Nora Nash: La Monja Indignada

At the beginning of next month, Sister Nora Nash of the Sisters of St Francis of Philadelphia will cut an unlikely figure at Goldman Sachs's annual meeting, as she calls on the bank to review "excessive" pay deals. As her community's director of corporate social responsibility, in charge of ensuring the investment portfolio for their retirement reflects their commitment to social justice, she has vowed to make her convent's opposition to corporate excess heard.

Sister Nora is not alone in shattering the traditional image of the nun as compliant and meek. The Daughters of St Paul, Boston are currently taking the unprecedented step of suing their archbishop in a dispute over their pension arrangements that has festered for years. In this latter case, the way the Daughters of St Paul have been treated raises questions about the way women religious are viewed within the Catholic church today.

The Boston community of the Daughters of St Paul numbers about 60 women, and communities of the order are found around the world. The brainchild of Mother Paula Cordero, who arrived in the US from rural Italy in 1932 with little money and no English, the order was established to spread the message of the gospel through publishing. The Daughters now run a considerable media empire, offering everything from holy cards to weighty theological tracts, and even a range of iPhone apps. The Boston community alone has 50 lay employees, and it is their pension provision that has caused the rupture with the archdiocesan authorities.

For five years the Daughters have been trying to withdraw from the Boston archdiocese pension fund and set up their own, which they feel would give their employees a better standard of living in retirement. But their requests have met with a brick-wall response from the pension fund's trustees, including the archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean O'Malley. The Daughters allege that they have not even been given a full account of their portion of the fund, despite several applications. Now they are reluctantly suing the trustees and seeking a ruling from the supreme judicial court that orders the trustees either to give the Daughters the requested financial information or to reimburse their contributions to the fund in full. The nuns claim they are owed some $1.37m.

There is something alarming about the treatment of these women. Part of the problem seems to be the apparent ineptitude in the church's administration of the pension fund, but the handling of the issue smacks of disrespect for this female community. The Daughters have been driven to recourse to the law simply to get their voices heard. This is not the mark of a church hierarchy that values its women religious, and one former archdiocesan official has gone so far as to call the Daughters the "Boston pension abuse victims".

That American nuns, at the forefront of the Catholic feminist movement from it inception, could be treated in this way compounds the concern. From the mid-1970s women religious in the US, galvanised by the reforms of Vatican II – the second wave of feminist activism and the civil rights movement – sought a re-examination of the role of women within the church. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the organisation representing 90% of nuns in the US, was a driving force here, with many of its members calling for the ordination of women. This was an issue that became central to the struggle of women religious to be seen as full, autonomous participants in the life of the church. Although the Vatican rejected female ordination outright in 1976, the rhetoric issuing from the Holy See on the matter of gender was increasingly couched in the language of feminism.

Under the papacy of John Paul II, however, that rhetoric became gradually exposed as mere lip service. John Paul showed himself generally unwilling to accept the incompatibility between Catholic social proscriptions and the drive to improve women's lives, particularly in the developing world, and in 1994 he declared that the church had no authority to ordain women into the priesthood, shutting down all discussion of this issue.

It was also under John Paul that another incidence of the silencing of the voices of women religious occurred. In the mid-1990s a number of nuns sought to make the Vatican aware of the sexual abuse of women religious, particularly in Africa, by Catholic clergy. In 1994, Sister Maura O'Donohue of the Medical Missionaries of Mary reported to the Vatican that African nuns were being abused by priests who believed that sex with a virgin would prevent then from contracting HIV. Sister Maura wrote: "When [the nuns] try to make representations to church authorities about harassment by priests, they simply are not heard." Her report, and those of other nuns reporting the same problem, remained unacknowledged for years, until the pope included a fleeting apology in a long address of late 2001. The National Coalition of American Nuns, standing up for their African counterparts, was one of many organisations that called for action on the issue – to little avail.

The nuns in Boston were not trying to do anything so controversial as uncover an abuse scandal or challenge church teaching on gender relations. They simply wanted to look after their lay workers and expected their superiors to be responsive to this. They allege they were ignored. One wonders if a male religious community would have been treated in the same way. Is it that nuns are still seen by some, 35 years after women religious in the US began to make the argument for reform of the position of women within Catholic life, as servants of the church who should be seen and not heard? For Sister Nora and the Boston Daughters of St Paul, this isn't a characterisation that they intend to live out.