Nun

A nun is a woman bound by religious vows, and canon law draws a precise line within that broad description which ordinary usage tends to blur.

Nun and sister

In the strict canonical sense a nun takes solemn vows and lives in enclosure, given to a hidden life of contemplative prayer, while a sister takes simple vows and lives an active life in the world, teaching, nursing or serving the poor, and though both are commonly called nuns the distinction is real and marks two different forms of the consecrated life for women. The contemplative nun belongs to an enclosed monastery; the active sister belongs to a congregation engaged in works in society.

Entering and its history

Entry is by stages, a period of testing and formation followed by first and then final vows, so the office is assumed gradually and by free profession, as with the monk. The active congregations of sisters are largely a creation of the last few centuries, made possible when the church accepted communities of women taking simple vows without enclosure, a development that opened to women the teaching, nursing and charitable work the enclosed life had precluded. As with the monk, the office is constituted by vows rather than by ordination, and the consecrated life for women, in its contemplative and its active forms, has parallels in the female renunciants and nuns of the Buddhist, Jain and other traditions.

Female asceticism is as old as the male desert tradition, with women recorded among the earliest Egyptian ascetics, but the medieval convent became, for roughly a thousand years, one of the very few institutions in Western Europe where a woman could receive an education, exercise real administrative authority, and pursue scholarship or the arts largely free of a husband's control, which is why learned abbesses, composers and mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen appear disproportionately from among the religious rather than the laity of their centuries.

The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century tightened enclosure requirements for professed nuns considerably, partly in response to Reformation-era criticism of convent life, and that stricter enclosure is part of what later made the canonical distinction between the cloistered nun and the uncloistered sister necessary, once new communities of women in the seventeenth century and after began seeking permission to work outside a convent's walls. The nineteenth century then saw a large expansion of active, uncloistered sisterhoods dedicated to teaching and nursing, congregations that went on to found and staff much of the school and hospital system of Catholic Europe and its colonies and, later, the United States, before the sharp decline in vocations that began in most Western countries in the 1960s.