"There are some priests and also bishops who have done it," the pontiff said last week in response to a journalist's question during his return flight from the United Arab Emirates.

Francis's admission followed an outcry last week in the Vatican's women's magazine over the sexual abuse of nuns by priests.

The magazine went on to say this has led to religious sisters feeling forced to have abortions or raise children not recognised by their fathers.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which is the largest US organization of women religious, thanked Francis for shedding "light on a reality that has been largely hidden from the public".

It called for measures to address the issue, saying it's time to rethink the Church's male-led hierarchy.

The LCWR also made a statement asking for reporting guidelines to be established so abused nuns "are met with compassion and are offered safety".

News media reports and the #MeToo movement have brought the issue of sexual violence against nuns to the fore, which for women religious has morphed into a new hashtag: #Nunstoo has been trending in recent days.

The LCWR says it is grateful Francis has "shed light on a reality that has been largely hidden from the public and we believe his honesty is an important and significant step forward".

It also acknowledged some religious congregations have been part of the problem as they didn't support sisters in coming forward to report abuse in the past.

"We regret that when we did know of instances of abuse, we did not speak out more forcefully for an end to the culture of secrecy and cover-ups within the Catholic Church that have discouraged victims from coming forward," the LCWR says.

Not speaking up is seen to have been a reflection of the church's overreaching concern with protecting its reputation from scandal, as well as the fear of reprisals internally for speaking out.

Source

• News.com.au
• Varsity Maine
• Angelus
• ARS-dkprogressImage:

She says just concentrating on dwindling numbers diminishes every vocation, the church and even God.

The smaller numbers also "reflects our fears and our uneasy and unresolved relationship with death," she says. Read more

On April 30, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prefect Cardinal Gerhard Muller made blunt criticisms of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Among his charges were that the LCWR was promoting ideas that were against Christian revelation.

The priests' association, which has 1000 members, said the cardinal's remarks were released by the congregation without reference to subsequent discussions.

The episode publicly shamed the women religious in a way that many could see as hierarchical and clerical bullying, the letter stated.

The priests called for an approach characterised by dialogue, following Pope Francis's example.

Continue reading

The Nun Justice Project wrote an open letter regarding recent comments by Cardinal Gerhard Müller to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

On April 30, Cardinal Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, bluntly criticised the LCWR's focus on a concept called conscious evolution.

He also expressed displeasure at the LCWR honouring theologian Sr Elizabeth Johnson, whose writings had been criticised by US bishops.

Future speakers and presenters at LCWR major programmes now have to be approved by a Vatican delegate.

The LCWR responded on May 8, saying a climate of mistrust had developed with the CDF, but dialogue would continue.

The Nun Justice Project expressed concern and dismay at Cardinal Müller's actions.

It asked Pope Francis to remove the mandate imposed on the LCWR.

"Cardinal Müller's pre-emptive public criticism of LCWR leadership and Dr Johnson, one of the most beloved and respected theologians in the world, eclipsed any opportunity for public dialogue," it stated.

"This communicates that faithful Catholic female leaders are disrespected and discounted in our Church."

The coalition suggested the situation with LCWR presented Francis with an opportunity to act on his calls for expanding leadership roles for women, adding "that the place to begin is to listen to faithful women who are already exercising leadership".

The letter asked for a public apology to Sr Johnson and LCWR leadership, saying it "would speak volumes about the institutional Church's intent to truly listen to women and honour their voices".

The letter started by expressing "respect and gratitude" for Pope Francis's "extraordinary leadership in our Church".

Among the groups in the Nun Justice Project are Call to Action, the American Catholic Council, the Association of Roman Catholic Womenpriests and the Women's Ordination Conference.

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Nun Justice Project
• LCWR - Vatican timeline (NCR)
• Image: National Catholic Reporter

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious said in a statement released on May 8 that communication had broken down with the congregation and, as a result, "mistrust has developed".

On April 30, at a meeting in Rome, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller bluntly criticised some LCWR actions.

The cardinal objected to the LCWR's growing "focus of attention" on a concept called conscious evolution, which he likened to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.

He also criticised the LCWR for honouring a theologian who writings were viewed unfavourably by the US bishops.

The cardinal insisted a Vatican appointee approve LWCR conference speakers.

But in their subsequent statement, the women religious rededicated their organisation to continued dialogue with Vatican officials.

"The continuation of such conversation may be one of the most critical endeavours we, as leaders, can pursue for the sake of the world, the Church, and religious life," they said.

