Pope Francis, women and ‘chauvinism with skirts’
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.
Feminists meet opposition from top in Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox faiths
Catholic and Mormon feminists are not the only ones to face opposition from all-male leadership in their respective faiths. Russian Orthodox woman do, too.
Last week, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called feminism “a very dangerous phenomenon,” which could lead to the downfall of the “family and, if you wish, the homeland,” according a Reuters report.
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“Man turns his sight outward, he should work, make money, while a woman is always focused inwards towards her children, her home,” Kirill told a group of Orthodox women. “If this exceptionally important role of a woman is destroyed, everything will be destroyed as a consequence.”
Meanwhile, Catholic Pope Francis has given the go-ahead to continue reforming the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group of American nuns.
Last year, the Vatican committee on doctrine criticized the LCWR “for not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination,” Religion News Service reported, and for promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
On Monday, Francis “reaffirmed the findings” of the Vatican investigation, RNS said, as well as allowing the “program of reform” for LCWR to go forward.
In Mormondom, writer, scholar and blogger Joanna Brooks is exploring the notion of priesthood: What is it? And do Mormon women already hold it?
“I’m convening a study hall. Let’s study on it,” Brooks writes at Feminist Mormon Housewives. “I’ll bring data. You bring data. We [can] reflect, think, discuss, and learn together.”
Earlier this month, a group of devout Latter-day Saints launched a drive to ordain women to the all-male Mormon priesthood. It was met by speeches from LDS leaders emphasizing that men and women have different but equally vital roles.
Peggy Fletcher Stack
A New Inquisition: The Vatican targets US nuns
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. ]
“Nuns on the Bus” Leader Captures True Catholic Spirit
Most politically-attentive Catholics are undoubtedly aware that Cardinal Timothy Dolan delivered the closing benediction at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
Most Catholics, however, have probably not heard of Sister Simone Campbell, the face of the “Nuns on the Bus” tour for social justice this summer and the deliverer of a spirited speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, Sept. 5. While Cardinal Dolan’s benedictions certainly leave a fair amount to be discussed, it was actually Sister Campbell who delivered the more interesting speech, a great deal of which focused on Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
“Paul Ryan claims [his] budget reflects the principles of our shared faith,” Campbell said, as she criticized Ryan’s so-called “The Path to Prosperity” budget, which Ryan has claimed is inspired by his Catholic faith. “But the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that the Ryan budget failed a basic moral test because it would harm families living in poverty.”
While the existence of another prominent American Catholic talking about social issues and morality may seem like nothing new, Sister Campbell and the Nuns on the Bus are actually doing something quite revolutionary. Instead of focusing on abortion or marriage equality, Campbell and her fellow sisters are focusing on poverty.
Shockingly, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby of which Sister Campbell is the executive director, has faced criticism from within the Vatican for promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
“I’ve no idea what they’re talking about,” Sister Simone Campbell said about the criticism in an interview with the BBC. “Our role is to live the gospel with those who live on the margins of our society: the hungry, the poor, the ill. That’s all we do.”
Campbell deserves to be applauded for bringing the focus of American Catholicism back to helping the needy and away from the bizarre obsession over abortion and marriage equality. The New Testament mentions poverty and the idea of helping the poor literally hundreds of times. Nowhere, however, does it mention abortion, and Jesus never once had anything to say about homosexuality.
“I am extremely proud of the Sisters [of Nuns on the Bus] and of NETWORK, because they are not hiding behind the typical political issues such as abortion. They are going back to Jesus’s actual teachings,” Elizabeth Zanghi, FCRH ’15, said. “As a Catholic, I believe poverty should be the most important issue [this election cycle], because it affects the most vulnerable people in America.”
A growing number of American Catholics share Zanghi’s view. According to the Catholic Star Herald, Barack Obama received 54 percent of the Catholic vote in 2008. He received 52 percent of the general vote, meaning that Catholics leaned more Democratic in 2008 than the general public. If Catholics shared the Church leadership’s consumption with opposing marriage equality and banning abortion rights, then surely they would not vote for a candidate who does not also hold those beliefs.
