La Vie Du Venerable Serviteur De Dieu Francois De Sales Evesque Et Prince De Geneve Fondateur Des Religieuses De La Visitation De Sainte Marie

Author : Marguerite Vacher
Publisher : University Press of America
ISBN 13 : 0761843426
Total Pages : 471 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (618 download)

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Download or read book Nuns Without Cloister written by Marguerite Vacher and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2010 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nuns Without Cloister explores one of the first and most innovative among the non-cloistered women's congregations established after the Council of Trent. Under the aegis of a Jesuit missionary, the first Sisters of St. Joseph envisioned a direct role for religious women in the secular society of mid-seventeenth century France and quietly broke the ecclesiastical and cultural barriers that opposed it. This book opens perspectives on the sisters' success through a politics of discretion and the introduction of creative variety in their lives in country parishes or in the urban orphanages, hospitals, and reformatories for fallen women of the ancien r gime. Vacher's methodology, comparing the congregation's theoretical, prescriptive documents with evidence about the actual life of these communities in southern France, leads to the question of whether and to what degree succeeding generations grasped the original inspiration. Sisters of St. Joseph preceding the French Revolution established a paradigm for the active, apostolic women's congregations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that supplied the workforce behind Catholic schools, colleges, hospitals, and orphanages in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. In researching them, Nuns Without Cloister addresses a little understood but central dimension in the early modern foundations of contemporary Catholicism.