But they were saddened "that impressions of the organisation in the past decades have become institutionalised in the Vatican, and these institutionalised perceptions have led to judgements . . . ."

LCWR has been under a cloak of doctrinal congregation suspicion since 2009.

In 2012, the CDF, having completed a doctrinal assessment, issued a reform mandate.

Two years of further discussions set the scene for the LCWR leadership visit to Rome and its meeting at the CDF on April 30.

"During the meeting it became evident that despite maximum efforts through the years, communication has broken down and as a result, mistrust has developed," the LWCR statement continued.

"What created an opening toward dialogue in this meeting was hearing first-hand the way the CDF perceives LCWR.

"We do not recognise ourselves in the doctrinal assessment of the conference and realise that, despite that fact, our attempts to clarify misperceptions have led to deeper misunderstandings."

The women said they plan to continue discussions with the CDF.

They also said that, overall, their encounters with the Roman Curia were marked by "genuine interaction and mutual respect".

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Catholic News Service
• Image: Hughosb

In Rome on April 30, Cardinal Gerhard Müller objected to a growing "focus of attention" within the Leadership Conference of Women Religious on a concept called "cosmic evolution".

Cardinal Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, likened this to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.

Two years ago, a keynote speaker at LCWR's annual conference was a leading thinker on conscious evolution, Barbara Marx Hubbard.

Since that address, Cardinal Müller said, "every issue of your newsletter has discussed conscious evolution in some way".

Its concepts have been found in the directional statements of religious institutes, he complained.

Cardinal Müller said the fundamental theses of conscious evolution are "opposed to Christian Revelation".

He said he was worried an uncritical acceptance means a "de facto" movement "beyond the Church and sound Christian faith has already occurred".

Cardinal Müller also challenged the LCWR leaders for bestowing a 2014 Outstanding Leadership Award to "a theologian criticised by the Bishops of the United States because of the gravity of the doctrinal errors in that theologian's writings".

Although he does not name her, Cardinal Müller was referencing Sr Elizabeth Johnson, a theologian at Fordham University.

He called this an "open provocation" against the Holy See.

The Vatican is insisting that speakers and presenters at the sisters' major programmes be approved by its "archbishop delegate" to the LCWR.

In 2012, the Vatican appointed Archbishop Peter Sartain to this position and gave him authority to revise the LCWR's statutes and programmes.

There is also an ongoing doctrinal assessment of the group.

Past LCWR leaders have said the Vatican's sanctions are disproportionate and compromise the organisation's ability to fulfill its mission.

Cardinal Müller concluded: "At this phase of the implementation of the doctrinal assessment, we are looking for a clearer expression of . . . ecclesial vision and more substantive signs of collaboration."

An LCWR statement noted that the discussion that followed the prefect's address was "an experience of dialogue that was respectful and engaging".

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
• Image: Patheos

Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, prefect of the Congregation for Religious, said the lack of discussion over the action against the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) caused him "much pain".

"We have to change this way of doing things," the cardinal said during an open dialogue session with some 800 leaders of sisters' communities at the triennial assembly of the International Union of Superiors General in Rome.

"Cardinals can't be mistrustful of each other. This is not the way the Church should function."

Cardinal Braz de Aviz referred several times to tensions between sisters and bishops on Church authority, questions of obedience, and the future of religious life.

At one point he even called for a wide-ranging review of structures of Church power.

"We are in a moment of needing to review and revision some things," he said. "Obedience and authority must be renewed, re-visioned.

"Authority that commands, kills. Obedience that becomes a copy of what the other person says, infantilises."

Cardinal Braz de Aviz said his congregation first learned of the move against the LCWR in a meeting with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after the formal report on the matter had been completed.

At that meeting, he said, he told Cardinal William Levada, who has since retired as head of the doctrinal congregation, that the matter should have been discussed between the Vatican offices.

"We will obey what the Holy Father wants and what will be decided through you," Cardinal Braz de Aviz told the sisters he had said to Levada. "But we must say that this material which should be discussed together has not been discussed together."

"I obeyed," Cardinal Braz de Aviz told the sisters. "But I had so much pain within me."

He also said it was the first time he was discussing the lack of consultation publicly, saying he previously "didn't have the courage to speak."

Sources:

National Catholic Reporter

National Catholic Reporter

Image: National Catholic Reporter

The sisters in this American convent belong to the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious — a national organisation that, unlike the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, is not in conflict with the Vatican.

Continue reading

The decision to enter into a "conversation" with Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle was announced at the end of the LCWR's annual assembly in St Louis.

