“A girl has legs to walk beyond the kitchen; a girl has eyes to see beyond the village; a girl has energy to fetch more than firewood; a girl has the ability to carry more than wood.”

So declares a Kenyan teenager at the beginning of the new short film “School of My Dreams.” She is a student at the Daraja Academy, a boarding secondary school for girls that welcomed its first class in February 2009. The school is located four hours northwest of Nairobi in the valley of Mount Kenya, also known as the Mountain of God. The campus is surrounded by traditional Maasai and Turkana villages.

“School of My Dreams” is a follow-up to the earlier short film “Girls of Daraja,” both of which were directed and produced by Emmy-winning filmmaker Barbara Rick through her 501(c)(3) documentary nonprofit Out of The Blue Films, Inc. Rick’s husband, accomplished cameraman Jim Anderson, served as cinematographer on both films. Out of the Blue is dedicated to socially conscious filmmaking and exceptional storytelling that explores, articulates and celebrates humanity.

If Rick’s name sounds familiar to some progressive Catholics, it may be because she also directed and produced “In Good Conscience: Sister Jeannine Gramick’s Journey of Faith.” The 2004 feature documented the life of Sr. Jeannine Gramick and her quest to dialogue with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who in 1999, as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, silenced Gramick for her work building bridges between the Roman Catholic church and gays and lesbians.

In her two most recent films, Rick again focuses bridge-builders. “Daraja” is Swahili for “bridge,” and the academy’s founders, Jason and Jenni Doherty, see the school as a connector that links “who the girls are now to who they can become.”

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While all of the students accepted to Daraja rank among the highest in their primary schools and exhibit leadership qualities, they also come from abject poverty, sometimes going days without food and living in deplorable conditions. Many are orphans, victims of AIDS, and survivors of domestic abuse and sexual abuse.

“It is as if they were standing on the other side of a river. They wanted to be on the other side, but they just didn’t have access,” Jason Doherty said. “We’re not just giving these girls their education; we’re giving them their access. How they cross that bridge is up to them.”

For every student, access begins with basic needs like uniforms, notebooks, pens and pencils. Like most other boarding school students, they live in shared dorms and enjoy three meals per day, health care and counseling. Daraja liberates these young women of the basic barriers of poverty so they can focus on their academic and personal potential.

More than 140 million children around the globe lack access to secondary school because their families cannot bear the financial burden. Not surprisingly, girls make up the majority of this population, and many of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. Daraja is one of the only free secondary boarding schools in Kenya.

Doherty began traveling to Africa with his family in the 1980s. “It was in Africa that I learned that I loved education,” he says in “The Girls of Daraja.” “Seeing that hunger and that need for education was inspiring, but also worrisome, because at that time I knew there was no free secondary school” for the poorest students.

While teaching in California, Doherty met and married Jenni, who shared his dream of moving to Africa to start a school. Daraja Academy is the first project of the Carr Educational Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to creating sustainable educational models in struggling communities.

Though Jason serves as principal and Jenni is the administrative director, all other staff members are native Kenyans. The teachers, who are both female and male, were educated at Kenyan universities.

In February 2009, the academy welcomed its first class of 26 girls chosen from a pool of 100 applicants. Currently, 128 students are enrolled in Daraja, representing 30 of Kenya’s 42 tribes, many of which have historically been in conflict. They are “brought together by love,” says one student, and taught “to live in peace.”

Daraja is equally committed to a respectful treatment of the land. Sustainable environmental practices are a priority for the school. Students are shown techniques for not wearing out the soil, how to compost, and how to produce a bounty of food. Animal conservation is also an important topic in this place, where the rich and varied wildlife population has been decimated by habitat loss and poaching.

One of the funders of the school is the Do A Little foundation, created by author and philanthropist Deborah Santana. Named after a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Do A Little was founded on the principle that women are powerful and strong leaders and is devoted to helping support women’s health, education and happiness around the globe. Santana was also the executive producer of both “The Girls of Daraja” and “School of My Dreams.”

A commitment to women’s empowerment is evident in the school’s curriculum. In addition to traditional courses in English, geography, chemistry and government, all girls take a class called WISH, which stand for Women of Integrity, Strength, and Hope. In these sessions, they are given the skills essential for leadership. The girls, many of whom are quite shy, learn posture, public speaking skills and, most importantly, confidence.

“What is integrity?” a teacher asks in one scene.

“A state of being whole and not divided,” one student answers, peering up from a dictionary.

“Completeness,” another students chimes in.

“Unbroken,” another girl says.

