Vatican II would bring about great changes to the liturgy (such as Mass in native languages and congregant-facing clergy), while other modernizations failed to come to fruition. Priests still could not marry, the curia (Vatican administration) retained much of its power and women remained relegated to gender-specific religious orders. However, social teachings, or the social justice current of modern Catholicism, became central to many religious orders in the United States. The Church, once the bank, community center, hospital and undertaker of the American frontier was beginning to confront the necessities of the urban environment within consumer capitalism.

The recoiling changes of the modern landscape created a society alienated and dispossessed amongst a sprawling shroud of fetishized signifiers. Visual culture had entered a golden age. In his book The First Pop Age, Hal Foster remarks “the conflation of fetishisms…was…a function of a consumerist economy in the postwar period in which the actual production of commodities was evermore obscured and our libidinal investment in them evermore intense.”[1] The spiritual animus of human beings was turning towards the product, the object and the image. Sister Mary Corita took a novel approach to criticizing this characteristic of modernity. Taking cues from the visual language of advertising, Corita began to insert the profound rather than merely causing an image to recoil upon itself.

In their recent book, Hippie Modernism, published in conjunction with The Walker Art Center’s eponymous 2015 exhibition, Lorraine Wild and David Karwan state, “Kent… took the language of commercial consumerism and transformed it into a vibrant picture of spiritual hunger and yearning for love and peace.”[2] Kent, unlike her Pop Art contemporaries, saw an opportunity to imbue the graphic landscape with exactly what it was missing — heart.

Warhol, on the other hand, could be said to do little more than show the image back to itself, thereby betraying its vacuous nature. What remains intriguing about Kent now is her sincerity. Whereas Warhol entered into entertainment and transcended into image himself, Kent kept her activist core and set justice at the center of her work, imploring her viewers to not forget that we are all in this together.

From 1965-1968, Corita’s work would become more and more political, reflecting a popular frustration with the Vietnam War and consumer capitalism as well as a profound desire to find a life worth living. The political landscape of the United States and her engagement with it would put her at odds with the Church as resistance materialized to the modernization efforts of Vatican II. The male clergy who maintained power after Vatican II were beginning to clamp down on the female religious orders who they viewed as taking liberties with the modernization edicts of Vatican II. In 1965, there were 180,000 Religious sisters in the United States. Over the next decade, that number would drop to 135,000.[1] Generally, this can be attributed to a decrease in the religiosity of the general public as well as an increase in the standard of living. However, this only accounts for the decline in new members. Many sisters chose to leave their orders, citing a frustration with the lack of true reform after Vatican II.

By 1968, Sister Mary Corita was gaining a level of celebrity and maintaining an exhaustive schedule. She decided to take a sabbatical, intending to return the following year according to those close to her. However, at some point she decided to leave the order and sought a dispensation from the Bishop to do so. She moved to Boston and continued to work. Two years later, the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary reformed as a lay community, leaving the church en masse. Kent maintained close ties to the community and would bequeath much of her estate to the Immaculate Heart Community when she passed away in 1986.

Corita Kent’s work is often held up as a curiosity — the nun that made Pop Art, being a common moniker. But Kent’s work was doing something wholly different. While Pop artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Ruscha and Hamilton were cynically turning America’s images upon themselves, stripping them of their intended meaning and thereby making the image an object, Kent saw another option. Is an image not meant to convey? Is it not a vessel? Can it not sustain us? Might it only need to be enriched to once again become the bread of life?