Outgoing president Sister Pat Farrell told reporters that "we are charged to enter into a process of dialogue", but matters of doctrine would not be the LCWR's starting point.

Rather, the dialogue would start with "our own lives and our understanding of religious life". She also said the LCWR would reconsider if it was forced to "compromise the integrity of its mission".

An assessment by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in April said a reform of LCWR was needed to ensure its fidelity to Catholic teaching in areas including abortion, euthanasia, women's ordination and homosexuality.

Sister Farrell said the LCWR members hoped its leaders would have "open and honest dialogue" that would lead to greater understanding and to greater opportunities for women to have a voice in the Church.

She said members of the LCWR wanted to be "recognised as equal in the Church", to have their style of religious life "respected and affirmed", and to help create a climate in which everyone in the Church could talk about "issues that are very complicated".

Sister Sandra Schneiders, professor emeritus of New Testament studies at the Jesuit School of Theology/Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, said: "There is definitely a desire to de-escalate the conflict, because fighting is not what we're about."

But she said there were also "non-negotiables", including the belief that God speaks through many people, not just through the bishops.

Archbishop Sartain praised the sisters, saying: "We must also work toward clearing up any misunderstandings, and I remain truly hopeful that we will work together without compromising Church teaching or the important role of the LCWR."

Sources:

St Louis Review

New York Times

Image: St Louis Review

The giant banner on their bus proclaimed, "Sisters driving for faith, family and fairness," and a gushing media noted that the sisters' fans along the way greeted them like rock stars.

However, it turns out that the sisters who organized the June 18-July 2 tour — from the sisters' lobbying group Network — also were driving for their own agenda.

As a Washington Post headline put it: "The Nuns on the Bus tour promotes social justice and turns a deaf ear to the Vatican."

The Nuns on the Bus tour did treat issues of poverty. But the tour also was designed to respond to the doctrinal assessment by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that found numerous doctrinal errors in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The LCWR is a superiors' organization of about 1,500 sisters who lead orders that include 80% of the sisters in the country. Read more

Sources

• Ann Carey in National Catholic Register
• Image: PR Watch

Ann Carey is the author of Sisters in Crisis: The Tragic Unraveling of Women's Religious Communities.

Last April the Vatican announced a major reform of the 1500-strong association, under which it will be supervised by three bishops.

The national assembly (under the theme of "Mystery Unfolding: Leading in the Evolutionary Now") will be in St Louis, Missouri, from August 7 to 11.

Interviewed by National Public Radio, the LCWR president, Sister Pat Farrell, said the options include fully complying with the Vatican mandate, not complying with the mandate and seeing if the Vatican will negotiate, or "to remove ourselves [and] form a separate organisation".

"In my mind, [I want] to see if we can somehow, in a spirited, nonviolent strategising, look for maybe a third way that refuses to define the mandate and the issues in such black and white terms," she said.

In the interview, Sister Farrell defended the LCWR against Vatican criticisms and said these centred on the group's unwillingness to follow the policy directions of the hierarchy, rather than active resistance.

On the issue of ordaining women, the LCWR president said the group had not advocated that since the Vatican's definitive statement that women cannot be ordained.

She defended LCWR members' periodic letters to the Vatican on issues of sexuality, including gay/lesbian issues, saying, "We have been in good faith raising concerns about some of the Church's teaching on sexuality. 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, new realities as they arise."

On abortion, she described the work of women religious as "very much pro-life". But she added: "We would question, however, any policy that is more pro-fetus than actually pro-life. You know, if the rights of the unborn trump all the rights of all those who are already born, that is a distortion, too."

Sources:

National Public Radio

National Catholic Reporter

Image: National Pubic Radio

Bishop Blair says that since the assessment has been completed he "can only marvel at what is now being said, both within and outside the Church, regarding the process and the recent steps taken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to remedy significant and longstanding doctrinal problems connected with the activities and programs of the LCWR".

He concludes, though, that he is "confident ... that if the serious concerns of the CDF are accurately represented and discussed among all the sisters of our country, there will indeed be an opening to a new and positive relationship between women religious and the Church's pastors in doctrinal matters ..."

• Read Bishop Leonard Blair's article
• Image: Southern Fried Catholicism

That instinct seemed to be the principal subtext to Benedict XVI's June 1-3 outing to Milan.

Formally, Benedict made the short trip north to attend the seventh "World Meeting of Families," a Vatican-organized event held every three years to celebrate marriage, youth and the family. In context, however, the trip also offered an opportunity for the Catholic rank and file to embrace Benedict amid one of the greatest trials of his papacy, the mushrooming Vatileaks scandal.

