Surrexit Christus Vere!Two items of note concerning the upcoming doctrinal investigation into the Leadership Council of Women Religious (LCWR), about which I posted earlier this week:
1. Jack Smith, Editor of The Catholic Key and its excellent blog, sets the standard, IMHO, for solid Catholic investigative reporting and commentary. He has an insightful post on just why the Vatican is compelled to give these sisters what Vatican II called for-- the throwing open of the windows to let in the fresh air. Although this time the fresh air is actually fresh-- instead of the odor of compromise, look for the breath of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth.
The Key links to a PDF document of the keynote address of the 2007 LCWR Annual Assembly in Kansas City. It discusses four options for the future of LCWR communities. It is a long document, but if you wish to understand the mindset of the dissenting religious communities, it is an essential read.
It acknowledges demographic realities facing these orders, and lays out four possible courses of action (or inaction). They are described differently, but in a nutshell they are as follows: 1) dying out (by default or intent); 2) returning to orthodoxy (which, while sneered at by the speaker, is acknowledged to actually work to cause a congregation to flourish); 3) reveling in heresy and acting without regard to the Church while clinging to a persecution complex; and 4) staying inside the Church and trying to get the "oppressors" to compromise the Catholic Faith and to join you in misery (an option labelled euphemistically as "reconciliation").
The speaker chooses option 4, speaks lovingly of option 3, understands option 1, and sneers at option 2. The speech quotes one nun who is living out option 3 as saying "I've... moved beyond Jesus." Perhaps this is why their numbers dwindle.
2. The second item to note out of the announcement by the Holy Office is that this effort will be headed by His Excellency Leonard P. Blair, Bishop of Toledo. Bishop Blair has been rising on the list of rumored candidates for the vacant Archiepiscopal See of Saint Louis. It would indeed be highly ironic, and perhaps a little satisfying, too, if the successor to Archbishop Burke were to be tabbed to carry on the work of ensuring dynamic orthodoxy in the Church's religious orders.
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3 comments:
Everyone should take the time to read all 28 pages of Sr. Laurie Brink's talk.
I read it a little differently than Timman does.
I think the most important thing Laurie tells us is of herself. She tells us she is a woman without any memory of the Church before Vatican II. She honestly admits she has no lived experience of Catholic tradition.
I think part of her message is that when you break tradition as forcefully as we did after Vatican II, the result is that the Laurie
generation inevitably goes
adrift,and starts to wonder "Who is the Church", or "What is the Church", or worse "How can we Be Church" to each other.
In other words,without tradition the Church becomes a subjective accomplishment of our minds. We are put to the task of "imagining Church" or continually re-making the Church because we have decided that it was always really just a put together thing, or a thing put together in 1966.
We have not a clue how to answer our own questions about ecclesiology because we have deliberately rejected any idea of objective truth.
Goodbye Aquinas, hello Derrida!
Still, if you read this work, carefully, you find an implicit critique of the road followed by Sr. Lears and Marek Bozek.
Sr. Brink doesn't make the critique of Sr. Lear's road
forcefully because she is a woman who doesn't believe in roads, or maps. To have a map you must have geography, or objective truth.
She's post-modernist!
Still, NOTA BENE how Sr. Laurie lays out the four options for women religious:
1. Death with Dignity and Grace
2. Acquiescence to Others’ Expectations
3. Sojourning in a New Land not yet Known
4. Reconciliation for the Sake of the Mission
Sr. Lears has chosen option 3. Laurie chooses option 4.
THERE is the buried critique!
The average reader will find a submerged criticism of the
"womenpriests" and the radical schismatics and dissenters.
Sr. Laurie says these folks are "sojourning in a New Land not yet Known."
She says they have gone "beyond Jesus".
IF that's not a good description of all the people calling God "Gaia" then I don't know what is.
Let's take heart. Sr.Brink turns on the brink (I had to say it!) and chooses option 4.
There may be some hope for these women yet. Many of them have already taken the third route. They have gotten "Beyond Jesus",
"Beyond Allah", "Beyond Buddha, and in fact they have gotten beyond everything and started marching deeper into themselves.
Sr. Brink is yet on the brink.
She hasn't dived into the dark hollow of her mind yet. She
is "on the margin".
Still, like Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Connor's WISE BLOOD she has not been able to "get beyond Jesus" no matter how hard she tries.
She is just not able to step off that cliff. Now the question is
will she and her friends step back?
Interesting post and interesting comment. Thanks. :)
I believe it is a mistake to imagine that anything short of direct Divine intervention can bring the "movement" of the liberal-minded Sisters back to the heart of Holy Mother Church. They are gone; they have said "non serviam" and that's that. Period. Having said that, I believe the Vatican Visitation as well as the CDF investigation into the LCWR will serve at least four very significant points. 1) These initiatives provide some sort of encouragement and protection, even if it merely moral and not concrete in any way, for the faithful, holy and truly Catholic Sisters hidden in he ranks of the post-Catholic convents. This was always a concern for Pope John Paul the Great. Most faihtful nuns have quietly survived - without complaining and perhaps without really knowing what was going on, at least at first - as their communities drifted from the Church. We must remember that for a Sister, her very livelihood, access to health care, food, clothing, housing, social network, all rely on remaining in her community today. She has nowhere else to go. The traditional Orders of nuns have no room for retired old Sisters from other groups, her parents are most, likely deceased, etc. etc. At lweast these Vatican initiatives tell her the Church is aware of her and loves her for her fidelity. In reality, that's too little too late, but it is what it is. 2) It puts the regular Catholic-in-the-pew on the alert. Many of us would never have thought to question the wisdom or veracity behind something served up by the nuns. This alerts all of us to their heterodoxy and thus begins to put some limits on the amount of damage these post-Catholic nuns can do on the faith of the faithful. Prior to this, one would be regarded as neanderthal to question any of the Sisters' initiatives. 3) It informs today's young women, unambiguously, of the Church's negative regard for some of these Congregations, thereby compromising the ability of these communities ro recruit new members from this JP2 generation. This is importasnt because when un-suspecting womwn join those change-oriented congregations, they slowly become adherenets to their post-Catholic religion. This hastens the natural end to these harmful communities of so-called Sisters. 4) Religious order men, priests and brothers, tend to see themselves as needing always to "catch up" with the Sisters, who have been quicker in the last 40 years to assimilate change. Whatever the Sisters have done (e.g. secular clothing, new age religion, preoccupation with peace and justice as the only authentic form for Christian spirituality; distaste for Catholic devotions, etc., etc.), the men have followed soon afterwards. Perhaps this time, the men will come to a halt, look at where the Sisters are leading them and say, "We don't want to go there." After all, the recent seminary investigation revealed that American religious men provide less orthodox training for their young men than the dioceses do in their seminaries.
I believe these two Vatican initiatives will serve the Church well in these four ways, at the very least, and probably in more ways that I have not yet envisioned.
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