Women religious not complying with Vatican study

[James_S_Saint]

No one has said they hate these women…That is your spin

“Actions speak louder than words.”

But enough. Do as you will.

 

[redrosetea]

“We” are to judge “our own actions”

Can you show me where the CC has requested that you or others take these matters into your own heart and hands? If so, I would like to know. As I said, I am not Catholic - yet.

We are to judge all action …That is how we teach our children right from wrong…and this came straight from a deacon

We as lay members of the church have a right to question when a religious directly defies Rome…These women are in positions of teaching …The church must be assured they are teaching pure catholic doctrine and not some stuff that is in direct oppsition to the church

You seem more intent on trying to insult me for trying to be faithful to the magesterium than anything else…I will not respond to you again

 

[Cristiano]

Apparently the U.S. nuns think differently.

Yes, and they are separating themselves from the Church.

 

[grace_singh]

Christ instructs us to rebuke one another in faith if we are going astray :

If your brother sins, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.'If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. (Matthew 18:15-17)

being a Christian means living a disciplined and holy life. this is true in sepcific ways for men and women who have chosen to live as monks or nuns and to be under the authority of a monastic rule. we are not to judge one another, but we are asked to make judgement calls about sinful or rebellious behavior, talk to the person about it, bring it before other Christians, bring it before the church, and then have nothing more to do with that person if after all that the refuse to listen or repent.

it is not wrong to expect a Christian to be answerable to Christian standards, other Christians, and the church. the world tends to shun discipline, but when you’re a Christian, especially a monastic under a rule, discipline is basically what one signs up for. and if the religious do not like that, then they can always opt to leave the community they are in.

 

[James_S_Saint]

If your brother sins, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.'If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. (Matthew 18:15-17)

And is this what has been done?

Have any of you gone to speak with those women? Or are you pre-judging them based on a report (gossiping)?

Just a thought. As I said, perhaps they really are the Devil’s own spawn. Such isn’t my call.

 

[grace_singh]

in the case of such a wide-spread number of communities, a survey would not be inappropriate. it’s not the only way of judging what is being done correctly and what is not, but it is one way of getting information, and many communities are not answering back.

again, if a person does not want his or her life and time and religious activities to be disciplined and subject to church teachings and mandates, it is best that they not sign up to become a Catholic monk or nun.

some religious communities do break with Rome and live and worship independently, but until they do they are still answerable to Rome and to any inqueries or orders there from.

And is this what has been done?

Have any of you gone to speak with those women? Or are you pre-judging them based on a report (gossiping)?

Just a thought. As I said, perhaps they really are the Devil’s own spawn. Such isn’t my call.

 

[mdgspencer]

According to a bishop in charge of this inquiry, three fourths of the orders are complying with this study. The article of the opening post vaguely cites unidentified sources, and it is published by the chief news organ of liberal Catholic dissenters. So it has a vested interest in the failure of this study to produce information on dissent.
Apparently, some of the posters here are unaware of the widespread dissent among some nuns in the West. However, I agree, it is best to assume that people are innocent until shown guilty, and I would be happy to be shown that most orders are loyal to their faith. Hopefully, this study will show the truth in the matter, whatever it will shown to be.

 

[Elizabeth502]

The highlighting responds to some of the comments so far, and also emphaizes some ironies, in my view.

The decisions by congregation leaders not to comply follow nearly two months of intensive discussions both inside and across religious congregations. They follow consultations with civil and canon lawyers, and come in the wake of what some women religious see as widespread support by laity for their church missions.

With about half of the responses from the nation’s 59,000 women religious accounted for, only about one percent answered, as directed, most or all of the questions contained in the study’s working paper, officially called an Instrumentum Laboris, according to one informed source.

By contrast, according to the source, **congregations representing, by far, the greater majority of women religious decided not to comply and answered only a few, or none, of the questions. **Many of the 340 U.S. apostolic congregation heads instead sent letters to Millea stating that what they were sending was what the Vatican was looking for.