Sister Campbell is capitalizing on that sentiment. Her emphasis on caring for the poor instead of dwelling on legislating morality is one that will connect with most Catholics, and with most Americans.
“We care for the 100 percent, and that will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our nation. All of us drive for faith, family and fairness,” Sister Campbell concluded to a roar of applause.
If Paul Ryan is trying to win votes for the GOP based on his Catholic faith, then he should drop the prattle on sideshow social issues and tax cuts for the super-rich. Instead, he should embrace Sister Campbell’s concern for the poor. American Catholics are moving forward. Will Ryan join them?
Canton Winer, FCRH ’15, is an undeclared major from West Palm Beach, Fla.
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Support the Sisters march set for Seattle
Supporters of America’s embattled Catholic nuns will march on August 12 in Seattle to the cathedral of an Archbishop who has been entrusted by the Rome with making sisters toe the Church’s ideological line.
The Sunday march will follow up on spring demonstrations that brought as many as 160 people to the steps of St. James Cathedral, including lay people and nuns and even a few priests.
Archbishop J. Peter Sartain
Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain and two other male prelates have been given the task of following up on a Vatican report that accused American nuns of embracing “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
The bishops’ charge is to “offer guidance on the application of Church doctrine” to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents 80 percent of America’s 57,000 Catholic nuns.
Organizers of the Seattle march explained its purpose in a web page statement:
“We hope to draw a large crowd to witness the values the sisters stand for, which we stand for as well: Faithful witness to the message of Jesus for compassion, inclusion and respect for all people, dialogue and collaboration between the bishops and the laity; the right to speak, follow our consciences . . .
“This march is about the sisters — because Rome’s action against them seems unfair and misguided.”
The early afternoon march will begin at Louisa Boren Lookout Park, at 15th E. and E. Garfield, and proceed 2.4 miles to St. James Cathedral. It will have followup vehicles for those who tire on the route.
Nationally, America’s nuns have refused to back down, and demonstrations at cathedrals across the country have supported their ministry.
A group called “Nuns on the Bus” traveled across the East to Washington, D.C., in late June, visiting programs that aid the poor and protesting a Republican budget in Congress that would eviscerate major social programs.
It upstaged bishops’ much promoted and politicized “religious liberty” observance aimed at the Obama administration’s contraception requirement in health insurance coverage.
The LCWR is meeting in August to explore how to respond to the Vatican’s “doctrinal assessment.” Its leaders met in June with Sartain and Cardinal William Levada, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrune of the Faith.
Archbishop Sartain has had no contact with leaders of the Seattle demonstrations, nor with local media.
The Vatican is not backing down from its increasingly hard line on such issues as opposition to contraception — although polls show the vast majority of America’s Catholic women use it — as well as abortion and opposition to marriage equality.
It has recently named hard-line doctrinaire bishops in such dioceses as Baltimore, Philadelphia and Denver.
On Friday, it elevated Oakland, Calif., Bishop Salvatore Cordeleone to become the new Archbishop of San Francisco.
Cordeleone was a major organizer of the 2008 campaign for Prop. 8, the California ballot measure that rolled back same-sex marriage in the nation’s largest state. He said at the time that “the ultimate attack of the Evil One is the attack on marriage.”.
In recent months, he has asked members of the Catholic Association for Lesbian and Gay Ministry to take an “oath of personal integrity” to Catholic doctrinal teachings.
Bishop Leonard Blair, Appointed By Vatican To Oversee US Nuns, Says Sisters …
First reported on The National Catholic Reporter
One of the three bishops appointed to oversee the group which represents the majority of U.S. women religious took a hard line Wednesday towards the Vatican’s criticism of the organization, saying the sisters are “promoting, unilaterally…a new kind of theology that is not in accordance with the faith of the church.”
