Vatican demands reform of American nuns' leadership group [CWN]

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Tigg said:
That would have been me, but hey, what’s in a number? Your guess may be closer to reality - truth be told, we’ll never know the inestimable harm that has been allowed to continue for decades.

Come Holy Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!
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AMEN !!

What’s that quote from St Paul?
When great evil abounds, great GRACE abounds even more.
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Something like that. We should hang on, be prepared to defend Holy Mother Church to those who may be supporting the LCWR and pray, pray, PRAY!

Mimi
 
triumphguy said:
The guy that started the rot admits how wrong he was:

youtube.com/watch?v=90ZfGBHkA_0&feature=player_embedded
patheos.com/blogs/kathyschiffer/2012/04/william-coulson-and-the-lcwr-we-overcame-their-traditions-and-their-faith/#comment-1840

He’s the reason we were doing the enneagram and Meyers Briggs when I was in novitiate, instead of learning the history and spirituality of the order. My inner child - the inner child of a 24 year old, was as important as the 800 years of tradition of the Order!:o

During my time with this order 50% of the priests and brothers left to live with or marry someone.
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Wow. Thanks for sharing that article, and your story.

Peace,
 
I just read “A Marginal Life: Pursuing Religious Holiness in the 21st Century Keynote Address by Laurie Brink, OP” and found it fascinating.

I can see why the Hierarchy is freaking out!

I’m proud and impressed by the leadership of the LCWR - I hope they take Sr. Brinks advice and put indecision aside and stand firm on their principles. She provides four options for their future. I hope that like her, the Bishops see this an an opportunity for reconciliation on both sides. Otherwise, like Hagar, we women will have to fend for ourselves in order to secure a future for our children. It isn’t just women religious who are affected by this move on the part of the Vatican, it is all women - and we are watching.

It’s exciting to be living through cataclysmic times.
 
bellasbane said:
It isn’t just women religious who are affected by this move on the part of the Vatican, it is all women - and we are watching.
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Since you speak for all women, what will you do if you don’t like the outcome? Will you leave the Church and start your own?

Peace

Tim
 
Orogeny said:
Since you speak for all women, what will you do if you don’t like the outcome? Will you leave the Church and start your own?

Peace

Tim
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I see no point in dealing with hypothetical situations. I am content to wait and see what happens. Hagar didn’t choose to leave Abraham, she was driven out into the desert - and survived. It’s a good lesson for women to learn.
 
Mrs_Sally said:
THis organization can’t break with Rome in the same way some other groups did. The organization itself is an umbrella group of individual orders. So it is the groups under it that would or wouldn’t break. And then many of those orders are part of larger religious families (ie, Dominicans, Franciscans, etc.)

So you might have The Sisters of Our Lady of the Wind decide that the want to leave the Catholic church. The are also breaking with the umbrella organization. Within that order which is (let’s say) Franciscan, some sisters might not want to leave. They could then petition to join The Sisters of Our Lady of the Sea, also Franciscans, who are remaining Catholic.

The individual SOLOW sisters might remian living together in community, but I don’t know if they could become Episcipalians (sp?) as a community. There is precidenct for Anglican orders (going back to the Friars of the Atonement) becoming Catholic, but I don’t think any have gone the other way en masse.
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No, no. Lots and lots of misconceptions here.
  1. This latest action only concerns the LCWR which is the conference of orders. It doesn’t concern the orders themselves, which have another structure and approval altogether. This is about the statements that this advisory conference has made in public, and it’s about the organizational alliances that this advisory board has with other sorts of voluntary associations.
  2. The results on the orders themselves has not yet been published. We don’t know if any of these congregations will be shut down or silenced yet. Some could; but maybe not. We just don’t know.
  3. There is a huge difference between the different kinds of religious organizations that exist. Orders are far different from congregations, for example. There are CONGREGATIONS of Franciscan-flavored sisters who are NOT anything like the Poor Clares, which is the second ORDER of the original Franciscan family. They’re all in the family, but with different canonical structures. I know it’s confusing and most Catholics don’t know about this, but it matters A LOT.
  4. Most of these dissenting organizations are not ORDERS, but CONGREGATIONS and INSTITUTES. They’re canonically different.
  5. You can’t just jump from one congregation to another without actually leaving one canonically and entering the novitiate of the other. It takes years and you have to be approved again. Likewise, you can’t transfer from an order to a congregation or vice versa, and so on all the way down the line. It’s a very time-consuming process and you can always be denied.
 
bellasbane said:
Is that the best you can do? :rotfl:
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No. But it is all I care to do.

I could easily go back and sift through your posts and I seriously considered it. Then I decided that it was really not worth my time. Anyone who doubts the veracity of my claim can click your profile and track down every one of your posts and decide for themselves.
 
There are things that can happen. Some groups have incorporated themselves civilly, leaving the Catholic Church to become independent. This doesn’t happen often because it limits their credibility and their ability to get vocations and support themselves to some degree, but it has been done.

Laypeople are ignorant about these things, and there are a number of laypeople who will still contribute to these outfits based on what they look like without reading the fine print. It’s kind of amazing, but true.

They can also go to all this trouble and then decide to join other churches, although honestly, that’s a huge stretch too. Other religious groups don’t have the commonsense frameworks to support them and they will languish. More rules, less money. It’s considered worse than just going independent.

Most of the groups that are the worst, even as they’ve lost their reason for being, have stayed in the Catholic Church because:
a) laypeople still contribute out of nostalgia and ignorance, so they do get some donations
b) they can manage their internal affairs and stay out of trouble most of the time
c) it gives them a framework from which to talk about their interests and paradigms which you’ve seen and apparently, to which many of you object.