While the girls speak of a variety of careers that interest them, from teaching to dentistry, many aim to pursue medicine and law in the hope of ending the oppression faced by women and girls in their country and globally.

“Girls are considered inferior, not worthy of education,” one girl says. “In my tribe, they treat girls like nonsense.”

Most of these students were raised to believe women should not speak in front of men. “I learned that I have a voice, and people have to listen to my opinions,” another student says in “School of My Dreams.”

According to the Daraja website, a 30-year study by the U.S. Institute of Food and Nutrition has demonstrated that women’s education is the single most important factor to combating levels of hunger and malnutrition in the developing world. And a girl who receives secondary and higher education beyond grade 7 has, on average, 2.2 fewer children.

Though Rick’s subject matter in these films is not tied directly to religious topics, I viewed both pieces with the knowledge that Kenya is an overwhelmingly Christian nation, with one-third of the population being Roman Catholic.

Both “The Girls of Daraja” and “School of My Dreams” are moving testimonies to why it is so important for church teaching to evolve beyond the idea that a person’s anatomy dictates what his or her role must be in both church and society.

While the current pope and his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, assert that women are of equal worth and dignity to men, they also believe the differences in the physical makeup of male and female bodies were reflections of the different roles, purposes, strengths and weaknesses God intended for us.

The female anatomy, the popes insist, dictates that a woman’s primary role in church and society is to be a nurturing mother. This is not simply a metaphor. It is declaration of the nature and purpose of women’s very beings, and it is one of the fundamental principles behind the Roman Catholic church’s continued exclusion of women from ordained ministry.

The exclusion of women from the leadership in the church and the development of doctrine reinforce the deleterious ideas with which women, like the girls of Daraja, have been raised: Women’s voices are not to be listened to, and their opinions are of no consequence.

“I feel that and believe that I am a source of power in my society and in my country,” says one girl in “The School of My Dreams.”

Through education, empowerment, and physical and emotional support, Daraja Academy is working to undo the harmful effects of the traditions — Christian, tribal or both — that have constantly told these girls that their anatomies limit their capacities to serve, lead and influence their communities.

Rick’s films capture powerfully the impact true equality and women’s empowerment can have on hunger, poverty and the health of children and families. Although each film is only 15 minutes in length, both pieces manage to compellingly chronicle the girls’ realizations that their bodies do not dictate who they are, what they have to offer, and how they might change the world.

“Educate a girl, educate a family, educate the world,” is phrase used often at Daraja Academy. With a little hope, one day, these girls will educate the church, too.

“The Girls of Daraja” can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube. A trailer for “The School of My Dreams” is also currently available. The films are on the film festival circuit, but they will be broadcast nationally on Link TV (DISH Network 9410 and DirecTV 375) at 7 p.m. Eastern time June 20.

[Jamie L. Manson received her Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, where she studied Catholic theology and sexual ethics. Her NCR columns have won numerous awards, most recently second prize for Commentary of the Year from Religion Newswriters (RNA).]

Editor’s note: We can send you an email alert every time Jamie Manson’s column, “Grace on the Margins,” is posted to NCRonline.org. Go to this page and follow directions: Email alert sign-up.

The more something changes, the more it stays the same. It’s a cliché, yes, but it seems to be an increasingly apt one to apply to the situation between women religious and the Vatican.

For those watching the situation unfold since April 2012, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith mandated that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) be reformed by three U.S. bishops, this week promised to offer some explanations about where the new pope stands on the issue. Pope Francis even met with members of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), a group of nearly 2,000 leaders of women religious throughout the world who have been meeting in Rome all week.

There have been high hopes for Pope Francis among those left spiritually bruised by the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI. Francis paid his own hotel bill after the conclave, took the bus with the rest of the bishops, refused to move into the papal apartment, claimed to want a “poor church,” and celebrated Holy Thursday at a juvenile detention facility where he washed the feet of 10 men and two women.

But a month after his election, a fly got caught in the balm Francis was pouring over the church’s body. LCWR leaders were informed in a meeting with the doctrinal congregation’s lead cleric, Archbishop Gerhard Müller, that the new pope had reaffirmed the mandated reform of the their organization.

Many Catholics who support both the LCWR and the new pope were at a loss to understand the news. Some imagined Francis simply wasn’t up to speed about the injustices behind the mandate. Speculation ran high that Müller hadn’t even spoken to Francis about the issue in any depth and that, somehow, Müller was speaking on behalf of Francis without the new pope’s approval.

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There was hope this week that all this conjecture was accurate when Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Religious, told the sisters at the UISG meeting that the doctrinal congregation made its fateful decision without his knowledge and that it caused him “much pain.”

