It’s a little embarrassing to look back and see what was so obviously going on when I made my final vows as a Maryknoll nun. Final vows are supposed to mean final commitment, no going back, no changing your mind, no breaking the promise. So it takes some fancy footwork to explain how I managed to take final vows, and why I am sitting here now a very married and thoroughly non-nun for more than 40 years.
I will start with the more ego-enhancing part of the explanation which, I admit, I’ve only recently thought up. It is that the Catholic Church itself sees final vows as less irrevocable than getting married or becoming a priest. In fact, women outside of marriage don’t have a commitment that the Church sees as irreversible. Men do but not women. I think it makes it just that little less significant, that little less binding.
Baptism, and marriage, and ordination to the priesthood can’t be undone, even by the Pope. I can’t go to Rome and say I want my original sin back, that it was removed from my soul when I was baptized and before I was old enough to give my consent and that it’s not good enough to say I can easily produce many more sins of my own. This was my first sin and it was an original.
I can’t go to Rome and say I don’t want to be married to X anymore either. If I have enough money, I might be able to convince the powers in Rome that it was never a valid marriage in the first place, but if I can’t achieve that, I’m irrevocably married until one of us dies. Likewise, priests can be unfrocked and relieved of their priestly responsibilities, but they can’t be un-ordained. Being made a priest is a permanent state for life.
Becoming a nun, even taking final vows after many years on probation, never becomes irreversibly permanent in that way. Rome reserves the power to release nuns from their vows.
So perhaps the fact that I took my relationship with Peter more seriously from the start than in retrospect I took my final vows at Maryknoll was in part the result of a subtle socialization. I always knew it didn’t really have to be for keeps.
But there are other explanations, too, for which I must take a greater share of personal responsibility. About which, more on another post.
