by Sandra Schneiders

The Vatican is at present conducting an investigation of some women’s religious orders in the United States of America and this is causing some concern.  Sandra Schneiders is both a religious and a professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, California.   In this interesting essay she contrasts ‘ministerial’ religious life with the more restricted ‘monastic’ form of religious life and decries the attempts by the male leadership in the Vatican to control these female initiatives.