Nuns Could Teach Vatican Good Conduct

By Bonnie Erbe
Dickinson Press
June 8, 2012

http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/event/article/id/58738/group/Opinion/

U.S. nuns are having none of the Vatican’s dictatorial management tactics. And the women religious are to be applauded for it. Especially considering the various scandals enveloping the Vatican’s storied walls these days (from corruption to document theft to priest pedophilia), the sisters are wise to say: Enough.

That said, they are doing so in a most dignified manner. The Vatican should adopt the nuns’ stalwart, inclusive, honest, open and helpful approach — and not the other way around.

A nasty tiff arose between the Vatican and U.S. nuns in late April, you may recall. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees church doctrine, ordered a “supervised renewal” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The conference represents 47,000 of the 57,000 or so U.S. nuns. Essentially, the Vatican placed control of the women religious under a U.S. archbishop, an unprecedented and disrespectful move.

The women religious did not respond immediately. They waited until they convened last week at headquarters outside Washington, D.C. Now they’ve responded, and their statement is a sizzler: a dignified sizzler but a sizzler nonetheless. If the two organizations were in a contest to determine which has more class, the leadership conference would win hands down.

The Vatican in April rapped the sisters’ knuckles for such things as replacing Catholic liturgies with New Age rituals and para-liturgies run by women at LCWR conferences. It also denounced the fact that workshops and speakers at these meetings tended to focus on the social and political rather than the ecclesiastic. It essentially branded the LCWR, which has done so much to help America’s underclass, as a bunch of New Age hippies. The CDF even decried the women religious’ work for legislation to bring people out of poverty; for better working conditions for laborers in factories along the U.S.-Mexico border; and support for a “global peace force.”

Here’s part of a press release issued June 1 by the sisters:

“The board members raised concerns about both the content of the doctrinal assessment and the process by which it was prepared. Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency.”

That last clause could be applied to just about everything the Vatican does, and does wrong, these days. The flawed chains of command and lack of transparency have resulted in hush money being paid to priests who were known to the Catholic hierarchy to be molesting children. Instead of turning these men over to authorities, the Church secretly paid each of them $20,000 to leave their jobs. Why should the open, honest sisters have to put up with interference from the deceptive men who are trying to take them over?

LCWR representatives will fly to Rome later this month to meet with their Vatican superiors. When they come back, they will inform the board and membership of what transpired. In August at a conference, they will formulate a formal response to the Vatican.

Of course they answer to the Church and its prelates appointed to govern the nuns. But as an outsider, it seems so perverse that the do-gooders should have to answer to those embroiled in scandal. Not all members of the Vatican hierarchy are involved with the scandals. But so many of them are that there is serious talk of cardinals conspiring to oust this pope.

These days, serenity only enters the Vatican when it’s looking for a place to die. Yet the leadership conference has handled the Vatican crackdown with a serene, forthcoming approach. Again, all I can say is I hope the cardinals and archbishops are watching and will take some cues from the group that has it right.

Erbe is a TV host and Scripps Howard News Service columnist.