Joan Chittister  Mary Lou Kownacki  |  Aug. 8, 2014 From Where I Stand
LCWR 2014
1

"Not too long ago, the world barely noticed nuns, and then only in some anonymous or stereotypical way. Now there is hardly an instance when the world does not notice them. The irony is palpable. When we looked like "nuns," we weren't seen. Now that we look simply like ourselves, everybody sees everything we do. Clearly, witness is at least as powerful as uniforms. And nuns have given clear witness to contemplation, equality, and justice these last years.
The problem with that kind of thinking, however, is that people who consider themselves full adults begin to act as if they are.

However, there are consequences to witness like that.

Next week, for instance, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious will face decisions that will move the question of the agency of women in a man's church either forward or back. Strange as it may seem in the 21st century, the issue is whether or not women are capable of hearing diverse speakers and still remain faithful Catholics. The issue is whether or not women religious may discuss various points of view on major issues and still remain faithful Catholics. The issue is whether or not women religious can manage their own organizations and still be faithful Catholics. The Vatican's answer to those questions is no. For the last 45 years, however, LCWR's answer to those same questions has been a clear and persistent yes.

Men and women everywhere are watching the scenario work out, searching for models to resolve it, seeking spiritual guidance to deal with their own frustrations. Benedictine sister and poet Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki writes of the situation in her own blog, Old Monk's Journal.

NCR's award-winning reporting and commentary are possible because of support from people like you. Give today.
She writes:

We've had enough of exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues. I see the world is rotten because of silence," wrote St. Catherine of Siena. This a quote that Old Monk is meditating on as the Leadership Conference of Women Religious gathers for its annual assembly in Nashville, Tenn., Aug. 12-16.
Silence in the face of injustice is a crime, a sin, a heinous act that has been used by Church authorities over the centuries to kill questions and new ideas and to punish those who dare ask them.

So it broke Old Monk's heart to read this sentence by Tom Fox, publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, in a commentary he wrote on the upcoming LCWR assembly. "A group (LCWR) that once prided itself on fearless leadership and modeling transparency is now more media restrictive than most other Catholic organizations, including the U.S. bishops."

It is this kind of intimidation and fear that church authorities count on. Keep the abuse secret. Keep it behind closed doors.

Here is Old Monk's prayer and plea, then, for the LCWR:

Dearest Sisters, you have done nothing wrong. It is your obligation as religious to ask the questions that need to be voiced. It is the holy responsibility of religious to stand with those who are most bereft. Be proud of the questions you have asked, the speakers you invited to your assemblies, the statements you issued, the liturgies you celebrated. Go to the microphone and say: We believe in feminist theology and in women's ordination; we believe in the rights of gαy, lesbian and transgender population and we will continue to speak aloud on these issues. Respectfully, we will not comply with the order to submit names of speakers to our annual assembly to Vatican representatives for approval. If this means that the LCWR is no longer recognized by church authorities, so be it. Though we have given our lives to the church, we have not given our consciences to anyone but God. Though we recognize the legitimacy of church law, we believe it sometimes conflicts with the Gospel. And our hearts -- since we were young women -- have been afire with the radical message and life of Jesus of Nazareth. To act otherwise would barter our integrity. As members of LCWR, we stand with our sister, Catherine of Siena in reminding the faithful, "We've had enough of exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues. I see the world is rotten because of silence.

From where I stand, it seems to me if the amount of press, ink, and media reviews tell us anything, there are many who care deeply that the voices and agency of the sisters in the United States remain strong."  NCR

If you are one of those, you might want to send an email to LCWR, sign the petition with nunjustice.org, or go to Twitter with #CryOut. Tell these sisters with Catherine of Siena again, today, in our time, for the sake of the church at this important moment in church history, "Cry out, Sisters; Cry out."

[Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister is a frequent NCR contributor. Benedict Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki blogs at Old Monk's Journal.]

Editor's note: We can send you an email alert every time Joan Chittister's column, From Where I Stand, is posted to NCRonline.org. Go to this page and follow directions: Email alert sign-up.

Leadership Conference of Women Religious
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
 

A notable thing about these heterodox women is how old they are now. Are they blind to all the closed down convents, the Great Apostasy etc.?

She starts out by saying; "Not too long ago, the world barely noticed nuns, and then only in some anonymous or stereotypical way. Now there is hardly an instance when the world does not notice them. The irony is palpable. When we looked like "nuns," we weren't seen. Now that we look simply like ourselves, everybody sees everything we do. Clearly, witness is at least as powerful as uniforms. And nuns have given clear witness to contemplation, equality, and justice these last years."

I would tend to dispute that. I think the world noticed the sisters more than she realizes. In fact the sisters said a lot more when they wore their habits and were silent.  

