“I MYSELF NO LONGER LIVE” - BOOK REVIEW

 “I MYSELF NO LONGER LIVE” - BOOK REVIEW

by MUINICE DE BAIRGÉAD

WHEN DORIS WAGNER–31 years of age, recently married and pregnant with her first child–

published her autobiography in November 2014, the Catholic worlds of Austria and the German

federal states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg were shaken by scandal. Doris Wagner had spent

eight years of her life in the reputable Thalbach Monastery in Bregenz, Vorarlberg, but now

revealed her sufferings and frustrations to the public. The title of her book was in fact carefully

chosen and meaningful: Nicht mehr ich. Literally translated into English, “no longer myself”

signifies that Doris had lost her identity and self-esteem, but in German, the phrase transports an

even more fundamental crisis: the loss of faith in God and utter disappointment in the Church. As

Doris revealed in newspaper interviews and TV broadcasts, she had deliberately taken her title from

the Bible. Galatians 2,20 reads: „Nicht mehr ich lebe, sondern Christus lebt in mir.“ – „I myself no

longer live, but Christ lives in me.” This verse had initially guided Doris on her way and given her

strength to embrace a religious vocation. She was only 19 years old and had just passed her A-levels

with honours when she decided to join “Familia Spiritualis Opus” at Thalbach. She was full of hope

and faith and humility. She came from a poor but devout family of converts in Northern Bavaria and

wanted to serve God. She was worried about the future of the Church and wanted to save souls.

Above all, she wanted to become a saint. And even though she had hoped to join a traditional order,

she felt that God called her to become a sister in Thalbach because the community’s motto was her

own baptism verse. In 2011, however, she left everything behind because giving herself up had not

brought her closer to Christ. The promise she had found in Galatians 2,20 had not been fulfilled.

And without the living Christ within her heart, there was nothing but emptiness and despair.

During her eight years as a religious, Doris had been faced with isolation, manipulation, paternalism

and sexual abuse within her community, and she claims that this is why other men and women

likewise left Thalbach before and after her own escape.

The Church has seen many cases of abuse in recent decades, of course, and many more recent

foundations from the Legionaries of Christ to the Community of the Beatitudes were severely

affected by those charges. But Doris’s story gives the debate a new and troublesome turn.

Unlike many earlier victims, Doris was part of the structures which she now criticizes, and unlike

many earlier victims, she has seen convent life as well as Roman universities and the Papal

apartments from within. She wasn’t an altar boy who comes to serve mass on Sundays but has a

family life and friends, too. She was a religious sharing all her days with the people who took

advantage of her, and this explains why she felt unable to defend when a male superior molested

and eventually raped her. Due to her young age, emotional immaturity and lack of education, she

was clearly unable to reflect upon the contradictions which she witnessed in her community’s

spirituality and lifestyle, and it is shocking to read that she was not even allowed to tell her parents

she wasn’t feeling well.

Embarrassed and devious

Among the most touching passages in Doris’s book is her account of her time in the community’s

English foundation in Littlemore, where FSO sisters take care of the “International Centre of

Newman Friends”. In the beginning, Doris had looked forward to England as an opportunity to

study the life of one the most renowned Catholic saints, and she had certainly hoped for greater

freedom. She was overawed with joy when she was told that she should give visitors guided tours

of the estates and the John Henry Newman Library. Accordingly, she asked her superiors for their

permission to read books on Newman and prepare herself for her new task, but this request was

denied. Instead, Doris was handed recordings of another sister’s guided tours, which she had to

learn by heart. In the very end, Doris felt embarrassed and devious when she was supposed to

lecture visiting Protestants or even non-believers on Newman’s teachings even though she knew

nothing about them herself. She wanted to bear testimony to the truth of God but felt ever more

detached from it. And within her community, every effort to aspire after knowledge was scorned as

pride and a denial of womanliness. The most important task which her fellow sisters at Littlemore

seemed to be concerned with was bringing an elderly Anglican lady, who lived on the estate, to

Catholicism on her deathbed. And when the old woman eventually died, Doris was given her

underwear as a matter of routine. All in all, the unfeeling efficiency with which her German-

speaking sisters seemed to fulfill their daily duties began to contrast sharply with the humorous wit

displayed by English Catholics, above all the Oratorians of Saint Philip Neri of Birmingham. Doris

describes them as endearingly companionable despite their firm beliefs, and she wonders if an

untamable streak of Britishness saved those priests from the rigidity of her own community.

Unfortunately, Doris was given little time to explore the alluring sides of traditionalism further and

was increasingly repelled by the darkness which surrounded her in FSO convents in Ireland, Italy

and Israel. When she was finally granted permission to study, she was sent to an Italian Opus Dei

university and felt misplaced among the many seminarians and foreigners. Besides, she did not like

the fact that doubts and criticism were generally put down to conspiracies against the church.

