The War on Nuns: Two Women Go to Rome

By Amy Davidson
New Yorker
June 3, 2012

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/06/the-war-on-nuns-two-women-go-to-rome.html


American nuns are sending two leaders of their main organization to Rome—on a mission, not a pilgrimage. Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and Sister Janet Mock, the group’s executive director, want to meet with a cardinal and an archbishop to ask why their group is being disciplined as the result of a harsh “assessment” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and, more extraordinarily, to object to the Vatican’s findings.

The assessment had talked darkly about “radical feminist” influences and “a distorted ecclesiological vision,” by which the Vatican seemed to mean, mostly, that the nuns were not listening enough to bishops. Strikingly, the problem wasn’t just the things that they were saying, but what they weren’t saying—that they weren’t fervent enough advocates for the bishops’ positions on issues like gay marriage and contraception. (See Margaret Talbot’s Daily Comment for an example.) It was, as I wrote when it was issued a month and a half ago, part of a broader war on nuns on the part of the Church in America, or rather on the part of the Church’s leadership; the women, it turned out, had a great deal of sympathy within local parishes, where people held prayer vigils and told the nuns that they were on their side.

But it was hard to tell what that support was worth: Where are you left when the Church to which you have given your life says that your work isn’t good—that its whole direction is wrong? Their position is a vulnerable one, to say the least. For many of the nuns, the past few weeks seem to have been a hard time, and even a lonely one. When the board of the L.C.W.R. finally met this week in Washington, Sister Pat Farrell said, in an interview today with the National Catholic Reporter, “There was an overall mood of really serious, prayerful reflection, I would say—a gamut of emotions of ups and downs. But I would say that the major thing is that it was a real consolation for all of us to finally be together in one place and to be able to process some of the feelings around this … to finally be able to talk about that face to face.”

The statement the L.C.W.R. arrived at was strong, and also brave:

Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency. Moreover, the sanctions imposed were disproportionate to the concerns raised and could compromise their ability to fulfill their mission. The report has furthermore caused scandal and pain throughout the church community, and created greater polarization.

One of the sanctions was essentially to place the L.C.W.R. into receivership, with an archbishop and a couple of bishops vetting what it did and published, and asked to speak at its meetings. Laurie Goodstein, at the Times, talked to Sister Christine Schenk, the executive director of a Church reform group, about why that was a particular blow:

“Here you see women, very competent, highly educated, doctorates in theology, masters in ministry, C.E.O.’s of hospitals, heads of school systems, being treated as if they were children,” [Sister Schenk] said. “That in itself goes to the issue of where are the women in the decision-making structures in Rome.”

“I think the inference that many people could draw from the publication of the Vatican document is that we are unfaithful,” Sister Pat Farrell told the National Catholic Reporter. “We really do not see ourselves in that way.” She added that speaking up was “a sign of our deepest faithfulness to the church,” because there were “questions that the people of God need to raise, that we need to talk about together in a climate of genuine dialog.”

Is that a conversation the Vatican is ready to have? Two women are going to Rome to find out.

Photograph: Cardinal William Levada, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with whom the nuns will meet at the Vatican. Yana Paskova/The New York Times/Redux.