Less than a day later after his stunning admission, Cardinal Braz de Aviz was apparently taken to the doctrinal congregation’s woodshed. The Vatican quickly released a statement claiming that the media (namely, the report in NCR) had misinterpreted Braz de Aviz’s words and that Braz de Aviz and Müller “reaffirmed their common commitment to the renewal of Religious Life, and particularly to the Doctrinal Assessment of the LCWR and the program of reform it requires, in accordance with the wishes of the Holy Father.”

The statement made two realities clear. First, as has typically been the case throughout the church’s history, the doctrinal congregation wields more power than any other congregation in the Curia. Second, Francis is more familiar with the saga between the doctrinal congregation and LCWR than some had hoped.

In a press conference the following day, Braz de Aviz claimed not to have seen this statement from the Vatican and affirmed NCR‘s report as “precise.” He said the only idea that got lost in translation was his explanation of authority.

Braz de Aviz went on to reassert what Pope Francis had said earlier in the day about authority and obedience during his speech to the UISG.

“Christ and the church. The two have to be together. For some people, Christ is fine, but the church isn’t. You can’t separate the two,” the cardinal told the press.

Braz de Aviz was echoing Francis’ statement to women religious: “It is an absurd dichotomy to think of living with Jesus but without the church, of following Jesus outside of the church, of loving Jesus without loving the church.”

Francis has offered this idea more than once over the last few weeks, but when directed at women religious, as it was on Wednesday, it takes on a particular weight.

At the UISG meeting the previous day, Congregation of Jesus Sr. Martha Zechmeister, an Austrian professor of systematic theology, told the gathering of 800 women superiors, “Religious obedience ultimately can only respond to God’s authority. In the traditional language, fulfilling the will of God is the only legitimate reason for religious obedience.”

It is a sentiment we’ve heard often since the doctrinal congregation’s crackdown on LCWR, and one for which the new pope apparently has little sympathy. Francis makes it clear that it is impossible to follow Jesus and not follow the church. In Francis’ eyes, it seems, to love and obey God is to love and obey the church.

Though Francis was the first pope to meet with the UISG, those who expected a dialogue with the new pontiff were likely disappointed. Francis offered a 15-minute reflection on religious life, then shook hands and exchanged brief pleasantries with the UISG’s executive board and staff.

As NCR‘s Joshua J. McElwee reported from Rome, Francis’ speech “focused on three themes, telling the sister leaders to keep their lives centered on Christ, to think of authority in terms of service, and that they must hold a ‘feeling with the church that finds its filial expression in fidelity to the magisterium.’ “

In other words, the way to be a true daughter of the church is to be faithful and obedient to the teachings of the pope and bishops.

With ideas that are no different from those of Pope John Paul II and Benedict, Francis told the sisters they should accept a “fertile chastity” because women religious are “mothers” who “generate spiritual children in the church.”

The new pope maintained his and his predecessors’ belief in the “special” (but not equal) role of women in the church, telling the sisters that without them, the church “would be missing maternity, affection, tenderness.” He went on to tell them to put themselves “in an attitude of adoration and service.”

If there is a point on which both Francis and the sisters agree, it is the importance of “touching the flesh of the poor Christ in the humble, the poor, the sick, and in children.”

But Francis does not seem to understand that it is precisely because women religious regularly touch that wounded body of Christ that they have such rich theological imaginations and a longing to delve into the spiritual questions of our time. Their intensely sacramental lives of service help clarify their priorities in their pursuits of justice and mercy.

All that women religious have done — the work they have committed to, the leadership style they have developed and the theologians they invite to their meetings — has been inspired by their ministry to the broken body of Christ. What Francis and the doctrinal congregation may interpret as a “deviation from doctrine” or a “failure to obey” are really just the fruits of women religious fulfilling their vocation as a prophetic life form.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Vatican is punishing women religious for failing to strictly adhere to doctrines that they have had no voice in developing and no role in shaping — precisely because they are women.

The look and feel of the papacy may be changing under Francis, but the fundamental understanding magisterium’s authority and the requirement that the women obey the men, I’m afraid, will continue to stay the same.

[Jamie L. Manson received her Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, where she studied Catholic theology and sexual ethics. Her NCR columns have won numerous awards, most recently second prize for Commentary of the Year from Religion Newswriters (RNA).]

Editor’s note: We can send you an email alert every time Jamie Manson’s column, “Grace on the Margins,” is posted to NCRonline.org. Go to this page and follow directions: Email alert sign-up.

In the six weeks since Pope Francis’ election, those who have followed him in the media have been treated to a series of tantalizing headlines about his promising views on women.

