Springtime’s not made for living like a nun.
John Ormond, “To a Nun”
The vow of chastity for a nun, Elizabeth Abbott notes in A History of Celibacy, was the supreme vow. Especially for those who had entered the convent unwillingly, keeping that vow proved “immensely difficult.” Abbott reports, “Though the majority of nuns likely remained chaste, a significant minority faltered and fell.” Some convents were “hopelessly dissolute.” An English abbess bore twelve children. Cannington in Sommerset was described as a bordello. (One nun in particular enjoyed “feverish sex” with a lecherous chaplain.) “Nuns arranged rendezvous within and without the convent and sometimes shucked off the habit.” Some Anglo-Saxon kings plucked their mistresses from the convents. At the Watton nunnery in Yorkshire in the twelfth century, a young nun was discovered to have seduced a laborer; Aelred of Rievaulx wrote, “She went out a Virgin of Christ, and she soon returned an adulteress.” She also returned pregnant. If anything, conventual misbehavior was even more egregious on the continent. Boccaccio’s tales in The Decameron had some basis in reality. In late 15th century Venice, one friar preached in the basilica that the nunneries “not convents but whorehouses.” Thirty-three convents were prosecuted for enabling fornication with nuns. At the Benedictine Sant’Angelo di Contorta, the nuns engaged in “dissolute deeds” in their cells and birthed illegitimate children. Two abbesses fornicated with both aristocrats and commoners. The pope shut it down in 1474. Benedictine nuns in Milan so egregiously violated their vows that, according to city councilors in 1538, they were nothing more than “lay prostitutes.”
After Vatican II (which coincided with the start of the sexual revolution), over 300,000 nuns renounced their vows. The incapacity to remain chaste undoubtedly explained much of the exodus. (A teaching nun confessed that she knew she had to exit religious life when she started having “dreams and fantasies about my eighth-grade boys.”)
Lutheran Guilt 