…

Part A attempts to collect quantifiable information about such things as membership, numbers, living arrangements, health, and retirement conditions. Part B and Part C (bottom of Part B) aim to gather detailed information about community governance practices, vocation efforts, spiritual and liturgical practices, ministry and finances.

Earlier in the month, apparently after many complaints from women religious, the Vatican withdrew several questions from Part C, involving the individual ages of the women, assets belonging to the congregations, and recent financial statements.

I apologize for insufficient suspiciousness. Sounds pretty routine and harmless to me, in fact, beneficent.
…

“This was a grassroots response,” said another woman religious. “It was not organized. It came out of a widespread sense that the Vatican action was an unjust affront to women religious.”
…

Several women religious said that, in discerning their responses to the questionnaire which they felt were intrusive, there emerged a new sense of identity and resolve. **One said that for years women religious have focused on the needs of others. This time they had to focus on themselves. **

She said women religious have been virtually unanimous in spirit that they have been living out their missions, as directed by the gospels and by the Second Vatican Council, which called upon religious communities to go out in the world to work among the poor and to build more just and peaceful structures.

She explained that in the process church prelates lost the control over women religious congregations they once had. She said many **women religious believe the investigation is part of an effort to regain that control. **

What a concept!

"**Vatican II took us out of the ghettos **and into ecology, feminism and justice in the world," she said. "The Vatican still has a difficult time accepting that."
Some of the women interviewed by NCR cite an irony involved in the investigation. One said that it is “unlikely the Vatican wanted us to come out of this being more confident of our identity as self-defining religious agents, but that is exactly what has happened.”

Another said: "At first, many women were asking, 'How do we respond? Then we were asking, ‘How do we respond faithfully in keeping with our identity?’ And **soon we were asking, ‘What is that identity?’ " **

Still another said that at first when confronted with the questionnaire, many women religious congregation heads felt isolated. But after discussions within their communities and after regional meetings with other women religious and after consultations with their canon lawyers, they overcame the initial sense of isolation and grew in common resolve.

Their identity crisis/crises are the fruit of their own making. Most orders had identities. They chose to reject those identities, particulary *the community dimension *of those identities, and to focus instead (unlike what was highlighted above) on their individual identities. From what I have heard many of them say, as well as what is quoted in this article, as well as what has been published in other articles, the irony is that their prolonged experiment does not seem to have gotten them any closer to finding their “real” identity.

 

[Elizabeth502]

Several women said canon lawyers told the women they were not required to answer all the questions. Religious, unlike bishops, priests and deacons, who make up the clergy, are not officially part of the church’s hierarchical structure. According to this reasoning, women religious are responsible to their congregation leadership and to their constitutions.

That’s a fair point. However, even that does not make them totally independent. They still are organizations operating with the RCC, and representing the RCC. Despite all the political language above and below, they are not theoretically or practically autonomous.

All along, said one woman religious, the challenge has been to respond to the Vatican in a way that breaks a cycle of violence. She said that the women religious communities have attempted to respond by using a language “devoid of the violence” they found in the Vatican questionnaire and within the wider study. She characterized the congregation responses as “creative and affirming,” and part of an effort to set a positive example in “nonviolent resistance.”

“On the one hand we didn’t want to roll over and play dead,” she said. "So the question was, “How do you step outside a violent framework and do something new?’ That was the challenge that emerged.” One congregation, she said, cited a U.S. bishops’ statement concerning domestic abuse in its response letter to Millea. “The point is, there have to be more than two choices: Take the abuse and offer it up, or kill the abuser.”

Women religious, she said, are asking if there is a “Ghandian or Martin Luther King way” to deal with violence they felt is being done to them.

I’m speechless at the metaphors.

At issue, according to several women religious, is the role women religious are to play in the world today. As much as any other element in the church, women religious claim Vatican II’s documents as a call go out in the world, loved and blessed by God, and to serve within it.

Vatican 2 never told you to go out and abandon your original order’s mission.

