Why Are American Nuns under Vatican Scrutiny?

By Francis X. Clines
New York Times
May 8, 2014

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/why-are-american-nuns-under-vatican-scrutiny/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1


The 57,000 American women who are working among the needy as Catholic nuns received some words of encouragement this week from a German cardinal, dubbed “the pope’s theologian” because of his close friendship with Pope Francis. “I am also considered suspect!” Cardinal Walter Kasper, an outspoken liberal church writer, said at Fordham University on Monday. He was alluding to a Vatican investigation into “the quality of the life” at women’s religious institutes — code for Rome-appointed busybodies probing nuns for feminist influences and traces of heresy.

When the Vatican crackdown on nuns was announced five years ago — in the United States and no other country — it struck many church critics and laymen as a chauvinist overreach from Rome, particularly amid the raging scandal of the male clergy’s raping and abusing children. Progressive orders like the Sisters of St. Joseph, who revolutionized the treatment of imprisoned women in New York, received particular scrutiny.

“Well, it’s all nonsense,” Bob Bennett said at the time, speaking as a lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “They are the jewels, the church’s class act,” Mr. Bennett said of the nuns.

The Vatican, however, is only stiffening its challenge to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — the nuns’ hierarchy — with a new requirement that the sisters’ annual conference agendas and speakers be vetted by a Vatican overseer. Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Vatican bureaucracy on doctrine, accused the sisters this week of resisting mandated reforms and preferring speakers who diverged from church teaching.

Conference leaders have politely dismissed the accusations as “unsubstantiated” and stopped well short of open confrontation.

Cardinal Kasper’s advice was that the nuns should not be overly concerned because the Vatican bureaucracy “sees some things a little bit narrower” than other church workers. He told a story about the pope (who has endorsed the investigation) smiling dismissively at conservative criticism of Cardinal Kasper’s own writings and declaring, “This enters in one ear and goes out the other.”

The cardinal spoke optimistically at Fordham that dialogue might eventually smooth things out, but he took care to express particular “esteem” for Sister Elizabeth Johnson, a widely respected feminist theologian at Fordham criticized in the past by Cardinal Muller.

“She is in good company,” Cardinal Kasper said, noting that Thomas Aquinas, one of the great theologians, was condemned for years by his bishop.