"American Nuns: Guilty as Charged?" by Angela Bonavioglio in The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/article/167986/american-nuns-guilty-charged
"On April 18, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the modern-day vestige of the Holy Office of the Inquisition—released the conclusions of an investigation begun in 2008 into the sins of our sisters. The congregation issued what amounted to a takeover decree to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a move that “stunned” the organization. With over 1,500 members, all heads of religious congregations, LCWR leans liberal and represents 80 percent of America’s 57,000 nuns. After giving an obligatory nod to the sisters’ good works in schools, hospitals and social service agencies, the CDF devoted the remainder of its Doctrinal Assessment to attacking the sisters for failing to provide “allegiance of mind and heart to the Magisterium of the Bishops”; focusing on the “exercise of charity” instead of lambasting lesbians, gays, and women who use birth control or have an abortion; refusing to accept the ban on women’s ordination; allowing “dialogue” on contentious subjects; and tampering with the notion of God the “Father” while promulgating other “radical feminist” theological interpretations. The CDF’s solution: send in three men, an archbishop and two other bishops, to take control of LCWR for five years. Much work by Catholic feminist theologians has undermined the hierarchy’s claim to absolute authority in matters of faith and morals...They claim women’s moral authority, clinging to the fundamental belief in the primacy of conscience. “God gave us free will,” explained the late Sister Margaret Ellen Traxler, a signer of Catholics for a Free Choice's 1984 petition, published in the New York Times, calling for dialogue in the church on abortion. “Free will is guided by conscience…. A woman will answer to God for one thing: Has she followed her conscience?… It’s nobody’s right to tell her what her conscience said to her.”The church fathers are so desperate that they have ordered the archbishop and his two assistant bishops to take over everything from LCWR—revising the community’s rules, planning events, approving speakers, withdrawing unsuitable materials. Chittister minced no words in assessing the Assessment. She told the National Catholic Reporter that it was “immoral,” “demeaning,” and nothing more than an attempt “to control people for one thing and one thing only…for thinking.” She sees rejecting Vatican control and forming an independent organization as the only real option for LCWR..."