The history of the Catholic Church is often times very troubling. I was reminded of this fact while touring the old section of Convent of Santa Teresa in Potosí this weekend. Santa Teresa was established in 1685 as a home to the order of Carmelite nuns. Since 1976 the convent has functioned as a museum, with the active convent being moved to a new building attached to the old structure.
In the wealthy silver mining town of Potosí, long-standing tradition required families to send their second daughter to the convent to become a nun in order to prove and maintain their standing in the prestigious social circles. Back then, the upper echelons of society had to pay a dowry around 20 million gold pieces, an equivalent of around one million dollars today, to have their daughters marry Jesus. Being unable to afford this hefty sum was a clear demonstration of not truly belonging to the upper-class, a shame that brought with it swift social consequences.
This once again brings with it the sour taste of Catholicism being more of an institution of money and greed than one of faith. Devotion and willingness to Jesus was not the cause or sufficient enough for women to become nuns, everything was dependent on money and what trinkets their families could offer the church. We visited one room where some of these dowry pieces were put on display, silver mirrors adorned with gold were the most ironic ones, seeing as how mirrors represent vanity and are shunned by nuns.
For me personally there is a two-fold loss here, one is the clear loss of the Catholic church's credibility as in institution of the Lord, and the other being the loss of these young girls lives. These girls were forced to enter the convent at the age of fifteen. At the beginning of the convent structure there is a small room known as the “Goodbye Chamber”, where girls would embrace and kiss their mothers and fathers for the very last time in their life. Future interactions would only be possible through a grate adorned with spikes, which allowed neither the comfort of physical contact nor of sight. The girls would never again step foot into the outside world, forever locked into this holy prison. Standing in that room I was filled with anxiety thinking of the dread and absolute horror these young girls must have experienced in those last moments of freedom.
The nuns slept on wood pallets, denying themselves mattresses and blankets in servitude of Jesus, and yet they prayed and sang in rooms adorned with gold, silver, rubies, and emeralds, a contrast that seems distasteful to me. There is a room in the convent called “Sala de la Virgen Niña” which is filled with little statues whose dresses and capes were changed every two weeks. The many extravagant dresses, many of which are lined with threads of gold, are still on display today. In my personal opinion, I think Jesus is probably very sad that his order of faithful followers chose to use their wealth to clothe doll figurines instead of poor and needy children in the streets.
I think this is a very honest, and raw reaction to the convent. And I think our modern sensibilities would generally agree that what happened to those girls was a tragedy. But ... can we try to take a step back ... one reason we want to look at convents is to understand the history of the time. One way to think about this is to think that women still enter the convent today, but this time of their own free will. How can we use that reality to put ourselves in the minds of someone in the 17th century who really believed this was the "right" thing to do? It's incredibly difficult to develop empathy for those who do things we find distasteful. But empathy (the ability to understand from another's point of view) helps us better understand why the world is they way it is. But it's a VERY difficult thing to do in reality.
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