The wave of excitement began during Holy Week, when Francis washed the feet of two women (and 10 men) and followed this tradition-breaking act a week later with a sermon that stressed the “special role” of women in the church.

And earlier this week, the Francis-induced spiritual high continued to soar with the rumor that Francis would be handing women a record number of positions in the Holy See.

But there has been sobering news, too. Last week, we learned that the new pope will move forward with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s mandate on Leadership Conference of Women Religious. As many will remember, last year, the doctrinal congregation accused LCWR of “a prevalence of certain radical feminist themes” and doing little to further the hierarchy’s teachings against contraception, marriage equality and abortion.

So where does Francis really stand on women? Last week’s publication of the English translation of On Heaven and Earth offers some illuminating clues. Originally published in 2010, On Heaven and Earth is essentially a series of conversations between then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio and Argentine Rabbi Abraham Skorka on issues both contemporary (like globalization and same-sex marriage) and eternal (like the devil and death).

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Each topic is given its own chapter. Chapter 13 is titled simply, “On Women.”

Since Francis’ comments on women in this chapter run just shy of 400 words, I have included the full text below in block quotes. (In the interest of space and focus, I am not including Rabbi Skorka’s ideas.) Although I have broken up his statement to offer commentary on specific ideas, Francis’ words are presented in the same order in which they appear in the book.

In Catholicism, for example, many women lead the liturgy of the word, but do not exercise the priesthood, because in Christianity the High Priest is Jesus, a male. In the theologically grounded tradition the priesthood passes through man.

Women can’t be priests, Francis argues, because their anatomies do not match that of Jesus. In this quote and throughout his comments on women, Francis echoes an ancient idea that was thoroughly developed and articulated by Pope John Paul II in his 1988 apostolic letter* “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women” (Mulieris Dignitatem).

John Paul II believed that while women were of equal worth and dignity to men, the differences in the physical makeup of male and female bodies were reflections of the different roles, purposes, strengths and weaknesses God intended for us. Men and women were designed to complement each other, which is why their genders must dictate their distinct roles in both church and society. Ultimately, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, John Paul II believed anatomy is destiny. And Francis seems to agree.

The woman has another function in Christianity, reflected in the figure of Mary. It is the figure that embraces society, the figure that contains it, the mother of the community. The woman has the gift of maternity, of tenderness; if all these riches are not integrated, a religious community not only transforms into a chauvinist society, but also into one that is austere, hard and hardly sacred. The fact that a woman cannot exercise the priesthood does not make her less than the male.

Here Francis is evoking John Paul II’s notion of the “feminine genius,” which argues that women have a natural, unique capacity to offer tenderness and nurture to the community. This is the reason Francis, in his highly touted post-Holy Week sermon, spoke about women’s “special role” in the church. But special is not equal, which is why women cannot be priests.

It seems outside the imaginations of Francis and John Paul II that a male could offer nurture or tenderness or women could bring strength and leadership to the church. Our anatomies decide the nature of the gifts we can and cannot provide to the community.

Moreover, in our understanding, the Virgin Mary is greater than the apostles. According to a monk from the second century, there are three feminine dimensions among Christians: Mary as Mother of the Lord, the Church and the Soul. The feminine presence in the Church has not been emphasized much, because the temptation of chauvinism has not allowed for the place that belongs to the women of the community to be made very visible.

For a second and third time, Francis invokes Mary, the mother of Jesus, who according to Catholic doctrine remained a virgin until her death. Again we see the influence of John Paul II, who believed there are two dimensions to a woman’s vocation: physical and spiritual motherhood and virginity for the sake of the kingdom.

It is somewhat telling that Francis reaches back to the ideas of a second-century monk to explain the three feminine dimensions of Christianity rather than lifting up the rich images of the sacred feminine that have emerged in Catholic scholarship and spirituality in more recent centuries. He does recognize that chauvinistic tendencies have obscured women’s rightful place in the church. Of course, women’s rightful place in the church seems limited to some variation of mother or perpetual virgin.

Catholics, when we speak of the Church, we do so in feminine terms. Christ is betrothed to the Church, a woman. The place where it receives the most attacks, where it receives the most punches, is always the most important. The enemy of human nature — Satan — hits hardest where there is more salvation, more transmission of life, and the woman — as an existential place — has proven to be the most attacked in history. She has been the object of use, of profit, of slavery, and was relegated to the background; but in the Scriptures we have cases of heroic women that have transmitted to us what God thinks about them, like Ruth, Judith …

Here, Francis seems to be exploring the deeper meanings behind the traditional practice of symbolically identifying the church as a woman. Women and the church have endured similar experiences of power and victimhood throughout history, Francis argues: Both are great givers of life, and both have been violated and misused.