Toledo, Ohio, Bishop Leonard Blair, who was appointed with Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain and Springfield, Ill., Bishop Thomas Paprocki in April to oversee the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) made the comments Wednesday during an extended interview on the popular public radio program “Fresh Air.”
His interview comes a week after LCWR’s president, Sr. Pat Farrell, also appeared on the program, saying that a key question facing the faithful today is “Can you be Catholic and have a questioning mind?”
At points during the interview Wednesday, National Public Radio host Terry Gross played back some of Farrell’s responses from her interview on the show July 17 [4], when the LCWR president directly addressed the Vatican’s condemnation of her organization, which represents some 80 percent of women religious in the U.S.
In a document known as a “doctrinal assessment,” first released April 18, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said there was a “prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” in the group’s programs and ordered it to revise and place itself under the authority of three bishops.
After hearing Farrell’s response from last week to the Vatican’s criticism that LCWR doesn’t focus enough on speaking against abortion, in which the sister said she thought the criticism was “unfair” because the group works on a range of pro-life issues, Blair said Farrell’s answer left him with “great disappointment.”
“No one is questioning the fact that many sisters” are involved in those issues, said Blair. But, quoting Blessed Pope John Paul II, the bishop said that “all other human rights are false and illusory if the right to life…is not defended with maximum determination.”
“One would expect the LCWR to stand up and be counted in upholding this right and working for its defense,” said Blair. “There’s been nothing really said by the leadership conference on this issue.”
At one point during the interview, Blair also specifically mentioned LCWR’s lack of statements regarding opposition to gay marriage, saying that “the defense of the God given institution of marriage as between one man and one woman” is a “great issue of our society today.”
First reported on The National Catholic Reporter
Bishop Explains Vatican’s Criticism Of US Nuns
Four years ago, a Vatican group called “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” began an assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a member organization founded in 1956 that represents 80 percent of Catholic nuns in the United States. The assessment was designed to take a careful look at whether the nuns were acting in accordance with the teachings of the church.
In the assessment, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the leadership conference is undermining Roman Catholic teachings on homosexuality and birth control and promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” It also reprimanded the nuns for hosting speakers who “often contradict or ignore” church teachings and for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.”
Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, is the bishop who assessed the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Along with Archbishop Peter Sartain and Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, he will be working with the nuns of the LCRW to make sure the group is aligned with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The bishops and the nuns’ group leaders were also told to develop material “that provides a deepened understanding of the church’s doctrine of the faith.”
An American Nun Responds To Vatican Criticism
Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the LCWR, talked with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross on July 17. Farrell addressed the major criticisms of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, including the LCWR’s decision to abstain from taking a public position on abortion, contraception and women’s ordination.
Blair tells Fresh Air that the LCWR is “promoting unilaterally new understandings, a new kind of theology, that is not in accordance with the faith of the church.” He says he would like to have a dialogue with the LCWR to “educate and help the sisters appreciate and accept church teaching and to implement it in their discussions, and try to heal some of the questions or concerns they have about these issues.”
Interview Highlights
On the LCWR not taking a hard-line stance on abortion
“I recall something that Pope John Paul II said: He said that all other human rights are false and illusory. If the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and condition of all personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination … to relativize or say, well the right to life of an unborn child is a preoccupation with fetuses or [it is] relative in its importance, I cannot agree with that, and I don’t think that represents the church’s teaching and the focus of our energies in trying to deal with this great moral issue.”
On the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church
“I think that the sexual abuse scandal is a great shadow over the church and over the hierarchy that we have to live with. But we also have to keep going on as a church with integrity. … We certainly have cracked down on sexual abuse and made great strides to understand it and prevent it.”
