What did the Second Vatican Council promise nuns?
The council passed only 16 documents over four years. One had to do with nuns. It said: Do what you need to do in order to update yourselves and renew yourselves. Look to the founder of your movement, look to the Scriptures and your own lives together to discern what kind of life you ought to lead, and how it ought to be different from the innumerable rules and regulations that you had lived [with] up to that point. They were given an instruction. I’m not sure all the bishops understood the latitude that instruction provided, but they passed it. They gave [nuns] this mandate to figure it out themselves. So where was the betrayal? The nuns took it seriously. They began to work on these things in three principal areas: how they lived, how they worked, and how they worshipped. But as soon as it began to be apparent that they were going to take some directions that were quite different from anything that had been done before – not wearing a habit, not working in church institutions, not li