During the pontificates of Pope John Paul II and Benedict the XVI the hierarchy, many church observers say, has pulled back from these directives, seeing the world as a more hostile environment. They view the church as a bastion of light and love within this world and want the women religious to work more directly from within church structures.

For example, Rodé told NCR senior correspondent John Allen last month that he believes that Vatican II, while designed to generate a moderate reform, instead triggered “the greatest crisis in church history.”

“In the 16th century, during the Reformation, many religious left the church and many convents were closed, but it was geographically limited, more or less to Northern Europe,” he said. “In the French Revolution, there was another catastrophe, but it was limited to France. The crisis after the Second Vatican Council, however, was the first truly global crisis.”

"We’ve paid a very steep price due to a secularized, worldly mentality

," he said.

^^ which women religious had no mandate to join!

I’ve said this on other, similar threads. If you don’t want to be part of the RCC, if you want to be autonomous, the church is not a prison. You’re free to leave. They clearly do not like the basic hierarchical structures of the church but are effectively torturing themselves to stay within it.

 

[DOShea]

The one thing that struck me in the article was that comment about looking for a “Ghandian or Martin Luther King way” to deal with the violence…

First of all, I would expect women religious to be looking for the Jesus Christ “way” of dealing with whatever they are trying to deal with. Second, characterizing a survey, a request for information as “violence?” C’mon, how is a questionnaire asking who you are and what you’re doing as a group or individually “violence?” If that is violence, what is an examination of conscience - terrorism?

Maybe many of them would be better off as secular workers in whatever cause they support, then they wouldn’t be burdened by having to answer questions to the authority that gave them a constitution? Surely the state or the IRS would never ask them any personal questions.

 

[fix]

The vast majority of U.S. women religious are not complying with a Vatican request to answer questions in a document of inquiry that is part of a three-year study of the congregations. Leaders of congregations, instead, are leaving questions unanswered or sending in letters or copies of their communities’ constitutions.

“There’s been almost universal resistance,” said one women religious familiar with the responses compiled by the congregation leaders. “We are saying ‘enough!’ In my 40 years in religious life I have never seen such unanimity.”

I think this response is the reason for the investigation. It shows the nature of the problem very well.

 

[SisterSnowflake]

The one thing that struck me in the article was that comment about looking for a “Ghandian or Martin Luther King way” to deal with the violence…

First of all, I would expect women religious to be looking for the Jesus Christ “way” of dealing with whatever they are trying to deal with. Second, characterizing a survey, a request for information as “violence?” C’mon, how is a questionnaire asking who you are and what you’re doing as a group or individually “violence?” If that is violence, what is an examination of conscience - terrorism?

Maybe many of them would be better off as secular workers in whatever cause they support, then they wouldn’t be burdened by having to answer questions to the authority that gave them a constitution? Surely the state or the IRS would never ask them any personal questions.

to all of your above comments!!

 

[Lutheranteach]

When one asks another questions and the person being questioned isn’t given a clear purpose for the questioning, the person being questioned usually stops answering. No one should be shocked.

 

[Tigg]

Individualism, and no doubt, feminisim, have now replaced the fundamental principles of virtue, not the least of which is obedience and respect for the hierarchy of the Church.

 

[rep140]

When one asks another questions and the person being questioned isn’t given a clear purpose for the questioning, the person being questioned usually stops answering. No one should be shocked.

It was my understanding that the Vatican did not acknowledge who initiated this action and did not say what they would do with the information gathered. The Rome curia have learned little from the priest sex scandal.

I like my priest, like my parish, and believe Catholic theology. I just don’t like the curia.

 

[redrosetea]

When one asks another questions and the person being questioned isn’t given a clear purpose for the questioning, the person being questioned usually stops answering. No one should be shocked.

A religious takes vows of obedience…If they aren’t going to obey they should leave the order

The church isn’t a democracy…It is a theocracy…This is coming from Rome, not from the person down the street

 

[fix]

When one asks another questions and the person being questioned isn’t given a clear purpose for the questioning, the person being questioned usually stops answering. No one should be shocked.