On the dialogue that the LCWR would like to have with the Vatican
“If by dialogue, they mean that the doctrines of the church are negotiable, and that the bishops represent one position and the LCWR represents another position and somehow we find a middle ground about basic church teaching on faith and morals, then no, I don’t think that’s the dialogue the Holy See would envision. But if it’s a dialogue about how to have the LCWR really educate and help the sisters appreciate and accept church teaching and to implement it in their discussions, and try to heal some of the questions or concerns they have about these issues, that would be the dialogue.”
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On contraception
“We do recognize the validity of natural family planning but not artificial contraception. And admittedly, that involves more of a personal investment as a couple or individual, but that would be based on the moral grounds of what church teaches about marriage and human sexuality.”
On the ordination of women
“The church doesn’t say that the ordination of women is not possible because somehow women are unfit to carry out functions of the priest, but because on the level of sacramental signs, it’s not the choice that our Lord made when it comes to those who act in his very person, as the church’s bridegroom. And you can say that sounds like a lot of poetry or you know, how do we know that’s true, but if you’re a Catholic, this is part of our sacraments and practice for two millennia, and it’s not just an arbitrary decision of male oppression over women.”
On the importance of women in the church
“It’s very important for me to say that the history of religious women in the United States is absolutely outstanding, and that one of the most disconcerting things about recent reports is to suggest that somehow that the bishops or the Holy See are not grateful or supportive for the work of religious women. They have done tremendous work in our country and throughout the world. If anything, part of our concern is precisely for their diminished numbers and their aging population. … We hope there would be revitalization of religious life for women.”
An American Nun Responds To Vatican Criticism
Jul 17, 2012 (Fresh Air from WHYY) — The Vatican recently announced that it would completely make over the Leadership Conference of Women Religious because of its “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” Sister Pat Farrell, who heads the organization, says many of the charges are unsubstantiated.
In April, the Vatican announced that three American bishops (one archbishop and two bishops) would be sent to oversee the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a member organization founded in 1956 that represents 80 percent of Catholic sisters in the United States, to get them to conform with the teachings of the Church.
In its assessment of the group, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the leadership conference is undermining Roman Catholic teachings on homosexuality and birth control and promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” It also reprimanded the nuns for hosting speakers who “often contradict or ignore” church teachings and for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.”
In their own statement, the nuns said the Vatican’s doctrinal assessment of the group was based on “unsubstantiated accusations” and may “compromise” the ability of female nuns to “fulfill their mission.”
“I would say the mandate is more critical of positions we haven’t taken than those we have taken,” says Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the Leadership Conference. “As I read that document, the concern is the issues we tend to be more silent about when the bishops are speaking out very clearly about some things. There are issues about which we think there’s a need for a genuine dialogue, and there doesn’t seem to be a climate of that in the church right now.”
Farrell tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the leadership organization is currently gathering the perspectives of all of its members in preparation for its national assembly in August.
“We’re hoping to come out of that assembly with a much clearer direction about [the Vatican's decision], and that’s when the national board and presidency can proceed,” she says.
Among the options on the table, she says, are fully complying with the mandate, not complying with the mandate or seeing if the Vatican will negotiate with them.
“In my mind, [I want] to see if we can somehow, in a spirited, nonviolent strategizing, look for maybe a third way that refuses to define the mandate and the issues in such black and white terms,” she says.
Interview Highlights
On questioning doctrine within the Catholic Church
“The question is, ‘Can you be Catholic and have a questioning mind?’ That’s what we’re asking. … I think one of our deepest hopes is that in the way we manage the balancing beam in the position we’re in, if we can make any headways in helping to create a safe and respectful environment where church leaders along with rank-and-file members can raise questions openly and search for truth freely, with very complex and swiftly changing issues in our day, that would be our hope. But the climate is not there. And this mandate coming from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith putting us in a position of being under the control of certain bishops, that is not a dialogue. If anything, it appears to be shutting down dialogue.”
