"It's as bad as we thought it could get. Maybe worse. In an interview with
NCR shortly after meeting with the leaders of the Leadership Conference of Women
Religious, Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, confirmed our worst fears: that this Holy Office is hell-bent on
bringing U.S. women religious to heel.
Franciscan Sr. Pat Farrell, president of the leadership conference, and St.
Joseph Sr. Janet Mock, the group's executive director, went to Rome at the
request of the conference's board to seek some understanding from Levada and
Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, the apostolic delegate, about the April 18
Vatican order that the women's group revise its statutes and programs. The
Vatican order, which followed a nearly four-year investigation of the group,
also appointed three bishops to oversee this reform: Sartain, Bishop Leonard
Blair of Toledo, Ohio, and Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill.
Farrell and Mock were hopeful going into the meeting, calling it a
continuation of a conversation already begun. On the other side of the meeting,
Levada wondered if he were engaged in a "dialogue of the deaf." He's not
convinced that the women's group is taking the Vatican's concerns to
heart.
In his interview with NCR, Levada listed as "substantive issues" of the
Vatican critique the publication of an interview with Fr. Charles Curran, a
moral theologian censured by the Vatican in the 1980s for his views on sexual
morality, in a recent issue of LCWR's Occasional Papers, and inviting Barbara
Marx Hubbard, often described as a "New Age leader," to address the upcoming
August assembly meeting. He also objected to the group's honoring Immaculate
Heart of Mary Sr. Sandra Schneiders, another theologian sometimes critical of
Vatican policy.
"Too many people crossing the LCWR screen, who are supposedly representing
the Catholic church, aren't representing the church with any reasonable sense of
product identity," Levada said.
That might qualify as one of the more bizarre assertions by a Vatican
official in recent memory -- Madison Avenue meets the church -- that somehow the
pursuit of holiness conforms to a certain "branding" process.
Levada's language, however, betrays more than a discontent with some
Catholic distribution point that's messing with "product identity." What he
really would like to see, he said, in suggesting that the Vatican might put in
place an alternative group to lead religious women in the United States, is a
group "that would focus on the priorities of religious life, the life of
holiness, which is the fundamental call of all of us in the church."
That we're all called to a life of holiness is beyond dispute. The rub, of
course, comes in the inferences to be drawn from the rest of that statement
regarding how that life should be lived and what its priorities should be for
women religious in the United States. In one breath, Levada and others speak of
a desire for dialogue with the women. In another, they make clear that unless
LCWR concedes to Vatican reforms, subjects its programs and speakers to the
oversight of men, it will be replaced by another group established by the
Vatican.
The question, then, is clearly whether the vision for religious life among
women in the United States, how they should understand and live it, is most
completely and correctly held by the men in the Vatican.
Dialogue presumes a parity among the partners, that each is open to being
persuaded of the other's point of view, that different sides see value in and
respect the other. On that point, the cardinal isn't really interested in
dialogue. His words can only be taken as an ultimatum in which power trumps all
and the noncompliant are made to know they've lost.
We've made the point before on this page that this contretemps between the
sisters and the bishops is more a clash of cultures than a clash over theology
or doctrine. The Vatican needs to get an interpreter, because these two groups
aren't speaking the same language. The difference in cultures has never been so
stark. The men in the Vatican, so deeply compromised by scandal of their own
making, are trying to reassert authority by making this a dispute over theology
and doctrine. It's not primarily that. It's mostly a dispute over power and how
people perceive the church: as either a checklist of rules and orthodoxies or a
pursuit of truth and holiness lived out amid life's realities and most
profoundly on its margins.
If the bishops are listening at all, watching the persistent show of
support for the sisters, they're aware of which path much of the community is
prepared to follow."
Bridget Mary's Reflection:
It is an authority crisis, but it is also a theology crisis. The bishops/Vatican are from Mars, and the nuns/LCWR are from Venus with two completely different worldviews of Catholicism today. I agree with the editorial above that it is not a serious dialogue because Cardinal Levada made it clear that the agenda is to replace LCWR and bring the U.S. nuns under the control of the Vatican in all things including theology.
The Vatican has achieved a hostile take-over of the LCWR. It is a disgraceful abuse of power. Now the nuns have to decide, will they submit and obey the Vatican patriarchy or will they affirm their freedom as independent, prophetic communities of religious women? The ball is in your court, Sisters, and the majority of Catholics and non-Catholics in the U.S. are on your side. I hope there will be nun priests in the church's future. The Catholic community is ready, are you?
Bridget Mary Meehan, arcwp
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