After several years of trial, Doris found unexpected help with fellow FSO brothers who likewise

suffered from the community’s escapism and fierce control. It was them who helped her press

charges against the superior who had sexually abused her. And it was them who helped her demand

funding to study at a German university. However, these late concessions did not make Doris stay.

The sudden clash of her old world with the new and very modern world of Freiburg University

troubled her deeply, and she came to the conclusion that her former life had been nothing but a lie.

In this sense, her book serves a clear and sad therapeutic purpose. Doris needs to convince herself

of the complete breakdown of her old life in order to be able to justify her new existence. And it is

obvious that such efforts do not result in well-written, concerted prose. Rather on the contrary,

Doris’s book is highly emotional and, yes, insulting. Dislike of brothers and sisters, which probably

developed subtly and by degrees in real life, is now presented as a looming anticipation–the voice in

the desert which she tragically overheard when joining the community. As a consequence, Doris’s

book is not a court protocol of what happened. It is the monologue of a severely injured soul trying

to reclaim her dignity, which makes this book both fascinating and abhorrent. And even though it

must not be taken at face value, it certainly reveals to the attentive reader what defects communities

such as FSO struggle with.

When Doris’s book hit the market on November 8, 2014, reactions among German-speaking

Catholics were strong and biased. Liberals saw Doris’s book as the final proof it took to abolish

traditions of monastic life and celibacy altogether, whereas traditionalists saw Doris’s former

community as one of the many new charismatic foundations which endangered the purity of

doctrine and discipline. The truth is that both sides were wrong. “Familia Spiritualis Opus” isn’t a

zeitgeisty post-Vatican II creation, but was founded shortly before the Second World War by

Belgian Catholic Julia Verhaeghe. Influenced by the late 19 th and early 20 th century liturgical

movements all across Europe, Julia Verhaeghe certainly wished to foster serious devotion and active

Christian practice among the Catholic laity, but her community was anything but anti-clerical or

democratic. After the Second Vatican Council, “Familia Spiritualis Opus” adopted the Novus Ordo

liturgy in a very careful and conservative manner, and when Benedict XVI strengthened the old

Latin Mass, many FSO priests happily embraced the Tridentine liturgy for private usage. At the

same time, FSO clearly distinguish themselves from classical Catholic orders and may not be seen

as a paradigm of backward, narrow-minded monasticism either. Strictly speaking, FSO is a

spiritual hybrid and therefore a continuous anachronism.

Exaggerated obedience

Apart from an exaggerated focus on obedience and the graces of Holy Orders, communities like

“Familia Spiritualis Opus” especially tend to avoid productive dispute with the outside world. This,

however, severely endangers their members’ spiritual growth and freedom. As Doris had never had

a chance to hear about the ways of the world or learned to actively refute criticism of the Church,

her own faith remained weak and immature. Last but not least, communities like FSO are marked

by a dangerous blend of a vocation to religious life and non-religious vocations. FSO sisters are not

considered to be nuns but represent a community of virgin lay women who are often caught

between two stools. The fact that FSO sisters mostly live in mixed communities with men while the

entire spirituality favours male endeavours adds on to their violability. As Doris writes in her

autobiography, FSO sisters were required to wear additional underwear so that the feminine shape

of their bodies would not lead male members into temptation. The natural development of a young

woman’s sexuality, however, was never openly discussed and resulted in Doris’s complete

detachment from her own physical existence. Quite unfortunately, Rome–and local dioceses, too–

have shown little concern for insufficient rules and regulations as long as newly founded

communities promised to be morally unblemished and attractive to young people. Doris’s book will

certainly force us to reconsider the nature of (female) religious vocations in the 21 st century. And it

will hopefully encourage Catholic families to be on their children’s side if any of them consider

joining a seminary, monastery or convent. In his reflexion Ecclesiastical movements and their place

in theology, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote as early as 1998:

Therefore, the admonition has to be addressed to these movements that they–even though they may have found and

passed on the entirety of the faith–still remain a gift to the entirety of the Church as a whole, and that they will have to

subject themselves to the demands of this entirety, in order to be true to their own substance.…Above all, there must not

be an apprehension of communio which extols the avoidance of conflict as the greatest pastoral virtue. The faith is

always a sword and can even foster conflict for the sake of truth and love (cf. Mt 10,34). A concept of the ecclesiastical

unity which immediately denounces conflict as polarisation and which purchases inner peace at the expense of the

completeness of the testimony of faith will soon be exposed as elusive.