The Cathoholic

Vatican Investigates U.S Nuns

Yesterday, the New York Times took note of the on-going apostolic investigation of U.S. religious orders, a development covered here in The Cathoholic. Check out my post on Mere Comments, the Touchstone Magazine blog. 

Cardinal Rode & U.S. Nuns: Back to the Future

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."

Rome & U.S. Nuns

The Holy See has informed the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the organization that represents the majority of U.S. orders, that it will initiate a "doctrinal assessment" of the conference, according to the National Catholic Reporter. NCR has made public a letter, dated February 20, from Cardinal William Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. According to the NCR report, Cardinal Levada's letter explained that the assessment was prompted by an evaluation of the conference's response to official church teaching outlined in three key documents:

"The Vatican assessment has become necessary, according to Levada, because at the 2001 meeting between the women’s leadership conference and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which took place in Rome, the women were invited “to report on the initiatives taken or planned” to promote the reception of three areas of Vatican doctrinal concern: the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, the 2000 declaration Dominus Jesus from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and “the problem of homosexuality.”

"Ordinatio sacerdotalis, Latin for “On the Ordination to the Priesthood,” was a Vatican document that reasserted that Catholic ordination to the priesthood is reserved for men alone and that the church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”

"Dominus Jesus was a declaration that, in part, insisted that non-Catholic Christians are “in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the church, have the fullness of the means of salvation” and that non-Catholic Christian communities suffer “defects.” It was viewed at the time by some Catholic theologians and leaders of other religions as a major setback in interreligious dialogue.

"In a 1986 letter written by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, to the world’s bishops, he wrote: “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

Here is my first post on the already announced apostolic visitation of U.S. women's orders, and here's a second one, explaining the negative reaction from one woman religious.

Nun Wars: Take Cover

Reportedly, many nuns of a progressive bent are seriously  angered by Rome's decision to organize an apostolic visitation of religious communities in the United States. Reportedly, they were not consulted about the visitation, they are seriously displeased and don't care who knows it. One such nun, Sister Sandra M. Schneiders vented her irritation to colleagues in an email, which was published, with the author's permission, in the  National Catholic Reporter. 

Sister Schneiders' remarks underscore the still unresolved issues that propelled many U.S. religious orders into uncharted territory in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Today, many U.S. religious orders with opposing interpretations of the council  have largely agreed to disagree.  But the apostolic visitation may stir up the past and reinvigorate the debates that led thousands to depart from their orders. 

It won't be easy for the messenger from Rome to navigate the minefield. Pity Mother Clare Millea, the Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who has been appointed by Rome to  lead an apostolic visitation of religious orders.  Mother Clare's order is an unusual  congregation, because it has joined both the more progressive  Leadership Conference of Women Religious and to the more orthodox Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious. In First Things, blogger, Elizabeth Scalia explains the unfolding conflict.

Vatican and U.S. Nuns: Housecleaning Begins Now

Catholic religious orders of women have been in decline for half a century. Finally, and not a moment too soon, the Vatican has decided to look into the matter. The Holy See will be conducting an "Apostolic Visitation" of Apostolic Religious Institutes in the United States. Not only will the Vatican examine the roots of the collapse in vocations, it also plans to report on the positive trends in religious vocations that remain a well kept secret from many Catholics.

Once upon a time, the luminous, courageous example of women religious inspired the average Catholic girl to ponder a religious vocation. Many did become nuns, commandeering parish schools, and Catholic hospitals, praying and serving as if the salvation of the world depended upon it. Today, few Catholic girls ever see a nun in the classroom, or know a nun as a friend. Most of our European-based orders that survived civil wars and world wars will not survive the crisis of faith that has produced a precipitous decline in vocations--documented by the Holy See.

Though one cousin of mine joined the Religious of the Sacred Heart that educated many family members on both sides of our family over several generations, I only briefly considered such a momentous step. in the early 1980s, I was asked to write a story on the first contemplative house for the Missionaries of Charity. Based in the South Bronx, it was a wonderfully joyful place led by Sister Nimala, the remarkable Nepalese Hindu convert who was later elected by members of the order to replace Mother Teresa, the founder. Sister Nimala was so thin, she appeared almost transparent, so light, she seemed to walk on air. But she was a gifted leader and advisor. Like most MIssionaries of Charity, she was enthusiastic about the order and encouraged every single woman to at least consider the possibility of making an extended visit. I enjoyed my five days at the South Bronx convent that seemed filled with hope and humor and so many different kinds of women who had found a time together, despite their diverse backgrounds and spiritual paths.

Looking back, I see that the Missionaries made a impression precisely because they were different, joyfully sacrificial and happy in their chosen life. They possessed two saris--one they wore, the other they washed and hung out to dry. They ate donated food, punctuated their day with prayer in the convent and with the poor they met on their travels. They laughed and told stories during recreation. After I returned to my Manhattan apartment, I slept for two days, but retained the sense of joy that pervaded the convent under Sister Nirmala's guidance.  Recently, I thought of my visit to the order's South Bronx convent as I began the recently published "Mother Teresa's Secret Fire: The Encournter that Changed Her Life, and How it Can Transform Your Own" by Joseph Langford,  co-founder of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers.

I have visited many other religious orders, and come to know a handful of nuns quite well. The example of most of their members easily claims my respect and affection. But I have also confronted the dark side of religious life: the nuns who made radical choices in the heady days of post-Vatican II Catholicism and now would rather preside at their order's demise than admit that mistakes were made. Such nuns speak, sometimes grimly, sometimes indifferently, of their order -- like a doomed train that has left the station and cannot be recalled. Perhaps they are right--some orders will die. But some can still be turned around, if only spiritual pride was put aside and the former radicals could spend some time examining the truly radical orders, like the Missionaries of Charity or the Nashville Dominicans, that continue to attract new vocations. This, I believe, is the mission of the Apostolic Visitation: by celebrating the successful orders, they may inspire others to reassess the choices that still claim their determined defense.

Young women I know who have chosen religious life said they were especially concerned with the order's commitment to community life and prayer. This must be a difficult challenge for orders in decline. I looked online at some vocations websites and was struck by the difference in approaches:
Here is the Nashville Dominicans Vocations Page.

Here is the Sisters of Mercy page. 

Pope Benedict XVI described  the authentic call to religious life thus:
"Belonging to the Lord:  this is the mission of the men and women who have chosen to follow
Christ – chaste, poor and obedient – so that the world may believe and be saved. To belong
completely to Christ so as to become a permanent confession of faith, an unequivocal
proclamation of truth that frees us from the seduction of the false idols that deceive the world."