Sisterhood: Sister Louise Akers Challenges Church's Patriarchy

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/455/sisterhood

..."With her bright eyes, quick smile, and easygoing manner, Akers doesn’t seem like the sort of person who’d pose a threat to the Catholic Church. As angry as she can get over injustice, she reserves her judgments for institutions, not individuals. At one point I asked how she walks the line between the dictates of her conscience and Catholic teachings.

“It’s not easy,” she said. “As a young person I didn’t see religious life in my future. I thought I would get married and have kids. But at the time that I joined the Sisters of Charity, I just felt it was what I was supposed to do — and I still feel that way. My spirituality has taken me places where I never thought I would go, including some that aren’t in accord with traditional Catholic doctrine.”

As I was leaving Akers’s apartment the first time, I noticed a stack of bumper stickers on a table: SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM, they said. She had the same sticker on her car. When she first put it on the bumper, she said with a smile, a priest told her most people wouldn’t know what it meant. Akers said she wasn’t worried. She knew what it meant."