Catherine Coldstream
speaker
329 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Catherine Coldstream’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I mean, that's such a good question.
I mean, it's a really intelligent question.
I mean, the supernatural spirit of obedience was a phrase we used a lot.
It was very common currency.
The idea was that we weren't living lives that were merely natural.
We were living supernatural lives.
And supernatural was the kind of the effects of the Holy Spirit and the effects of our relationship with God.
So obviously you can reframe authoritarianism as, I mean, you could reframe
anything really in supernatural terms, and we did.
So was talking about a supernatural spirit of obedience, which meant we saw God through the prioress, and whatever the prioress said, we saw as coming straight from God.
Was it supernatural?
Or were there elements of control going on that were actually less benign?
It's impossible to know.
But obviously, if you accord all power and agency and authority to one person in a group of 20, and that person is continually reelected and never challenged, never questioned, never open to discussing or reviewing things, you've obviously got a setup where it's very, very open to abuse because you've got one person who is basically given carte blanche and everybody else will let her do whatever she wants.
And I think it is a real danger in very isolated religious communities that what starts off as something that's conceived in a spiritual way can become all too human in that, you know, human beings do, you know, when they've given power, they can abuse it.
And communities can be very complicit in that too, especially vowed communities of nuns can be, you know,
can be very, in those days, very compliant and very unquestioning and timid.
So I think there was a timidity that gave free reign to one or two people.
And at one point that kind of expanded into a sort of clique.
There was a sort of coterie of people who were really like the sort of power group who were driving everything.
Showing 221–240 of 329 · page 12 of 17
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