I read the article (noting its dramatized headline as well). A number of errors in the article, which is not surprising, but an enormous amount of bias as well, and some hyperbolic language beyond the headline.
The problem with the bias and the errors is that it doesn’t separate the important fact of doctrine with the important command of ministry, and that’s a crucial separation. Thus, when quoting this person,
“We were the ones who probably took Vatican II and ran the fastest and the farthest with it,” said Sister Janice Farnham, a retired professor of church history at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. “Sometimes our church leaders forget, we were tasked to do these things by the church. The church said jump, and we said, how high? The church said update, renew, go back to your sources, and we did it as best we could. We did it with a passion, and we paid dearly.”
What does “do these things” mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean what the NYT writers think it means. Running fastest and farthest with V2, and “updating, renewing, going back to their sources” does not necessarily mean that the sisters understood this as permission or encouragement to challenge doctrine. In fact, what follows in the article is an explanation of a number of very legitimate V2 “things” which religious responded to (i.e., more involvement in ministries, plural, in a variety of realms and functions).
But of course, as usual, we can expect the NYT to politicize most topics and events, from religion to education to the ordinary. And politicize they did…such as in the subsequent paragraphs about how collegiality with bishops was somehow replaced by “conservative” bishops for whose appointments the two most recent popes are responsible. Underlying that statement is the notion that Catholic doctrine is a personal and political choice by individual bishops, instead of a fixed understanding and requirement that is not subject to secular trends. (The NYT has
never gotten that one right. Fact-checkers are always asleep at the wheel over in the Religion and Belief section of the newspaper.)
Regarding the obedience issue:
Our friendly poster JR has tried to explain the “autonomy” aspect of religious Orders (for example), and it’s something that I am still not entirely comfortable with. I fully understand that religious who make vows (including that of obedience) make theirs to God, not to The Church (that has been emphasized by Sr. Sandra Schneiders, a key figure in the LCWR). However, is the Church not God’s? Whether congregations, Orders, communities — Religious life, it seems to me, should not oppose the teachings of the Church, or let’s put it this way: When the V2 call to widen ministry makes a sister confront a choice between her ministry and church teaching (again, not a pastoral approach to that, but a fundamental understanding), I don’t see how the Church’s teaching can be compromised, or even needs to be. We are never called to change doctrine, not lay people and not religious. Religious, despite their amazingly virtuous answer to the gospel call, are not in a privileged place with regard to doctrine. Despite any level of technical autonomy in how they play out their legitimate ministries, that autonomy does not extend to a licence to dispense with or modify doctrine. It never has, and any sister who reads V2 as permission to do that, has misread V2, both in its literal sense and in its “spirit.”
Mind you, I do not interpret the NYT article as ascribing such heterodox views to the above sister it quotes; they provided only a snippet and, as always, out of context. I’m just making a general observation about the issue of “autonomy.”