I wonder if Francis understands the negative effects the limits placed on women’s roles in the church have had on the dignity of women both inside and outside the walls of the church? Although the magisterium insists women have a “special role,” the sad truth is that they still have no decision-making authority in the institutional church and no power to lead the community in sacramental celebrations. Women didn’t even have a voice in the creation of notion of “feminine genius” that John Paul II and his two successors have promulgated.

Women may be valued for their maternal instincts, but ultimately it is the male hierarchy who defines and controls their role in the church. Like his predecessors, Francis doesn’t seem to understand how the strict limits the hierarchy has placed on women’s power inside the church has helped reinforce the powerlessness that women suffer in society.

What I would like to add is that feminism, as a unique philosophy, does not do any favors to those that it claims to represent, for it puts women on the level of a vindictive battle, and a woman is much more than that. The feminist campaign of the ’20s achieved what they wanted and it is over, but a constant feminist philosophy does not give women the dignity that they deserve. As a caricature, I would say that it runs the risk of becoming chauvinism with skirts.

Francis, like John Paul II and countless critics of feminism from the past century, employs the same old misrepresentation of feminism as a belligerent imitation of male domination. (“Chauvinism” is the translation of Francis’ word machismo.) Apparently Francis believes feminists should have been satisfied when they achieved the right to vote in the 1920s. (Is he aware of the irony that women, by virtue of their anatomies, still have yet to achieve any approximation of voting rights in the Roman Catholic church?)

In a world where women account for 70 percent of the global poor, half of all pregnant women lack adequate prenatal care, and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate population is made up of women, Pope Francis wants to insist that any further fight for equal treatment under the law and equal standing in society should be understood as women trying — like vindictive macho men in female drag — to insist on their superiority over men.

If feminism is such a failure, what will, at long last, defeat all of the injustices that ail women in our world? Given all he has said in this interview, I’m sure Pope Francis would agree with John Paul II, who wrote, “the true genius of women,” that innate, unending female drive toward care-giving and mothering, will “overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.”

And, after all, who are chauvinists in skirts to challenge the opinions of men in long, flowing robes?

*An earlier version of this column misidentified the type of document.

[Jamie L. Manson received her Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, where she studied Catholic theology and sexual ethics. Her NCR columns have won numerous awards, most recently second prize for Commentary of the Year from Religion Newswriters (RNA).]

Editor’s note: We can send you an email alert every time Jamie Manson’s column, “Grace on the Margins,” is posted to NCRonline.org. Go to this page and follow directions: Email alert sign-up.

The prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in a Saturday address in Houston called for a “culture of communion” and the continued path toward reunification.

“Christ’s prayer ‘that they all might be one’ underscores the imperative of seeking full visible unity among Christians,” Archbishop Gerhard Muller told a symposium marking the first anniversary of the Catholic church’s U.S. ordinariate for former Anglicans.

The Houston-based Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, headed by Msgr. Jeffrey Steenson, sponsored the symposium with the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

Sessions, which were held in Houston at the archdiocese’s St. Mary Seminary, explored the ecclesiology, evangelizing and liturgical missions of personal ordinariates created by the Vatican for former Anglican groups and clergy seeking to become Catholic.

While fully Catholic, the groups in an ordinariate retain aspects of their Anglican heritage and traditions. Similar to dioceses, though national in scope, ordinariates were authorized by Pope Benedict XVI in a 2009 apostolic constitution, “Anglicanorum coetibus.”

“The Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter serves this vision of unity by making it possible for groups of Anglicans to enter into communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony,” Muller said in his keynote address.

“It can certainly be said that, in creating this new structure, the Holy Father was responding to a movement of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit that draws the disciples of the Lord together, fashioning them into the ecclesial body of Christ,” he added.

Muller’s attendance marked his first official visit to the United States since his appointment as prefect in July 2012. His message hit on Vatican themes of Christian unity and the new evangelization.

The first ordinariate was established in England and Wales in 2011, then in the United States and Canada in January 2012, and in Australia last June.

“Last year, Cardinal William Levada, my predecessor as prefect … told the clergy of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham (in England) that ‘Anglicanorum coetibus’ was very much ‘the pope’s project,’” the archbishop said. “I have come to understand how true that is. You are very much in his thoughts and prayers.”

In attendance were dozens of parishioners from Houston’s Our Lady of Walsingham Catholic Church, located a few minutes’ drive from St. Mary Seminary. The parish is the seat of the ordinariate; it was established in 1984 as an Anglican-use parish under a pastoral provision of the Blessed John Paul II.

