After a Vatican report on the American Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) caused an uproar particularly in the popular press, Pope Benedict offered an olive branch. Addressing visiting U.S. Bishops he said, “I wish to reaffirm my deep gratitude for the example of fidelity and self-sacrifice given by many consecrated women in your country.” Read more
Various institutions within the American church have been of concern to the US bishops over the past few years — and now it is the turn of the Girl Scouts. In a recent article, Joan Chittister writes that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Catholic Charities in the US, Caritas, and now the Girl Scouts, Read more
In one sense it is correct to say that the crackdown on the LCWR would seem to be “Rome vs. America”, in that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has declared that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious needs renewing. But, says John L Allen Jr in his National Catholic Reporter column, “At Read more
The noble image of nuns as sweet, selfless and courageous “brides of Christ” is merely a way of generating public sympathy in the fight with the Vatican. So says US author, researcher and expert on Religious Life, Donna Steichen. Steichen says this view is being manufactured by sympathetic media, including the Washington Post, Huffington Post Read more
ROME — When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected to the papacy in April 2005, the popular forecast called for stormy weather ahead. This was, after all, the Vatican enforcer who had been leading a “smack-down on heresy since 1981”, in the words of T-shirts and coffee mugs marketed by a Ratzinger fan club. His rise elicited Read more
Both the investigation into the orthodoxy of the US’s Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and the “visitation” of active congregations of US sisters were initiated within weeks of each other in 2009. But while the latter received extensive publicity both in America and internationally throughout the entire time the process was underway, the LCWR Read more
It is almost instinctively that one reaches, when attempting to explain what is going on today in the Catholic church, for metaphors out of the natural world — storms, earthquakes, seismic shifts — to get at the magnitude of events. We search for the terms that explain what we’re experiencing: phenomena beyond the ordinary disturbances Read more
The leader of a group of US nuns criticised by the Vatican last week is hitting back. Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby, insists the group would continue “caring for the least among us on the margins of society.” Campbell said that Network, which works with the LCWR and vocally Read more