Victim Souls and Departed Sisters: Sponsa Regis in the Religion Database
by Joel Schorn
/November 14, 2023
Users of the Atla database may notice an influx of articles and book reviews from the journal Sponsa Regis, which ran from 1933-1965 and was the predecessor to another Atla-indexed title, Sisters Today (1966-2000). This material constitutes a useful resource for those researching the spirituality and the theology behind that spirituality of women’s Roman Catholic orders in the United States and Canada in the mid-20th century. Sponsa Regis (“bride of the king”), according to the journal, was “a monthly review devoted to the spiritual interests of all sisterhoods,” founded and edited by the monks of St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota “with the assistance of the Reverend Clergy and the Sisterhoods.” Thanks to a licensing arrangement with Liturgical Press, Atla is in the process of indexing and providing full-text coverage of Sponsa Regis. Many issues are already available in the database.
The journal covered a variety of topics relating to spiritual and practical lives of nuns, including spirituality, community life, liturgy, the vows, scripture, and Mariology, among others, as well as prayers and poetry and numerous article series like “Operations of the Holy Ghost in Our Soul,” “Pious Echoes for Sinners and Saints,” and “Convent Queries.”
“Victim Soul” Spirituality
Of interest to students of this tributary of 19th- and 20th-century Catholic spirituality, an ongoing concern of the journal was the promotion of “victim soul” spirituality, a movement of which Father Joseph Kreuter, O.S.B., monk of St. John’s and longtime editor of Sponsa, was a major proponent. Victim souls, Kreuter wrote in one of the many articles on the subject in Sponsa, are “ever ready to expiate, repair, and suffer for the conversion of sinners, for missions, and for the whole Church.”
While perhaps unfamiliar to many, the victim soul movement has attracted the interest of scholars. In her article in a 2002 issue of Church History, “’She offered herself up’: the victim soul and victim spirituality in Catholicism,” which includes a discussion of Kreuter and Sponsa Regis, Prof. Paula M. Kane notes: “The term ‘victim soul,’ according to Paulin Giloteaux, a French priest, originated in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Described in religious writing as an individual whose spiritual work is to plead with God to make reparation for the suffering of others, the victim soul voluntarily embraces and receives pain.” In his writing, Kreuter also said,
The aim of a victim with Christ is a threefold one: 1. To repair the insults and outrages that are daily heaped upon the Sacred Heart of Jesus throughout the world, 2. To gain the grace of conversion for sinners, and 3. To implore the special blessing of God upon the labors of priests and religious.
In the pages of Sponsa’s advocacy of victim soulhood, however, lurked a tension. The same monastery who put out Sponsa was also publishing Orate Fratres, later Worship, and was the home of Virgil Michel, O.S.B., a journal and a monk who played key roles in the foundation of the Catholic liturgical movement in the U.S. (Michel’s early death, by the way, was, to the best of my knowledge, noted without comment in Sponsa). Paula Kane described this tension succinctly in her book Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2013): The liturgical movement’s “emphasis upon including the laity in the central sacrament of the church flourished alongside that emphasized the Eucharist (and the priest) as a sacrificial offering. At St. John’s Abbey, this latter position was represented by Fr. Joseph Kreuter, a Benedectine who . . . championed the cult of vicarious suffering, embodied by the ‘victim soul.’ ” In her Church History article Kane said: “Unacknowledged by historians of spirituality is the fact that through his victim soul campaign, Kreuter was also launching an attack on socially-engaged sisters and priests. His rebukes of their secular involvements and what he termed ‘active’ vocations run counter to what Vatican II later came to endorse and encourage as social justice ministry or Christian social activism. In the 1920s and 1930s, such an understanding of vocation was not prevalent in Catholic culture, although its emphasis upon privatized contemplative piety had political consequences.”
Yet as time went on and Kreuter was succeeded as Sponsa editor by Kilian McDonnell, O.S.B., signs of the gradual embrace of progressive mid-century Catholicism began to appear. With at times an almost, in retrospect, humorous understatement, articles, some original to the magazine and others as reprints, began appearing by Thomas Merton—”who is well known to our readers”—Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., Jean Leclercq of the Abbey of Clervaux, the English Dominican Gerald Vann, Father James Carmody, S.J. of LeMoyne College, Sister Annette Walters, C.S.J., the then-newly elected executive Secretary of Sister Formation, Father Carroll Stuhlmueller, C.P., and Mother Kathryn Sullivan, R.S.C.J., among others. Article topics expanded to include business administration of religious communities and the psychology of religion. Even the liturgical movement received support. “The modem liturgical movement has continued to grow, opening ever widening vistas and drawing countless souls to a more fervent, to a more profound life in the Mystical Body,” wrote Sister Mary Gabriel, O.S.F. in Issue 29 no 9 1958 of Sponsa.
Transition to Sisters Today
The decisive stage of Sponsa’s transition occurred when the journal became Sisters Today. As Christine Ochoa wrote in this 2020 blog post,
In 1965, it was decided the original Latin title was no longer resonating with the journal’s audience, and so it was changed to Sisters Today. This name change symbolized and concretized the goal, focus, and audience for the journal: that it was not for the sisters of years ago, but for current sisters, offering applicable, practical advice for their lives today.
Oh, and about those deceased sisters. Atla’s indexing policies define a death notice as “a short statement of death that contains little or no biographical information other than name and dates of birth and/or death.” For many years Sponsa gathered and published, usually on the rear cover, death notices of sisters from communities in the U.S. and Canada. These almost always consisted only of a name, community initials, and sometimes age of death and community location. That fits the indexing standard, and so these many death notices are going into the database.
These departed nuns sometimes received the title “Venerable Sisters” and their death notice section had introductory quotes like “’Be mindful O Lord of Thy servants and handmaids who are gone before us with the sign of faith and sleep in the sleep of peace’ (Canon of Mass)” as well as asking for prayers for them. In the custom of the time the names of these sisters in many cases consisted of only a single given “religious” name without a surname, although in many cases a surname was included, preceded by the initial “M.” for Mary, a very common addition to women’s religious names at the time. If a surname was noted, database users will find the death notice title field and name authority surname, given name, and sometimes estimated years of birth or death (question mark following)—estimated because subtracting age of death from year of publication did not always reflect in the actual birth and death years. The authority records will, in time, include not only the deceased’s community but also the location of the community which of course can be an important identifier.
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