Lcwr Nuns: " Catholic Church Is Pro-Foetus but Keeps Silent on Other Essential Issues"

By The Debate between American Nuns and the Vatican Continues
Vatican Insider
July 19, 2012

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/world-news/detail/articolo/stati-uniti-united-states-estados-unidos-16910/


Sister Pat Farrel, president of the Leadership Conference for Women Religious breaks the silence in a radio interview with NPR. The world moves on and doctrine cannot remain static she says

It seemed like a coincidence to many but the day after a change of guard was announced in the leadership of the Holy Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - Cardinal Levada was substituted by Cardinal Müller – nuns of the Leadership Conference for Women Religious (LCWR), the association which represents 80% of women religious in the U.S. and which is preparing a national assembly to be held in August have broken their silence and agreed to talk about their placement under the supervision of an external commissioner.

Neither was it a coincidence that the first one to speak was President Pat Farrel, number two of the Dubuque Franciscan Sisters Congregation in Iowa, in an interview with National Public Radio in one of its most popular programmes. The nun reiterated the association's official response to the Vatican's "unfounded" accusations which could potentially be destructive to the continuation of their mission. But she went further, saying: "There are issues about which we think there's a need for a genuine dialogue, and there doesn't seem to be a climate of that in the church right now."

Sister Farrel highlighted one fundamental question: is it possible to be part of the Church but be in favour of dialogue and discussion? "Questions there are much less black and white because human realities are much less black and white. That's where we spend our days." "I think one of our deepest hopes is that in the way we manage the balancing beam in the position we're in, if we can make any headways in helping to create a safe and respectful environment where church leaders along with rank-and-file members can raise questions openly and search for truth freely, with very complex and swiftly changing issues in our day, that would be our hope. But the climate is not there. And this mandate coming from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith putting us in a position of being under the control of certain bishops that is not a dialogue. If anything, it appears to be shutting down dialogue."

One of the questions on the table, which Levada tried to tackle, is the Church's doctrine on sexuality. Here too, Sister Farrel refuses to be placed in the category of those who reject it: "We have been, in good faith, raising concerns about some of the church's teachings on sexuality. The problem being that the teaching and interpretation of the faith can't remain static and really needs to be reformulated, rethought in light of the world we live in. And new questions and new realities [need to be addressed] as they arise. And if those issues become points of conflict, it's because Women Religious stand in very close proximity to people at the margins, to people with very painful, difficult situations in their lives. That is our gift to the church. Our gift to the church is to be with those who have been made poorer, with those on the margins."

The interview could not fail to address the question regarding the LCWR's position on the fight against abortion which Rome claims is too soft: "I think the criticism of what we're not talking about seems to me to be unfair. Because [Women] Religious have clearly given our lives to supporting life, to supporting the dignity of human persons. Our works are very much pro-life. We would question, however, any policy that is more pro-foetus than actually pro-life. If the rights of the unborn trump all of the rights of all of those who are already born, that is a distortion, too — if there's such an emphasis on that. We also have many, many ministries that support life. We dedicate to our lives to those on the margins of society, many of whom are considered throwaway people: the impaired, the chronically mentally ill, the elderly, the incarcerated, to the people on death row. We have strongly spoken out against the death penalty, against war, hunger. All of those are right-to-life issues…Our concern is that right-to-life issues be seen across a whole spectrum and are not narrowly defined. ... To single out one right-to-life issue and to say that that's the only issue that defines Catholic identity, I think, is really a distortion."

It is worth mentioning that after all the spontaneous and formal demonstrations of support for the nuns, including the full support of all superiors of the 7 Provinces of Friars Minor in America, other bodies have followed suit and expressed their full support for the LCWR cause. For example, the Augustinian Order, the Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood, the Xaverian congregation and the entire Conference of Major Superiors, the male equivalent to the LCWR.