As the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States heads towards its annual assembly in August, its president says she is looking for a “third way” in dialogue with the Vatican. Last April the Vatican announced a major reform of the 1500-strong association, under which it will be supervised by three bishops. The Read more
Bishop Leonard Blair is one of the three bishops (the other two being Bishop Thomas Paprocki and Archbishop J. Peter Sartain), that made up the committee formed by the Holy See to undertake the doctrinal assessment of the LCWR. Bishop Blair says that since the assessment has been completed he “can only marvel at what is Read more
In moments of crisis, there’s a natural desire among many Catholics to rally around the flag, meaning to show support for the church and the pope. It’s not about denial, because Catholics are nothing if not sober realists about the church’s failures. It’s instead about saying to the world that despite it all, there’s still Read more
The Vatican’s treatment of LCWR (the Leadership Conference of Women Religious) has raised eyebrows outside the Church as well as within it. 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 Read more
The action of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in taking the US LCWR to task has resulted in vast public support for women religious, while the US Catholic bishops look foolish. This is the opinion of Phyllis Zagano, writing in National Catholic Reporter. She says that according to the CDF, the “women religious 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
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
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