 Muller noted that the ordinariate leadership has a “delicate but all-important task to both preserve the integrity of your parish communities and, at the same time, help your people integrate into the larger Catholic community.” This he said, creates a culture of communion — “communion with the bishops of the church, communion with the local diocese and parishes, communion with the Catholic faithful, and bonds of charity and friendship with those still separated from the church.”

The Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter includes 30 priests — all former Anglicans who have completed an approved formation program — and about 1,600 people in 36 communities across the United States and Canada, most of whom became Catholic within the past year.

Muller acknowledged that for some, the path to full communion with the Catholic Church has not been easy.

“I am well aware that many of you have experienced conflict and division in the years leading up to your decision to seek full communion with the Catholic church,” he said. “We must be reflective about these experiences, discerning carefully that they do not overly influence our attitudes toward ecclesiastical authority or church life.

“It takes a great deal of courage to be Catholic and so I say to you: Be courageous,” he continued. “Be courageous in maintaining the vibrancy and orthodoxy of your faith in the Catholic church. Your loyalty to the Holy Father and your commitment to seeking the truth has brought you this far and will sustain you, and will also serve as a powerful encouragement to those ‘born’ into the Catholic Church to rediscover her beauty and the consistency of her teaching. Your ‘youthful enthusiasm’ is a great gift.”

He urged the former Anglicans to “be courageous pioneers of communion, placing the diversity of your gifts at the service of the universal church.”

“The distinctiveness of your traditions and manner of prayer and worship are no obstacle to true unity in the church,” he said. “But courage in maintaining these traditions also recognizes that, for them to be a true enrichment to Catholic life, you will need to win the trust and confidence of the local Catholic community.”

Muller suggested that “a robust engagement with the pastoral and charitable initiatives of your Catholic and Anglican neighbors will not only redound to the glory of God and actually strengthen your ordinariate parish, but provides an example of diversity grounded in the unity of faith which furthers the new evangelization.”

Other speakers included Steenson; Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston; Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, ecclesiastical delegate for the U.S. ordinariate; Msgr. Steven Lopes, a San Francisco priest on staff at the doctrinal congregation and secretary to the commission preparing liturgies for the ordinariates worldwide; and Bishop Kevin Vann of Orange, Calif., ecclesiastical adviser for the Catholic church’s pastoral provision which since 1980 has allowed married Episcopal priests to become ordained diocesan Catholic priests.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles, a joint reporting project by NCR and GlobalPost.com, examining the background and the principle players in the Vatican’s investigations of U.S. women religious.

VATICAN CITY  — Franciscan Sr. Pat Farrell and three other sisters crossed St. Peter’s Square through the fabled white columns, paused for a security check and entered the rust-colored Palace of the Holy Office.

It was April 18, 2012, and on entering the palazzo, they were aware of its history, that in this same building nearly 400 years earlier Galileo had been condemned as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition for arguing that the Earth orbits around the sun.

Today, the palazzo houses the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that enforces adherence to church teaching. As president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Farrell and her executive colleagues had an appointment with the prefect, Cardinal William Levada, about the congregation’s investigation of their group.

They were walking into what Fr. Hans Küng, the internationally renowned theologian who has had his own battles in the palazzo, calls “a new Inquisition.” (See related story.)

The sisters were accused of undermining church moral teaching by promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” To many sisters, the congregation’s action is a turn toward the past, causing a climate of fear and a chill wind reaching into their lives.

The Vatican wants control of LCWR, an association of 1,500 superiors, representing 80 percent of American sisters, most long active in the front lines of social justice.

The main leadership council of American sisters embraced the Second Vatican Council’s social justice Gospel, which has taken sisters to some of the poorest corners of the world to work with politically oppressed people, particularly in Latin America. But a stark drama of attrition has unfolded as the Vatican II generation reaches an eclipse. Since 1965, the number of American sisters has dropped by more than two-thirds, from 181,241 to 54,000 today.

In contrast, the rate of women joining religious orders has surged in Korea, South Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Caribbean. Nowhere has the increase been more pronounced than in India. Five of the 10 largest religious institutes of women have headquarters in India, where only 1.6 percent of the population is Catholic.

“While India has nearly 50 million fewer Catholics than the United States does, it has over 30,000 more women religious,” wrote Jeff Ziegler in Catholic World Report.

