Wonder why CTA will be giving its 1996 Leadership Award to U.S. women religious? Consider this quote from Joan Chittister's The Fire in These Ashes:

But nuns did it all anyway, whatever the resistance from the Church, and they never stopped thinking of new needs -- then or now -- despite the threatened danger to their immortal souls for stepping over canonical traces, out of their convents and back into life. Stretching the institution is clearly a function of religious life. The documents call it 'the prophetic dimension'. The ecclesiastical bureaucrats often call it 'disobedience'. Yet, most ministries now proudly displayed in the Official Catholic Directory as 'diocesan' programs -- soup kitchens, peace and justice centers, hospitality houses, battered women's centers, AIDS hospices, refugee centers, spirituality centers -- were all begun not by the dioceses themselves but by nuns, many of them acting independently, during the past 25 years in what is supposed to be the period of the demise of religious life. But if that is so, then there is a lot of life in this death. And these ministries were being founded while religious were being corrected for not being in schools and not wearing uniforms.