As U.S. orders of women religious prepare for the Vatican's apostolic visitation, and the "doctrinal assessment" of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Cardinal Rode, Prefect for the Congregation for Institutes for Religious Life, lays the groundwork for the up-coming meetings in a thought-provoking statement, "From Past to Present: Religious Life Before and After Vatican II."
First the good news:
"In many of these Western countries, religious have lost hope. They are resigned to the loss of vitality, of significance, of joy, of attractiveness, of life. But America is different. The vitality, the creativity, the exuberance that marks the thriving culture of the United States is reflected in Christian life and also in consecrated life. Just think: Since the Second Vatican Council, more than a hundred new religious communities have sprung up in this fertile soil.
"This is the country that Pope Benedict visited in April in order to bring the message of the hope of Christ. But when he returned to Rome, he said, "I discovered a tremendous vitality and a decisive will to live and to witness to the faith in Jesus". With great joy, he confessed that he himself "was confirmed in hope by American Catholics".1
Cardinal Rode notes that American religious orders are approaching present challenges in a variety of ways. While some women religious are resigned to their order's declining numbers, others are seeking to revitalize the charism of their order.
Now, the bad news:
Rode also takes note of another contingent that, most likely, has prompted the upcoming doctrinal review of activities and statements from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious:
"Then, we must admit too, that there are those who have opted for ways that take them outside communion with Christ in the Catholic Church, although they themselves may have opted to "stay" in the Church physically. These may be individuals or groups in institutes that have a different view, or they may be entire communities."
However, Rode makes it clear that he wants to be of service to religious orders that seek to revitalize their charism, and are reassessing their post-conciliar approach toward spiritual reform.
"To that end, it will be helpful to examine the roots of the crisis, and here we come face-to-face with a necessary and brutal question: Wasn't "renewal" precisely what we did after the Council? Wasn't this going to bring us into a new era? And was it not precisely this "renewal" that has landed us where we are today?
"As Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote in an insightful essay five years ago, "to reform is to give new and better form to a pre-existent reality, while preserving the essentials . . . The goal is to make persons or institutions more faithful to an ideal already accepted".2
"Reform, therefore, entails identifying three basic elements: 1) something essential to preserve; 2) some way of dealing with what is essential that has gone wrong and needs to be corrected, 3) a new way of dealing with what is essential that has to be implemented."
Pope Benedict XVI's diagnosis:
Then Rode turns to the nub of the problem: the radically different interpretations of the Second Vatican Council documents, particularly regarding the church's dialogue with the larger culture. Rode share's Pope Benedict XVI's diagnosis of the fractured Catholic debate that has marked the past half century:
"It all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or — as we would say today — on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application". He continues, "The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and clashed. One caused confusion; the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and continues to bear fruit.
"On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call 'a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture'; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the 'hermeneutic of reform', of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us".
Update: Here's a story in the National Catholic Reporter that provides a bit more information on the upcoming apostolic visitation of U.S. religious orders and the doctrinal assessment of the LCWR. The story was prompted by an April 22 meetingin Rjome between Vatican officials and a LCWR delegation. Here are the most relevant points in John Allen's piece:
"Regarding the motives for the review, one official with the U.S. bishops’ conference said the concern is “entirely” about speakers the Leadership Conference of Women Religious has invited to address their annual assemblies in recent years, based upon the texts of those presentations posted on the conference’s Web site.
"Though this official did not cite specific speakers or topics of concern, Levada’s letter pointed to three areas of doctrine that he said the congregation first flagged in a 2001 meeting with officers of the leadership conference: the ordination of women, the theology of religious pluralism, and homosexuality. Most observers believe that a principal aim of the assessment is to ensure that future speakers at the conference’s assemblies will be screened for their positions on those issues.
"Sources also told NCR that while it’s the Vatican that commissioned Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, to conduct the doctrinal assessment, at least part of the push came from the Committee on Doctrine of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Blair is a member of that committee."
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