The Vatican crackdown of LCWR has exposed a schizophrenic church. Interviews with missionary sisters in Rome, from India and other countries, register a deep fault line between cardinals immune from punishment, and sisters who work in poor regions with some of the world’s most beleaguered people. Religious sisters from other parts of the world view LCWR’s conflict with foreboding. How far Pope Benedict XVI goes in imposing a disciplinary culture, policing obedience over sisters, is an urgent issue to many of these women — and one sure to color this pope’s place in history.

The doctrinal assessment delivered by Levada was an intervention plan; he appointed Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle to approve speakers for LCWR gatherings and overhaul its statutes. “You can impose silence, but that doesn’t change anyone’s thinking,” Farrell reflected several months later at the convent in Dubuque, Iowa, where she lives.

“This is about the Vatican II church, how we have come to live collegially with participatory decision-making,” Farrell explained. “When I entered in 1965 we studied and prayed with [the Vatican II] documents, implementing new charters. … We’re in a line of continuity with the early history of our communities, assessing unmet needs, going to the margins to help the homeless, people with AIDS, victims of torture and sexual trafficking.”

“When Vatican II requested nuns to search their history, Rome believed in a mythology of plaster statue women,” said Syracuse University Professor Margaret Susan Thompson, a historian of women religious. “They found instead nuns who took the job literally, and became controversial for doing so.”

The leadership conference endorsed women’s ordination in 1977 — 17 years before Pope John Paul II reinforced the church’s ban on it with the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. Farrell says LCWR has not campaigned for women’s ordination. Nor has it endorsed abortion. The doctrinal congregation’s demand that the leaders speak out against abortion and gay rights is a battle over conscience, forcing words into superiors’ mouths.

“These women are really rooted in Christ and committed to the poor,” said Sr. Nzenzili Lucie Mboma, executive director of Service of Documentation and Study on Global Mission in Rome. A Congolese member of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, Mboma had two friends murdered in political violence in the 1960s, during her novice years. “It is painful to see the Vatican carrying on these kinds of things,” she said.

“In certain parts of the church we have an us-versus-them mentality,” said Fr. Míceál O’Neill, an Irish Carmelite prior in Rome with background as a missionary in Peru. “ ‘Us’ is religious, and ‘them’ is officers of the Holy See.”

“We have a church that is doctrinally conservative and pastorally liberal,” O’Neill said. “The Vatican is trying to assert control, ‘we are in charge.’ … Many people are saying the two churches are not coming together.”

“There is a fundamental problem of honesty.”

Farrell, 65, came of age in Iowa in the heady years of Vatican II. She joined the Franciscans at 18, and in her 30s worked with Mexicans in San Antonio. She moved to Chile in 1980 during the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Disappearances were common. “It was routine for police to torture people in the first 72 hours,” she said. Demonstrations were banned, yet protests were the only way to put a spotlight on abductions when lives were at stake.

She joined “lightning demonstrations,” unfurling banners of the anti-torture protest movement in congested traffic, spreading leaflets that gave people information on the missing, who were airbrushed out of news reports. At one point she was arrested, with 100 other people, but coverage in a growing clandestine media saw them released the same day.

In 1986 she moved to El Salvador with a handful of sisters to help people reeling from a grisly civil war with U.S. military support of the Salvadoran government. Farrell spent her first weeks sleeping at night in a church sacristy, getting to know people, and eventually moving into a sprawling refugee camp, living with villagers displaced by military bombings. American sisters were a nonviolent presence, giving thin cover to locals.

“We learned never to leave the road because any area off defined footpaths could have land mines,” she explained. “I remember walking down one long hill with trembling knees to meet a group of soldiers who entered the camp. Part of our role as internationals in the camp was to keep the military out and I was on my way down to ask them to leave. That time they did, thank God.”

Religious processions common to Latin America took on heightened meaning. For a newly repopulated community to show up en masse, with banners of saints and the Virgin Mary, conveyed “a political statement,” Farrell said: “We are not afraid. We have a right to be here. Our faith continues to be a source of strength to us.”

In 2005 Farrell returned to her Dubuque convent. Elected to the LCWR board several years later, she was midway through her one-year term as president when LCWR leaders made their annual trip to Rome in 2012 to update church officials on their work. With Farrell were Dominican Sr. Mary Hughes, past president; president-elect Franciscan Sr. Florence Deacon, and Janet Mock, the executive director and a Sister of St. Joseph of Baden, Pa.

Before their appointment in the Palace of the Holy Office, they held an hour of silent prayer in a Carmelite center.

The sisters had met once with the doctrinal congregation’s investigator, Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, but had not seen his report. The sisters were expecting some conclusion to Blair’s inquiry but had no indication about what it would entail. Blair was not in the meeting that day. They were to meet with Levada, who was about to turn 76 and retire to his native California.

