Vatican Diary / the Holy Office Puts the American Sisters in the Corner

Chiesa
April 30, 2012

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350234?eng=y

The "liberal" leadership of the women religious of the United States has been effectively stripped of authority. By order of the pope. Here is the document from the congregation for the doctrine of the faith that explains how and why


VATICAN CITY, April 30, 2012 – The congregation for the doctrine of the faith has charged the archbishop of Seattle, James Peter Sartain, with bringing back to the straight and narrow the "Leadership Conference of Women Religious," the conference of religious superiors of the United States of America, initials LCWR, the cartel that connects most of the communities of sisters in the country.

He will be assisted in the enterprise by bishops Leonard P. Blair of Toledo, Ohio, and Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois. The former was also in charge of the two-year investigation, from 2009 to 2010, that led to this decision.

On the same day as the appointment of Sartain as "commissioner," on April 18, the congregation for the doctrine of the faith also made public an eight-page document of its own, in English, that reconstructs the run-up to the decision and above all presents its justifications.

The primary justification given is that the conference of female religious superiors of the United States has given free rein to ideas and approaches judged by Rome as being incompatible with correct doctrine, and particularly dangerous because of "the influence the LCWR exercises on religious Congregations in other parts of the world."

The document of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith is reproduced in its entirety further below.

Among the accusations that the Holy See makes against the conference of American women religious superiors is the de facto approval of the tendency to go "beyond the Church" and even "beyond Christ," as theorized in a 2007 talk by Dominican sister Laurie Brink.

Another accusation concerns the resistance of some groups of sisters against accepting the Mass, celebrated by a male priest, as the center of their communal life.

Yet another recalls the opposition of the LCWR, in 1977, to the declaration "Inter Insigniores" approved the previous year by Paul VI, which reiterated the reservation of priestly ordination to men. A "public refusal" – remarks the document from the congregation for the doctrine of the faith – that subsequently "has never been corrected."

On the basis of these and other charges – including silence on abortion and euthanasia – on January 12, 2011 the congregation for the doctrine of the faith resolved that the doctrinal and disciplinary deviation of the LCWR had to be stopped.

And two days later, on January 14, Benedict XVI personally ordered the prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, the American William J. Levada, to put the resolution into practice.

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In the meantime, since 2008 the Vatican congregation for religious had also been conducting an apostolic visitation of the women's religious communities of the United States.

The inspection had been urged above all by some cardinals of the United States, both of the curia and residential, with direct knowledge of the "problematic" orientations of the LCWR.

Cardinal Franc Rode, prefect of the congregation for religious until the end of 2010, had given the go-ahead to a rather hostile apostolic visitation of the LCWR. But after, on January 4, 2011, he was replaced by Brazilian cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, a focolarino, and even before that, when the American Redemptorist Joseph W. Tobin became secretary of the same congregation, the apostolic visitation continued and concluded in a much more conciliatory manner.

This changing of the guard at the top of the congregation for religious was not at all to the liking of the cardinals from the United States residing in Rome at the time – Levada, Raymond L. Burke, James F. Stafford, Bernard F. Law, John P. Foley – so much so that none of them attended Tobin's episcopal ordination at Saint Peter's Basilica on October 9, 2010.

There was then some surprise, and not only among the American cardinals, over the appointment as undersecretary of the congregation for religious of Sister Nicla Spezzati, who does not usually wear the religious habit, just like the sisters of the leadership group of the LCWR (in the photo).

The fact is that the apostolic visitation organized by the Vatican congregation for religious finished up at a dead end.

While on the contrary, the parallel initiative of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith is proceeding with explosive effect, having moreover the explicit approval of the pope and being now the only practical initiative conducted by the Holy See to reverse the course of the LCWR.

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With regard to the LCWR, it must be taken into consideration that – a case more unique than rare – in the United States the superiors of women's religious congregations are not joined together by a single association, as is done for example in Italy.

At the beginning of the 1990's, in fact, precisely because of the "liberal" drift that characterized the leadership of the LCWR at the time, and induced various communities of sisters to distance themselves from it, the Holy See authorized the creation of a parallel association in the United States, the "Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious," CMSWR, more faithful to the magisterium. One member of this association is Sister Mary Clare Millea, the sister of pontifical master of ceremonies William Millea, who led the apostolic visitation organized by the congregation for religious.

The CMSWR represents about 20 percent of the 57,000 sisters of the United States. On the basis of a 2009 survey by Georgetown University, their average age is 60, while that of the LCWR is much higher at 74 years.

Moreover, according to the same survey, while 43 percent of the communities of sisters associated with the CMSWR each have in 2009 five or more novices in formation, only 9 percent of those represented by the LCWR could boast the same number of vocations. Worldly and "liberal," these latter, but visibly sterile and on the way to extinction.