The difficulty we’re seeing now is that they have, as you say, an umbrella organization which is not juridical but does act as a conference, which has said some things that people object to…and it’s had some alliances that are counter-productive to which the Vatican is objecting. The Vatican is insisting that they clean up this conference. Not the congregations, right now, just the conference.

However, it will probably have some kind of effects on the congregations, simply because to have a conference with radically different views than the views of the congregations it represents will not be credible or sustainable. This is what the dispute is about.
 
iloveangels said:
  1. The results on the orders themselves has not yet been published. We don’t know if any of these congregations will be shut down or silenced yet. Some could; but maybe not. We just don’t know.
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This is correct. The current statements from the CDF are a result on the investigation to the LCRW, not the individual communities. There is an Apostolic Visitation of Institutes of Women Religious in the United States, which is a different thing all together.

apostolicvisitation.org/en/index.html
 
jwinch2 said:
No. But it is all I care to do.

I could easily go back and sift through your posts and I seriously considered it. Then I decided that it was really not worth my time. Anyone who doubts the veracity of my claim can click your profile and track down every one of your posts and decide for themselves.
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Sounds like a witch hunt. Glad you didn’t lower yourself to that level.

It’s too bad you can’t seem to handle a dissenting opinion on this issue without resorting to an ad hominem attack 🤷
 
from the CDF report:While recognizing that this doctrinal Assessment concerns a particular conference of major superiors and therefore does not intend to offer judgment on the faith and life of Women Religious in the member Congregations which belong to that conference, nevertheless the Assessment reveals serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life. On the doctrinal level, this crisis is characterized by a diminution of the fundamental Christological center and focus of religious consecration which leads, in turn, to a loss of a “constant and lively sense of the Church” among some Religious. The current doctrinal Assessment arises out of a sincere concern for the life of faith in some Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. It arises as well from a conviction that the work of any conference of major superiors of women Religious can and should be a fruitful means of addressing the contemporary situation and supporting religious life in its most “radical” sense—that is, in the faith in which it is rooted. According to Canon Law, conferences of major superiors are an expression of the collaboration between the Holy See, Superiors General, and the local Conferences of Bishops in support of consecrated life. The overarching concern of the doctrinal Assessment is, therefore, to assist the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States in implementing an ecclesiology of communion founded on faith in Jesus Christ and the Church as the essential foundation for its important service to religious Communities and to all those in consecrated life.
 
gilliam said:
from the CDF report:While recognizing that this doctrinal Assessment concerns a particular conference of major superiors and therefore does not intend to offer judgment on the faith and life of Women Religious in the member Congregations which belong to that conference, nevertheless the Assessment reveals serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life. On the doctrinal level, this crisis is characterized by a diminution of the fundamental Christological center and focus of religious consecration which leads, in turn, to a loss of a “constant and lively sense of the Church” among some Religious. The current doctrinal Assessment arises out of a sincere concern for the life of faith in some Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. It arises as well from a conviction that the work of any conference of major superiors of women Religious can and should be a fruitful means of addressing the contemporary situation and supporting religious life in its most “radical” sense—that is, in the faith in which it is rooted. According to Canon Law, conferences of major superiors are an expression of the collaboration between the Holy See, Superiors General, and the local Conferences of Bishops in support of consecrated life. The overarching concern of the doctrinal Assessment is, therefore, to assist the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States in implementing an ecclesiology of communion founded on faith in Jesus Christ and the Church as the essential foundation for its important service to religious Communities and to all those in consecrated life.
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There it is in print. It means exactly what it says. Thank you, Gilliam.
 
iloveangels said:
No, no. Lots and lots of misconceptions here.
  1. This latest action only concerns the LCWR which is the conference of orders. It doesn’t concern the orders themselves, which have another structure and approval altogether. This is about the statements that this advisory conference has made in public, and it’s about the organizational alliances that this advisory board has with other sorts of voluntary associations.
  2. The results on the orders themselves has not yet been published. We don’t know if any of these congregations will be shut down or silenced yet. Some could; but maybe not. We just don’t know.
  3. There is a huge difference between the different kinds of religious organizations that exist. Orders are far different from congregations, for example. There are CONGREGATIONS of Franciscan-flavored sisters who are NOT anything like the Poor Clares, which is the second ORDER of the original Franciscan family. They’re all in the family, but with different canonical structures. I know it’s confusing and most Catholics don’t know about this, but it matters A LOT.
  4. Most of these dissenting organizations are not ORDERS, but CONGREGATIONS and INSTITUTES. They’re canonically different.
  5. You can’t just jump from one congregation to another without actually leaving one canonically and entering the novitiate of the other. It takes years and you have to be approved again. Likewise, you can’t transfer from an order to a congregation or vice versa, and so on all the way down the line. It’s a very time-consuming process and you can always be denied.
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Yes, I’m aware of all that. The point I was making (and that you agree with 😉 ) is that what happens to this umbrella organization may or may not affect the groups under it. Then within the individual order/congregations/etc. not every person has to make the same decision.

Farther up this thread is an example of a few sisters who did leave one dissenting group and were invited into a different diocese to try and start a new congregation there. It can be done, even if it is difficult.

The Church as a whole does not want to just shut down order (short for all the various flavors) and send the women out to fend for themselves. They will work with each sister or groups of sisters to make sure they have a home if it comes to suppressing an order.
 
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