After a cordial greeting, Levada read aloud an eight-page, single-spaced assessment that his office was just posting to the Internet. The assessment accused the sisters of “corporate dissent” on homosexuality and failure to speak out on abortion. The assessment also castigated LCWR for ties to NETWORK, a Washington-based Catholic lobbying group that supported the Affordable Care Act, and the Resource Center for Religious Institutes, a group in Silver Spring, Md., that gives religious orders canon law guidance on property issues.

Leaving the Holy Office, Farrell felt numb. “It was in the press before we had time to brief our members,” she recalled.

“The reaction of rank-and-file sisters was anger. Now there is a stage of deep sadness and concern for the climate in the church and the misrepresentation of religious life,” she said.

A darkly ironic twist involves the doctrinal congregation’s handling of the clerical sexual abuse crisis. The congregation has processed 3,000 cases of priests who have been laicized for abusing youngsters. Several hundred are reportedly pending.

Yet those procedures, which Benedict, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, put in place as prefect in 2001, have a large loophole. The office has not judged bishops and cardinals whose negligence in recycling abusers caused the crisis.

The most glaring example is Cardinal Bernard Law, whose soft-glove treatment of pedophiles ignited the Boston scandal. He resigned as archbishop in 2002 and in 2004 he was named pastor of a great Roman basilica, Santa Maria Maggiore, with a $10,000 per month salary and a highly influential role in choosing new American bishops.

Law was a driving force behind a preliminary investigation of all American religious orders of women, according to several sources interviewed here, and a May 15 report by Robert Mickens, the respected Vatican correspondent for the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet. Law, who has not spoken to the media in a decade, refused an interview request. But Cardinal Franc Rodé, 78, retired prefect of the congregation that oversees religious orders, confirmed Law’s role. In a wide-ranging interview at his residence in the Palace of the Holy Office, Rodé said, “It was the American milieu in the Roman Curia that suggested it.”

The “apostolic visitation” of all but the cloistered communities of U.S. women religious was the initial phase. The doctrinal congregation’s aggressive investigation of the main leadership group soon followed.

“Some people say this is an attempt to divert attention from the abuse crisis, like politicians do,” a missionary sister from a developing country with her order in Rome, said of the doctrinal congregation’s investigation. She asked that her name not be used because the order depends on donations from U.S. Catholics channeled through dioceses.

“The Vatican is trying to assert control, to say, ‘We are in charge,’ “ she continued. “This envisions a different church from Vatican II. Many people are saying that the two churches are not coming together.”

LCWR has indeed pushed the envelope by giving forums to theologians who have questioned celibacy and the evolution of religious life. As liberal theologians clamor for change, LCWR has collided with the doctrinal office over freedom of conscience, a core principle of Vatican II.

Rodé, as prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, ordered the 2009 visitation of American sister communities. He told Vatican Radio of his concern for “a certain secular mentality … in these religious families and perhaps also a certain ‘feminist’ spirit.”

Rodé was also prompted by a 2008 conference he attended on religious life at Stonehill College near Boston. Dominican Sr. Elizabeth McDonough, a canon lawyer, accused LCWR of creating “global-feminist-operated business corporations” and “controlling all structures and resources.”

“I’m unaware of any such facts that would back up that claim. It sounds like a sweeping indictment of the direction many orders have taken which the hierarchy found offensive or disloyal, summed up in the ‘radical feminism’ catch phrase,” said Kenneth A. Briggs, author of Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.

“Most orders were scrounging to come up with funds to support retired sisters, often selling off property that belonged to them to do so. It seems clear to me that the aim of the Stonehill meeting was to paint a picture of disobedience as a pretext for a crackdown,” Briggs said.

Rodé in an interview brushed off suggestions that the apostolic visitation was unfair.

Rodé had requested $1.3 million from religious communities and bishops to cover travel and other expenses for the visitation, which he appointed Mother Mary Clare Millea, superior general of Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to carry out.

The funding request raised eyebrows among many missionary orders.

“Why would you want to pay them to investigate you?” asked one of the missionary sisters in Rome.

The study by Millea has not been made public.

“Vatican II was the most important event that changed the Catholic church,” said Sr. Nzenzili Lucie Mboma. “Jesus was a carpenter. He didn’t build cells, but windows to see every culture.”

She paused. “Why is this investigation happening?”

Also in this series: German theologian Hans Küng still resists the ‘Roman Inquisition’

Coming in this series: Next: The bishops and cardinals who are investigating the sisters have poor records on sex abuse cases.

[Jason Berry, author of Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, writes from New Orleans. Research for this series has been funded by a Knight Grant for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. ]