"We Did What The Church Asked Us To Do"

[anode]

…the title of a terrific piece in a recent NCR, which I read online:

ncronline.org/news/women/we-did-what-church-asked-us-do?nocache=1#comment-51311

This article gives a detailed outline of the various instructions from Rome to women’s religious institutes regarding their modernization. What I didn’t realize was how extensively Pope Pius XII was involved in initiating this. One tends to think that all of this started with Vat II. Wrong. Puis XII was a brilliant man. In 1950, he perceived the problem with all the archaic statutes in women’s orders especially, and he delivered detailed orders and instructions to religious orders to update and get rid of the nonessential. This included a huge meeting in Rome over 12 days, and apparently involved 4000 superiors (that must have been an interesting sight!) Pius also blamed the archaic restrictions on religious life for the ‘alarming’ decline in religious vocations after WWII. So the decline actually antedated the council.

This article describes all that followed Pius’s initiative in considerable detail. It makes worthwhile reading.

 

[drforjc]

Sorry, but I don’t put much stock in the National Catholic Reporter. This publication frequently opposes authentic Church teaching. No Thanks.

 

[anode]

Sorry, but I don’t put much stock in the National Catholic Reporter. This publication frequently opposes authentic Church teaching. No Thanks.

The point of my mentioning the article is to mention the considerable contribution that Piux XII made towards the updating of women’s religious orders, including specific commentaries on updating their habits and in discontinuing outdated practices. I don’t think that his initiation of this process and his active involvement in getting it going is widely realized.

 

[ack]

I had high hopes for the piece after reading your description of it, but I was disappointed by it.

The message of the article is that congregations are being visited for having made the very changes made by Pope Pius XII. From the article, you would get the impression that the visitation was ordered because the sisters eliminated too many “archaic customs” and are spending too much time helping the poor.

The author also suggests that the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life is unaware of what was ordered 45 years ago, and that the Congregation is incompetent for having ordered the visitation without considering this fact. This scenario does not seem plausible to me – one would think that the worldwide authority on religious life has a broader perspective on this topic than one sister from one community does.