Vatican visitation of nuns in America

[Shoshana]

These things happen on occasion for the reason you state.

The seminaries in the United States had a visitation a couple of years ago. Now its the sisters turn.

It also did not help that some groups of sisters seem to have lost their orders charism and are starting to embrace environmentalism and eastern healing practices such as reki.

Not only sisters…It is too bad they don’t vist local monasteries, spiritual centers, etc who really get into New Age and steering our good Catholics away.

They will have a lot to answer for…

 

[Formosus]

Is there some generally accepted idea of why the visitation was initiated?

Again, my concern here is that to a layman outsider, Catholics want to be Catholic, and ensuring that various Catholic groups are Catholic groups is a good thing not a bad thing.

If you go to Burger King, you don’t want to find a Big Mac on your plate.

To be quite honest, I wouldn’t mind that lol…

But yeah there is a lot of fuss over this visitation. It is my view that if these sisters are fully Catholic, then they really have nothing to worry over.

 

[bigquests]

Promoting good stewardship would be good but some have let it go to far and it has split over into the new age. I encountered a group that spoke about “mother Gaia”.

Serious support of the environment is–pardon the expression -going viral among religious communities --the Stanbrook Abbey in the UK moving in to a LEEDS (strict new environmental building codes) new abbey; communities turning their land into rising organic crops and gardens, including the Trappist nuns in Iowa, down to many cloistered monasteries raising their own organic food.

guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/30/stanbrook-abbey-eco-friendly-nuns

Here is a link to the interview with Archbishop Tobin, the new Secy of the Congregations for Institutes for Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic LIfe, who replaced Archbishop Rode:

ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/vatican-must-hear-anger-and-hurt-american-nuns-official-says

Here is a quote from one part of that interviews: Tobin’s answers are in** bold.**

Q: Is it therefore too early to talk about what the end-game might be?

A : Yes, although I can say that I would be very surprised if anybody would purport to give any punitive or overly prescriptive norms as a result of this visitation. If the visitors, in dialogue with the sisters, have identified some specific issues that need to be dealt with, okay. But forcing people into habits or something like that? That’s not what this is about.

There’s another side to this, which is that if anybody needed to be convinced of the complexity of the United States, just do an apostolic visit! There are stereotypes of Americans in the air sometimes, and there’s a risk of falling victim to those stereotypes among people who don’t know the country.

Q: In other words, this visitation could be a learning experience for Rome as well?

A: Sure, that’s what I’m saying.

Q: You don’t anticipate that the visitation is going to trigger an earthquake in women’s religious life in America?

A: No, I don’t. I think that would be really disrespectful of what women religious in America have accomplished. Anyway, earthquakes in religious life generally don’t work out very well. Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuits, for example, and in retrospect that wasn’t a very good idea!

Q: We’re not likely to see anything like that?

A: No.