That, at any rate, is how Vatican officials have touted what happened. In an interview with Italian TV, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State (and, according to many analysts, the principal target of the leaks), referred to the "extraordinary display of love for the pope and ... support for him and his magisterium" witnessed in the streets of Milan, as well as among the more than 1 million people who turned out for Sunday Mass at Bresso Park.

Bertone said it was significant that such affection, including "frenetic" applause for the pope wherever he went, poured out "in this particular moment" — and by that, of course, he meant the current atmosphere of scandal. Continue reading

Sources

• John L Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: thestar.com

In his column in NCR, Bill Tammeus, a Presbyterian elder, writes:

"Those of us outside of Catholicism find it unfathomable that the church ... would exploit or disdain the women who have committed their lives to doing ministry in Christ's sacred name. But that's what the current controversy over the Vatican's action says to many of us".

• Read the article by Bill Tammeus
• Image: LCWR

Bill Tammeus writes the daily "Faith Matters" blog for The Kansas City Star‘s website and a monthly column for The Presbyterian Outlook.

She says that according to the CDF, the "women religious of the United States were spending too much time on social issues and not enough on defending doctrine", and that the "US Catholic bishops, who have no moral credibility ... can't get their own job done and so are taking the sisters into receivership".

• Read Phyllis Zagano's article
• Image: CathNews USA

Phyllis Zagano is a lecturer on contemporary spirituality and women's issues in the church.

But, says John L Allen Jr in his National Catholic Reporter column, "At least part of the original momentum for the overhaul actually came from America, not Rome".

• Read John L Allen Jr's column.
• Image: The Catholic World Report

During most of the past seven years, however, that anticipated upheaval has seemed a lot like the dog that didn't bark. Back in February 2006, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus famously voiced "palpable unease" among those most elated by Ratzinger's election, and that disappointment endured in a swath of Catholic opinion which had begun to despair that the pope would ever impose order.

Of late, however, many observers believe the "real Ratzinger" has finally come out to play. Consider the tumult of the past month:

• On April 18, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decreed a sweeping overhaul of the Leadership Conference for Women Religious, the main American umbrella group for the superiors of women's orders, to correct what the congregation described as LCWR's "corporate dissent" on issues such as women's ordination and homosexuality, and its contamination by "radical feminism."
• At least five Irish priests have faced Vatican-inspired discipline, with implementation left to their religious orders. Two Redemptorists have seen their writings for a church magazine either withdrawn or limited (one was also dispatched to a monastery for a six-week "reflection"), a Passionist prominent in the English media is now subject to prior censorship, and both a Marist and a Capuchin have been told to stop writing and speaking on certain hot-button topics.
• On April 5, Benedict XVI included some blistering language in his Holy Thursday homily about a "call to disobedience" issued by more than 300 priests and deacons in Austria who oppose celibacy and support women's ordination. The pope called the effort "a desperate push to do something to change the church in accordance with (their) own preferences and ideas." Continue reading

Sources

• John L Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: NY Daily News

We search for the terms that explain what we're experiencing: phenomena beyond the ordinary disturbances we've learned to weather one season to the next. Just as seismologists or climatologists begin to put together patterns over time, to construct a mega-image of what is happening, so are we. Another piece of the puzzle has just fallen into place for us with the delivery last week from the Vatican of the "Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious."

The 5.8 earthquake that hit the East Coast in August was insignificant by West Coast standards, yet it was felt hundreds of miles from its epicenter in Virginia. Geologists explained that the earth's crust in this part of the world is more dense and less disturbed and fractured than that in the usual earthquake zones, allowing the seismic waves to travel farther than they would, say, in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

In a similar way, the shockwaves emanating from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), a gathering unlike any that preceded it in tone, purpose and language, have reverberated through the relatively undisturbed crust of the institutional church's presumptions and leadership culture. The assessment of the nuns is the latest of the aftershocks. This council, popularly known as Vatican II, did not announce anathemas; did not condemn heresies, as was the case with others; did not dwell on dogma or establish new lines for who's in and who's out of the community.

Instead, to state the matter broadly, it asked that we all go to the roots of who we are as a people of God and to figure out what that means in the contemporary world. And while it is a far more complex story — indeed, a universe of stories — than can be done justice in the space of this essay, we can know some things about what's happened since we began to feel the rumblings beneath the ecclesiastical crust. Continue reading

Sources

• Tom Roberts in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: LCWR