The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.
Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining ”” to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965.
While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.
The article states “Cardinal Levada sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote†the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.
The letter goes on to say that, “Given both the tenor and the doctrinal content of various addresses†at assemblies the Leadership Conference has held in recent years, the problem has not been fixed. ”
The sentences appear in the middle of the article while the lede suggests that the Vatican is going to drive these saintly women back into convents and force them to wear 18th century habits and destroy their creative attempts at trying to live their religious lives in the 21st century. Of course, the Times (as usual) gets it wrong: the investigation was triggered by nuns creating a public scandal by their activities and teaching, their books and their feminist embrace of everything from abortion to homosexual behavior to a female priesthood. Some of those in religious orders are arguably no longer Christian let alone Catholic. The Times, of course, would not understand this since the agenda of the nuns is perfectly congruent with the paper’s.
[blockquote]The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.[/blockquote]
Well, gee, if you had been faithfully living out your vocation as CATHOLIC NUNS, then you wouldn’t have any doctrinal issues to be targeted, now, would you?
Heretics aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box…
Yep — nice catch, Dan.
RE: “The sentences appear in the middle of the article while the lede suggests that the Vatican is going to drive these saintly women back into convents and force them to wear 18th century habits and destroy their creative attempts at trying to live their religious lives in the 21st century.”
But in reality, the nuns know precisely why they’re being investigated — and my first thought was “yea!”
[blockquote] . . . it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote†the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.[/blockquote]
I’ve had both positive and negative experiences with nuns. Sister Regina, who was principal of the Catholic School I attended, was pretty much distilled awesome.
Another one, years later, when I told her I was considering military chaplaincy as a vocation, asked me point blank, “Why do you want to support killing?” Oy.
Technically, the visitation is concerned not with nuns at all but with religious sisters. The fact that the distinction is so fuzzy even in the minds of many Catholics might be an indication that reflection on each religious institute’s identity is a good idea.
You know this is a good thing by the reaction of those commenting on a National Catholic Reporter report on the visit. Spark is to Gasoline is as Vatican Scrutiny is to Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
There is a very little of the Catholic Religion evident in this group. Instead they are in the forefront in attempsts to destroy the Church and remake it in their image. Which includes putting up new altars to Eco Spirituality, Homosexuality, Sexual License, Radical Feminism, and Rebellion. With feast days dedicated to such minor gods as Inclusion, Tolerance, Syncretism and Humanism.
Jesus Christ serves only as an example. And this only when they can use Him to bolster their own beliefs. He is far too polite and ineffectual to challenge their notions. You know the Jesus who never said anything about loving, committed same sex relationships. Not the one who gave rather graphic descriptions of the consequence of sin.
All the errors that are found in TEO at large are flourishing in these orders. The irony and blessing is that these orders are the ones that are withering (I guess they offer a fruit no one wants to pluck.) While the orthodox orders are attracting vocations. Guess Truth does matter after all.
Living in New England as I do, I have had quite a few opportunities to visit RC retreat centers, often run by nuns. Those run by men’s orders are variable, but the centers run by nuns are invariably filled with New Age garbage. Many women’s religious orders have ceased to be Christian in any meaningful sense; to them, Jesus of Nazareth is simply the best spiritual teacher (and sometimes simply the major figure of our particular tradition).
I have learned to always pray for spiritual protection when for some reason I need to attend an event at an RC retreat center.
Mixed reaction here. While I do agree that some groups of women religious have become nothing more than tax-exempt bodies of liberal social workers, I wonder about this plan to investigate them while the pedophilia bit was NOT addressed and investigated adequately by Cardinal-turned-pope Ratzinger.
And the charge that they are not “promoting” the primacy of the RCC as the means to salvations irks me and reminds me of a story. At my former Episcopal parish, we lost a beautiful parishioner, a nurse who volunteered her time on the weekends to deliver babies at a Catholic-run maternity clinic for the poor. My friend was killed in a car accident while she was on her way to the clinic one weekend to deliver a child. Truly tragic, as this left her own daughter an orphan.
Our church was absolutely packed for her funeral and our rector generously allowed the nun who was the director of the maternity clinic to give the sermon and eulogy. The congregation was probably evenly split between RCs and Episcopalians but there wasn’t any quibbling about “issues” — everyone was there to celebrate the extraordinary life we all lost. The nun expressed appreciation for being able to give the sermon and for our prayer book, which she called a gift to Christianity. Our rector praised the good work of the sisters in their pro life endeavors.
At the reception afterward, an elderly member of our parish was telling me how happy she is to see things change. She said that when she was much younger, she would get tears in her eyes when she saw the nuns leading their pupils from the nearby RC school down the street because, when they neared our church building, the nuns would make the children cross the street. They told them that they weren’t to go near any Protestant churches. How very sad.
Is this the type of thing the Vatican wants to see happening again? Maybe not so overt but a re-emphasis on how rejecting the RCC can jeopardize one’s soul? Sigh….
I had lunch yesterday with two Roman priests at their Rectory at a nearby urban parish cluster. I have more in common with them concerning faith and ministry than I do with most other ECUSA clergy in this diocese. We discussed this report at length. This parish cluster (3 churches, 2 priests) does Mass in English, Latin Tridentine, Latin Novus Ordo, and German regularly, and occasionally in Polish. The fastest growing group in the cluster is the Tridentine group…teeming with young families!
I don’t suspect they are heading toward nuns leading kids back across the street away from protestant buildings. But I do see a reclaiming of authentic faith in the Roman tradition, which was jettisoned in the 1970’s. The nuns who taught me for First Holy Communion and Confirmation when I was an RC were in hindsight far from the faith! Yet in High School we had old Polish Felician Sisters – very faithful! And new Orders of women following their former rules (as well as communities of men such as Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s group in New York) are bursting at the seams with vocations.
Like Fr. Cutie – perhaps we will see and influx of theologically poor religious orders coming to ECUSA while one of OUR traditionalist orders of sisters, the All Saints Sisters of the Poor in Maryland, is making their submission to Rome in the coming months.
God help us.
[blockquote]Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, [b] ordering their schedules around daily prayers[/b] and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals. [/blockquote]
I just had to chuckle at this. (How dare we expect religious to order their schedules around daily prayer! What an outrage!) Seriously, anyone in a religious order who doesn’t keep daily prayer needs to find another vocation.
I do hope Mother Mary Clare gets a nice long sitdown with a certain Joan Chittister.
I presume the first sentence of this report came by way of the NY Times. I say this because there has been a lot of comment on Catholic blogs and websites about the Times choosing to charicature a badly needed look at American religious orders of sisters a doctrinal “inquisition.” Leave it to the Times to pick the most negatively loaded words to report on Catholic and Vatican events.