a death sentence for women, particularly before birth control was legal and widely available; nuns could always work and control their own lives because they had no husbands and children. Historically, unmarried women, nuns or not, have always had more power and freedom than married women; only in the past few decades has that begun to change.

Topics covered in the book include the habit, unforeseen consequences of Vatican II's call for renewal and re-examination of religious life and the histories of these orders, the horrible poverty many aging nuns have found themselves in, the mass exodus of nuns in the years after Vatican II, nuns and feminism, the backlash against progressive nuns (and feminism in general), groups working for female ordination, and nuns getting advanced degrees. Since no two orders and no two nuns are alike, there are a plethora of viewpoints on these issues. For example, some orders never really had a habit, and there were some orders in the 19th century whose founders got away with never wearing a habit. Many different nuns offer differing viewpoints on the future of the sisterhood in the face of their dwindling ranks and the continued interference from bishops. As Mr. Briggs shows, there's no one clear and simple answer to the question of why there are relatively few nuns under the age of 50 today, and what might be done to attract more young women to the sisterhood. Yes, there are certain areas and orders that do have many fresh-faced younger sisters instead of geriatric retired women, but when looking at the numbers, there's no denying that the vast majority of American sisters are over the age of 50. The amount of young women entering has slowed to a trickle in comparison to the huge amounts of women in their late teens and early twenties who entered in the Forties, Fifties, and early Sixties. A big part of this certainly is because today women are allowed secular opportunities for freedom and liberation, and don't have to be nuns to improve their chances of getting advanced degrees, being administrators, and entering the workforce. Another big part is how at every turn, the Church hierarchy "double-crossed" these women who had given so much for so many years, being unpaid servants and the backbone of the Church, really taken for granted because they weren't ordained and because they were women. Many bishops, archbishops, and cardinals were afraid of these newly-assertive nuns championing progressive causes, questioning the order of things, rethinking their position in the Church hierarchy, pushing for more rights and representation, and openly embracing feminism. A lot of their critics blanketly tossed around the term "radical feminism" when in actual fact most of these nuns were not affiliated with that particular branch of feminism. I guess it really is true that to many people, basic feminist principles and the notion that women are people really are radical. Many women who might have considered the sisterhood were thus dissuaded by seeing how all of these efforts for reform and basic rights were viewed by the higher-ups, attempting to block them and paint them as unreasoning radicals at every turn. Amazingly enough, many of these bishops, archbishops, and cardinals also blamed these women for things like their dwindling numbers and the fact that they were living in poverty in old age and having to beg for salaries. If only they hadn't rebelled against Mother Church, hadn't dropped their habits, hadn't pushed for more rights, everything would still be swell for them.

This is a very important work on a chapter in American history (and Catholic history) that deserves to be better-known, although it's just the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully it will inspire the reader to go and seek out more books on the subject of contemporary nuns and the social and political forces shaping the sisterhood in the past few decades. My only problem with the book, apart from the at-times somewhat academic style (as opposed to a more personal and casual tone to convey the same information) was that there weren't any pictures. It would have been nice to have matched these names to faces.