Nun aims to make Church visible

A nun, unhappy at the Church's failure to make an impact in today's world, made a four-year study of renewal which included working as a commercial secretary in secular dress. She told PETER NOLAN of how she plans to give a lead in making the Church more visible —
The Church in Britain is still in the catacombs, the religious are too comfortable and their failure to make an impact on society for Christ now threatens the survival of Catholicism.
Such declarations echo through the history of the Church, often signalling the birth of a new movement or community, whose revitalising influence Ilea saved Christians from becoming frozen and unresponsive in the straitjacket of their institutions.
This time it comes from a sister, currently looking after 44 homeless women, after 40 years spent as a teacher and school principal.
In Australia, where Sister Mary Bernardine Thrapp has spent most of her life, she became dissatisfied that the renewal undertaken by her congregation had not really succeeded in introducing a fresh new spirit to religious life or work.
Something an elderly nun told her made a deep impression on her, as it seemed to express her own feelings. She had said: "To update properly, you would want to start from the grassroots up."
Released to pursue her study of renewal, she came to Britain four years ago to find that her Australian teaching qualifications could not be accepted without completing a lengthy course here. Undaunted, while still living in a community, she donned secular dress and took up secretarial work, becoming the first nun to work for the London Electricity Board and Eagle Star Insurance.
Sister Bernardine said: "I wanted to see what people outside thought of us inside and experience what it was like to be dressed in secular clothes, to see how people met me as an ordinary person." She had already conic to feel that nuns in particular had set themselves apart and, though perhaps not fully consciously, saw themselves as a special group.
"We are a very elite Church in many respects. The day is coming when we will have to live more closely with people and share our lives and spiritual riches with them." Now matron of a lodging house run by a nondenominational charity, she said: "Many nuns think I am a lost soul because I'm living away from the community."
Sister Bernardine has conic to believe that the Church has not really adjusted to today's world and is in growing danger of becoming irrelevant. "I was at a London Cathedral for mid-morning Mass on Sunday recently, which only about 300 people attended, though about three million people live in the area," she said.
"Many Catholics do not even know the name of their bishop. Who is going to sound the trumpet for Christ?" Attending a parish meeting, she found most of the time devoted to discussing whether people should kneel or stand to receive communion. "Such meetings are a waste of time," she said.
Sister Bernardine strongly believes the Church needs to make a terrific impact to make itself visible to people. "We are letting years go by, letting people go by," she said.
After working in two mother and baby homes, during which Lime she took social studies courses, she began with her present Loding House over a year ago and transformed it from an impersonal doss house to one with a community sense, where people took time to get to know one-anuther.
Working in this field, she has surprisingly found herself the first nun to do so. Most of the homeless women are referred to her through Government agencies and at no point was the caring Church really in evidence. A survey she carried out showed roost sisters were not engaged in institutional care. "With 1,000 sisters working as I do, we could truly renew the face of the earth."
While welcoming the growing number of parish sisters and the handful of nuns fully involved in similar activities, Sister Bernardine believes most sisters are woefully un
Sister Mary Bernardino Thrapp
deremployed and tailing to make an impact on the thoroughly secular society we live in. "There are hundreds of nuns who could be doing the sort of work I am and who never will because of the fear of undertaking new things and the communities superiors fears of losing easy discipline," she said.
The possibility of new initiatives is often sacrificed to maintain the existing structures and even today the superior can
know exactly what each member of her community is doing and where at any hour of the day. There is simply no room for the plurality of apostolate that the fast moving world of today calls for, she said,
In her own experience of such commuoities, while all might share a common life, a minimum of individual communication really took place between the individual members, further weakening them, she said.
Sister Bernardine believes very strongly in the idea expressed by Pope Paul while Archbishop of Milan that the sins of omission of the Church will have to be atoned for. She Sees these in terms of "healing wounded people," of seeing Christ in others in difficulties of any sort and tending to them.
"The Church has allowed social need to rise mountain high," she said. The family planning lobby would be bereft of their arguments against large families, for example, if the Church had genuinely related itself to the poor and their problems.
"It was the pennies of the poor in Britain and Ireland that helped build the large Churches we now have," she added. Attending a fund-raising function UM by nuns in Surrey some time ago, she was struck by the way the sisters had made a fuss of the rich members of the local community while paying no attention to the less welt-off who were there.
For the last five years Sister Bernardine has been developing her ideas for starting a new community that would really respond to the needs of all the people of God. "It will he a religious community I would call the `Christus Sisters'," she said. "Sisters have already come so far from the cloister that the problem is now to reconcile prayer life with the religious and apostolic life that young people are emphasising so much today," she said.
Love of God and one's neighbour would be its guiding star and it would aim to alleviate human need in all its forms. Spiritual formation "will go hand in hand with professional training," to produce sister specialists in various fields front medicine and forms of counselling to architecture. •
Sister Bernardine said: "The re-discovery of the poor Christ must be made, arid He roust be served and loved here and now in the present situation as it confronts us, in the untaught child, the homeless, the lonely, the aged, the mother seeking an abortion, the suffering in mind or body." Nor does Sister rule out a similar organisation for men.
"A special teal ure ol I he new congregation will consist itt the special efforts it makes to prevent as well a$ tire," she said.
"How can see ignore die cries ol Christ in all those desperately poor and in need and find peace of soul in the personal order and comfort we enjoy, which is tinshared and perhaps not to be disturbed."
Much of the community's work would be towards helping restore stable family life. whose break up Sister 13ernardine feels is the source ol most social ills.
Sister's prune need today is for a large house to it she , would like to attract mainly young people prepared to undertake a vet y difficult apostolate recamang that total commitment needed "to renew the face of the earth for Christ.' Such a cominuenty would derive a joy from sharing their lives, a joy that would overflow into the lives ot those t /EN help, she said.
It is riot a L ill to be undertaken lightly, Not only is Sister Bernardiness enthusiasm infectious. but she is also a selt• declared peirectioilist whom nothing but the hesr will satisfy.