It was my understanding that the Vatican did not acknowledge who initiated this action and did not say what they would do with the information gathered. The Rome curia have learned little from the priest sex scandal.

I like my priest, like my parish, and believe Catholic theology. I just don’t like the curia.

It is said the measure of humility is obedience. The rejection of Church authority is a statement that shows where we stand. No surprises here.

[87](javascriptpenWindow(‘cr/87.htm’) Mindful of Christ’s words to his apostles: “He who hears you, hears me”,49 the faithful receive with docility the teachings and directives that their pastors give them in different forms.

 

[JimG]

Another view of the matter: Pounding the Table.

 

[Havard]

When one asks another questions and the person being questioned isn’t given a clear purpose for the questioning, the person being questioned usually stops answering. No one should be shocked.

Okay, so here’s an official statement, with a key except here:

“For many years this dicastery had been listening to concerns expressed by American Catholics – religious, laity, clergy and hierarchy – about the welfare of religious women and consecrated life in general, and had been considering an Apostolic Visitation as a means to assess and constructively address these concerns. The multitude and complexity of these issues were made clear by speakers and participants at the Symposium on Religious Life at Stonehill College in September 2008.”

• Cardinal Franc Rodé, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life

So let’s examine Cardinal Rodé’s remarks at this Symposium, since he refers to it in his statement:

“Despite this past greatness and present vitality, we know — and it is one of the major reasons we are gathered here today — that all is not well with religious life in America. My remarks today are addressed especially to the active religious…”

“Pope Benedict, speaking to superiors general, said: “In these last years, consecrated life has been re-examined with a more evangelical, ecclesial and apostolic spirit; but we cannot ignore that some concrete choices have not offered to the world the authentic and vivifying face of Christ. In fact, the secularized culture has penetrated the mind and heart of not a few consecrated persons, who understand it as a way to enter modernity and a modality of approach to the contemporary world. As a result, in addition to an undoubted thrust of generosity capable of witness and of total giving, consecrated life today knows the temptation to mediocrity, bourgeois ways and a consumerist mentality…””

“The great lesson I learned from that experience was this: The religious who secularized consecrated life were not doing so for the sake of the faith of the people of God. It was not the good of God’s people that they were seeking. Rather than God’s will, what they were seeking was their own. Religious life, being a gift from the Holy Spirit to the individual religious and the Church, depends especially on fidelity to its origins, fidelity to the founder, fidelity to the particular charism. Fidelity to that charism is essential, for God blesses fidelity while he “opposes the proud.” The complete rupture of some with the past, then, goes against the nature of a religious congregation, and essentially it provokes God’s rejection…”

“In our day the prevailing climate of agnosticism, relativism, and subjectivism is frequently taken as having the kind of normative value that belongs by right to the word of God. We must energetically oppose reformers who contend that the Church must abandon her claims to absolute truth, must allow dissent from her own doctrines, and must be governed according to the principles of liberal democracy. False reforms, I conclude, are those that fail to respect the imperatives of the Gospel and the divinely given traditions and structures of the Church, or which impair ecclesial communion and tend rather toward schism. Would-be reformers often proclaim themselves to be prophets, but show their true colors by their lack of humility, their impatience, and their disregard for the Sacred Scripture and tradition.”

That whole speech can be found here. The bold font is mine, for added emphasis. I think it’s clear what their concern is, they have seen evidence of a systemic problem, so now they are engaging in a visitation to get a clearer picture of it.

 

[Corki]

When one asks another questions and the person being questioned isn’t given a clear purpose for the questioning, the person being questioned usually stops answering. No one should be shocked.

However, the questionairres were step #2 of a three step process which the regligious congregations were aware of. This was the preliminary step before in-person visits. It is not unusual to have such documents be more open-ended and less “clear purposed”. This is a common practice in business audits (not to be confused with the IRS type ) General and even vague questions are asked in order to develop more defined areas to discuss at the in-person stage. To do otherwise is to risk missing information because of narrow questions. The sisters should not have been surprized by this.