Yes, I agree, but that's not her context for "notice."  Her context is power, recognition, praise, and position -- all of which point to Pride, not to mention secular assumptions.  You see, it's not just the externals (such as the habits), or even the behavior of general silence.  What was destroyed in Religious Life, post V2 -- among much else -- was the entire focus on the traditional spirituality of Religious Life, particularly its discipline in personal formation toward the virtues.  By that was meant not only poverty, chastity, and obedience, but all of the evangelical and contemplative virtues:  humility, simplicity, docility, and much more.

Sisters of Newchurch turned their focus entirely outward.  It was quite deliberate, and was the main reason that daily Mass, in community, was devalued by these modernistic "sisters."  When you lose daily Mass as a community, you not only lose the (most important) power of community liturgical prayer -- the prayer of the Church; you deny the importance of community life altogether.  Traditionally in the Roman Church, community has been considered an essential element of Religious Life (both active and contemplative) because of the sanctification community life offers and demands (not unlike marriage).   Further, community is a major feature of support for the trials of Religious Life. There is no tradition in Roman Catholicism of "cells" of residential living by vowed Religious as single women (or men) in lonely apartments, apart from daily -- not weekly, not monthly -- community.

These facts are separate from the equally important fact of the abandonment of the original Mission of most of these communities.  That is, their Foundresses, usually pre-20th century, had a vision which each Foundress expected those joining her order would accept.  The so-called leadership of these communities which have deviated from that Mission are guilty of so much -- of breaking promises (betrayal), of sins of pride, of bearing false witness, etc.  I've read ridiculous rationalizations for the perversion of the original mission, not to mention equally ridiculous rationalizations for the open rejection of community life.  Community life is also more economical -- thus in line with the vow of poverty, and much more responsible toward women of retirement age who have no other means of support than their orders.  Since orders have suffered such devastating drops in membership after V2 -- never the fault of their Foundresses -- the option would be to consolidate in more centralized locations which do provide (larger) community and which serve the needs of a variety of members, so that younger sisters are not entirely burdened with the care of their elderly counterparts.  Believe me, they have rationalizations for not doing that, as well.

When a Foundress says that she has begun a community to teach girls and young women, she means she has begun a community to teach girls and young women.  She didn't mean "something else."  She didn't mean it was only for the 19th century.  She meant what she said.  There have been dozens of such orders whose original mission to teach has been abandoned, and the excuse has always been, "But I don't want to do that."  Then join another order.  As to the aging of teaching sisters, again, there is where consolidation and reconfiguration comes in.  It's not new.  These same orders of the past always had to account for sisters too old, frail, non-energetic to teach.  Such sisters worked at different tasks while younger sisters entered the same order and took on those tasks.  All the excuses are B.S.

Ditto (all of it) for orders whose original mission was nursing.

The docuмent of Vatican II instructed the religious communities to look to their original charism for guidance in their renewal. Many of the religious communities were founded based on some sort of service to the poor, nursing, teaching, etc... When they get away from that original charism that is whn they start to have problems.
One has to recognize that there is a such thing as an authentic renewal and a false renewal..

What they did was not even a renewal of any type -- true or false.  It was a brand new invention and a sabotage of the original charism.  I could list many, many orders which did that, but such women do not deserve the time I would spend even to do that.  

Quote from: MMagdala

Quote from: poche

The docuмent of Vatican II instructed the religious communities to look to their original charism for guidance in their renewal. Many of the religious communities were founded based on some sort of service to the poor, nursing, teaching, etc... When they get away from that original charism that is whn they start to have problems.
One has to recognize that there is a such thing as an authentic renewal and a false renewal..

What they did was not even a renewal of any type -- true or false.  It was a brand new invention and a sabotage of the original charism.  I could list many, many orders which did that, but such women do not deserve the time I would spend even to do that.  

The failure of renewal is the problem.

You can call it whatever you want to, but we're going to continue to remain at an impasse over the language, apparently, as language connotes meaning.   These renegade "sisters" never renewed anything about their communities.  But it's not just a "failure of renewal" (a passive behavior).  They seized the direction of those orders and transformed them into modernistic enterprises which were unrecognizable from the original mission of the Foundress, ss radically unrecognizable as the Novus Ordo is from the Mass of the Ages.  That includes a secular character given to these new enterprises and an outright embrace of heterodox theology published directly on their websites -- i.e., the "celebration" of Lesbian behavior, the whining about Tradition, the bitterness about female "invisibility. "  Not subtly.  Not "failing to renew."   Public dissent from Catholicism, perversion of the Order's mission, rejection, and revolution.   That is in a category way more grave than "failing to renew."

Speaking at a conference at the Vatican, Sister Simone Campbell of “Nuns on the Bus” assailed the male hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

“It is about male power and male image, not people’s stories,” said Sister Campbell. “The real trouble is they have defined their power as spiritual leadership and they don’t have a clue about spiritual life.”

The conference at which the American sister was speaking was focused on the contributions that women make to world peace. The conference was timed for the International Women’s Day, March 8, and organized jointly by the Jesuit Refugee Services and the Fidel Gotz Foundation, an institution based in Liechtenstein.

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=30957