On their options
“We’re not talking about the risk of excommunication or leaving the church. That’s not our intent. We’re talking about the Vatican’s dealing with a national organization, not with specific religious congregations or individual religious. The one and only underlying option for us is to respond with integrity with however we proceed. That is our absolute bottom line in this. Some of the options would be to just comply with the mandate that’s been given to us. Or to say we can’t comply with this and see what the Vatican does with that. Or to remove ourselves and form a separate organization.”
On the criticism from the Vatican regarding human sexuality
“We have been, in good faith, raising concerns about some of the church’s teachings on sexuality. The problem being that the teaching and interpretation of the faith can’t remain static and really needs to be reformulated, rethought in light of the world we live in. And new questions and new realities [need to be addressed] as they arise. And if those issues become points of conflict, it’s because Women Religious stand in very close proximity to people at the margins, to people with very painful, difficult situations in their lives. That is our gift to the church. Our gift to the church is to be with those who have been made poorer, with those on the margins. Questions there are much less black and white because human realities are much less black and white. That’s where we spend our days.”
On roles within the church
“A bishop, for instance, can’t be on the street working with the homeless. He has other tasks. But we can be. So if there is a climate of open and trusting and adequate dialogue among us, we can bring together some of those conversations, and that’s what I hope we can help develop in a deeper way.”
On women’s ordination
“The position we took in favor of women’s ordination in 1977 was before there was a Vatican letter saying that there is a definitive church position against the ordination of women. So it’s interesting to me that the document [just released by the church] goes back 30 years to talk about our position on the ordination of women. There has, in fact, been an official opinion from the church that that topic should not be discussed. When that declaration came out, the response of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious was to call for a nationwide time of prayer and fasting for all Women Religious in response to that. Because our deep desire for places of leadership of women in the church be open. It remains a desire. Since then, the Leadership Conference has not spoken publicly about the ordination of women. Imposing a silence doesn’t necessarily change people’s thinking, but we are in a position to continue to be very concerned that the position of women in the church be recognized.”
On the phrase “radical feminist themes”
“Sincerely, what I hear in the phrasing … is fear — a fear of women’s positions in the church. Now, that’s just my interpretation. I have no idea what was in the mind of the congregation, of the doctrine of the faith, when they wrote that. But women theologians around the world have been seriously looking at the question of: How have the church’s interpretations of how we talk about God, interpret Scripture, organize life in the church — how have they been tainted by a culture that minimizes the value and the place of women?”
On abortion
“I think the criticism of what we’re not talking about seems to me to be unfair. Because [Women] Religious have clearly given our lives to supporting life, to supporting the dignity of human persons. Our works are very much pro-life. We would question, however, any policy that is more pro-fetus than actually pro-life. If the rights of the unborn trump all of the rights of all of those who are already born, that is a distortion, too — if there’s such an emphasis on that. However, we have sisters who work in right-to-life issues. We also have many, many ministries that support life. We dedicate to our lives to those on the margins of society, many of whom are considered throwaway people: the impaired, the chronically mentally ill, the elderly, the incarcerated, to the people on death row. We have strongly spoken out against the death penalty, against war, hunger. All of those are right-to-life issues. There’s so much being said about abortion that is often phrased in such extreme and such polarizing terms that to choose not to enter into a debate that is so widely covered by other sectors of the Catholic Church — and we have been giving voice to other issues that are less covered but are equally as important.
“Our concern is that right-to-life issues be seen across a whole spectrum and are not narrowly defined. … To single out one right-to-life issue and to say that that’s the only issue that defines Catholic identity, I think, is really a distortion.”
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
An American Nun Responds To Vatican Criticism
Enlarge LCWR
Sister Pat Farrell is the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the vice president of the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque, Iowa.
LCWR
Sister Pat Farrell is the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the vice president of the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque, Iowa.
In April, the Vatican announced that three American bishops (one archbishop and two bishops) would be sent to oversee the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a member organization founded in 1956 that represents 80 percent of Catholic sisters in the United States, to get them to conform with the teachings of the Church.
In its assessment of the group, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the leadership conference is undermining Roman Catholic teachings on homosexuality and birth control and promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” It also reprimanded the nuns for hosting speakers who “often contradict or ignore” church teachings and for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.”
In their own statement, the nuns said the Vatican’s doctrinal assessment of the group was based on “unsubstantiated accusations” and may “compromise” the ability of female nuns to “fulfill their mission.”
Related Stories
“I would say the mandate is more critical of positions we haven’t taken than those we have taken,” says Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the Leadership Conference. “As I read that document, the concern is the issues we tend to be more silent about when the bishops are speaking out very clearly about some things. There are issues about which we think there’s a need for a genuine dialogue, and there doesn’t seem to be a climate of that in the church right now.”
Farrell tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the leadership organization is currently gathering the perspectives of all of its members in preparation for its national assembly in August.
“We’re hoping to come out of that assembly with a much clearer direction about [the Vatican's decision], and that’s when the national board and presidency can proceed,” she says.
Among the options on the table, she says, are fully complying with the mandate, not complying with the mandate or seeing if the Vatican will negotiate with them.
“In my mind, [I want] to see if we can somehow, in a spirited, nonviolent strategizing, look for maybe a third way that refuses to define the mandate and the issues in such black and white terms,” she says.
Interview Highlights
On questioning doctrine within the Catholic Church
“The question is, ‘Can you be Catholic and have a questioning mind?’ That’s what we’re asking. … I think one of our deepest hopes is that in the way we manage the balancing beam in the position we’re in, if we can make any headways in helping to create a safe and respectful environment where church leaders along with rank-and-file members can raise questions openly and search for truth freely, with very complex and swiftly changing issues in our day, that would be our hope. But the climate is not there. And this mandate coming from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith putting us in a position of being under the control of certain bishops, that is not a dialogue. If anything, it appears to be shutting down dialogue.”
On their options
“We’re not talking about the risk of excommunication or leaving the church. That’s not our intent. We’re talking about the Vatican’s dealing with a national organization, not with specific religious congregations or individual religious. The one and only underlying option for us is to respond with integrity with however we proceed. That is our absolute bottom line in this. Some of the options would be to just comply with the mandate that’s been given to us. Or to say we can’t comply with this and see what the Vatican does with that. Or to remove ourselves and form a separate organization.”
And this mandate coming from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith putting us in a position of being under the control of certain bishops, that is not a dialogue. If anything, it appears to be shutting down dialogue.
On the criticism from the Vatican regarding human sexuality
“We have been, in good faith, raising concerns about some of the church’s teachings on sexuality. The problem being that the teaching and interpretation of the faith can’t remain static and really needs to be reformulated, rethought in light of the world we live in. And new questions and new realities [need to be addressed] as they arise. And if those issues become points of conflict, it’s because Women Religious stand in very close proximity to people at the margins, to people with very painful, difficult situations in their lives. That is our gift to the church. Our gift to the church is to be with those who have been made poorer, with those on the margins. Questions there are much less black and white because human realities are much less black and white. That’s where we spend our days.”
On roles within the church
“A bishop, for instance, can’t be on the street working with the homeless. He has other tasks. But we can be. So if there is a climate of open and trusting and adequate dialogue among us, we can bring together some of those conversations, and that’s what I hope we can help develop in a deeper way.”
On women’s ordination
“The position we took in favor of women’s ordination in 1977 was before there was a Vatican letter saying that there is a definitive church position against the ordination of women. So it’s interesting to me that the document [just released by the church] goes back 30 years to talk about our position on the ordination of women. There has, in fact, been an official opinion from the church that that topic should not be discussed. When that declaration came out, the response of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious was to call for a nationwide time of prayer and fasting for all Women Religious in response to that. Because our deep desire for places of leadership of women in the church be open. It remains a desire. Since then, the Leadership Conference has not spoken publicly about the ordination of women. Imposing a silence doesn’t necessarily change people’s thinking, but we are in a position to continue to be very concerned that the position of women in the church be recognized.”
On the phrase “radical feminist themes”
“Sincerely, what I hear in the phrasing … is fear — a fear of women’s positions in the church. Now, that’s just my interpretation. I have no idea what was in the mind of the congregation, of the doctrine of the faith, when they wrote that. But women theologians around the world have been seriously looking at the question of: How have the church’s interpretations of how we talk about God, interpret Scripture, organize life in the church — how have they been tainted by a culture that minimizes the value and the place of women?”
On abortion
Our gift to the church is to be with those who have been made poorer, with those on the margins. Questions there are much less black and white because human realities are much less black and white. That’s where we spend our days.
“I think the criticism of what we’re not talking about seems to me to be unfair. Because [Women] Religious have clearly given our lives to supporting life, to supporting the dignity of human persons. Our works are very much pro-life. We would question, however, any policy that is more pro-fetus than actually pro-life. If the rights of the unborn trump all of the rights of all of those who are already born, that is a distortion, too — if there’s such an emphasis on that. However, we have sisters who work in right-to-life issues. We also have many, many ministries that support life. We dedicate to our lives to those on the margins of society, many of whom are considered throwaway people: the impaired, the chronically mentally ill, the elderly, the incarcerated, to the people on death row. We have strongly spoken out against the death penalty, against war, hunger. All of those are right-to-life issues. There’s so much being said about abortion that is often phrased in such extreme and such polarizing terms that to choose not to enter into a debate that is so widely covered by other sectors of the Catholic Church — and we have been giving voice to other issues that are less covered but are equally as important.
“Our concern is that right-to-life issues be seen across a whole spectrum and are not narrowly defined. … To single out one right-to-life issue and to say that that’s the only issue that defines Catholic identity, I think, is really a distortion.”
Vatican slams the door on women again
Liberal Catholics believe a war on women is being waged not (or not only) by the Republican Party but also by the Vatican. If so, the women lost another battle this week with the pope’s appointment of a new head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the orthodoxy-guarding agency once headed by Pope Benedict XVI. The new prefect of the congregation is Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, and he opposes giving women even third-class status in the clergy.
First some background: In its investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group of nuns, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith raised several concerns. One involved “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” A related complaint was that some leadership conference officers had objected to “the Holy See’s actions regarding the question of women’s ordination.”
It was a reminder that, though many lay Catholics and some theologians favor the ordination of women as priests, the papacy remains set against it. The position of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is that Catholics must show “definitive assent” to Pope John Paul II’s 1994 statement that “the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”
But the pope said “priestly” ordination. The Catholic clergy comprises three orders: bishop, presbyter (or priest) and deacon. For centuries the only deacons were “transitional deacons,” young men ordained as deacons as a steppingstone to ordination as a priest. But after Vatican II the so-called permanent diaconate was restored and married men were ordained to the office. Deacons may not celebrate Mass, but they may baptize and preach and take a secondary role in the sacraments. (The son of some friends of mine was baptized in Washington by a lobbyist who had been ordained to the diaconate.)
Recognizing that female priests were out of the question, at least for the foreseeable future, some Catholics have nurtured the hope that the Vatican would agree to ordain women as deacons. Not only did “deaconesses” exist in the early church but, because deacons don’t celebrate Mass (in which the priest is considered a representation of Christ), there was no theological argument that they be men. Yes, female deacons would have a sort of second-class (or actually third-class) status, but they would be members of the clergy and able to take some of the workload off the shoulders of priests.
But Bishop Mueller will have none of it. In an interview republished by Catholic Online, he said that all three clerical offices — bishop, priest and deacon — are reserved for men. “If the deacon, with the bishop and presbyter, starting from the radical unity of the three degrees of the orders, acts from Christ, head and Spouse of the Church, in favor of the Church, it is obvious that only a man can represent this relation of Christ with the Church.” No women need apply.
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