The Rebel Nuns, the Cardinal and a Showdown with the Vatican

By Tom Kington
The Guardian
June 9, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/09/vatican-showdown-america-liberal-nuns

Cardinal William Levada, centre, will meet with Sister Pat Farrell in Rome. Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti

She is the American nun who after 15 years spent working with war refugees in El Salvador now leads the majority of the 57,000 Catholic sisters in the US. He is the American cardinal who marched in San Francisco protesting against gay marriage and was accused of turning a blind eye to paedophile priests before he took over the Vatican's doctrinal office, the modern version of the Inquisition.

On Tuesday, Pat Farrell and William Levada will clash in Rome at the climax of a raging row over what Catholicism means for women. It will be a confrontation that pits America's increasingly independent and broad-minded nuns against the Vatican's male guardians of the faith. "Pat Farrell knows it will be daunting, but she sees the importance of this meeting for the whole Catholic community," said her spokeswoman, Sister Annmarie Sanders.

The showdown follows the claim by Levada's department that Farrell's Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella organisation for most US orders, has been promoting "radical feminism" and glossing over the Vatican's hard line on gay marriage and abortion.

To set the sisters straight, Levada plans to send an archbishop to rewrite the group's statute and institute re-education programmes to combat heterodox thinking. The reaction from Farrell, the group's president, was swift, denouncing the Vatican move as causing "pain and scandal". "We're all hurt by this," she told the National Catholic Reporter.

"Nuns accusing the Vatican of causing scandal is nothing short of incredible," said US priest Father Jim Martin, who organised a Twitter drive defending the sisters. The Levada report follows an "apostolic visitation" to US orders to check on nuns' "quality of life".

"A lot of nuns are now in their 70s and it is demoralising to them that the Vatican should be asking them how often they pray. It's like investigating your grandmother," said Martin. As American Catholicism recovered from paedophile scandals that scared off believers and crippled the church with lawsuits, nuns were "the glue that keeps the church together in the US", he said.

Americans have been quick to back the nuns with protest vigils outside churches and a 50,000-strong petition, while seven groups of US Franciscan friars denounced the Vatican crackdown as "excessive". "The support has shown the sisters are valued in ways they didn't even know," said Sanders.

But few expect Farrell, who will be accompanied by the leadership conference's executive director, Sister Janet Mock, to change Levada's mind. "Nuns are lay people. They take vows of poverty and chastity, but they are not ordained, which is why they have no power," said Kenneth Briggs, author of Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns. "They are between a rock and a hard place." A Vatican spokesman insisted that Rome was merely helping the nuns. "It's not a standoff," he said.

Farrell will report back to the leadership conference assembly in August and has not ruled out severing ties between the group and Rome. "The option is always there," said Farrell, who is a member of the Sisters of St Francis in Iowa, an order founded in Germany in 1864 to care for orphans and the elderly.

Levada, a former archbishop of San Francisco, has shrugged off doubts about his record over catching abusive priests to become head of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, making him the most powerful American at the Vatican. He has a habit of rapping nuns' knuckles. Last week the congregation condemned Sister Margaret Farley, a professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Yale University, for a book in which she approved of gay marriage and divorce and praised female masturbation. The Vatican said the book treated Catholic doctrine "as one opinion among others", and took issue with Farley's claim that "self-pleasuring" could help marriages, calling it instead a "gravely disordered action".

"It has become abundantly clear that, particularly in matters related to the pelvic zone, the hierarchy is not interested in exploring questions or engaging in dialogue," columnist Jamie Manson wrote in the National Catholic Reporter. On Thursday, the 1,500-strong Catholic Theological Society of America also backed Farley against the Vatican.

The Vatican's crackdown has a whiff of politics, since many sisters backed Barack Obama's healthcare plan in the face of opposition from bishops over measures on contraception.

There were 185,000 nuns in the US in 1965 and conservative orders say the dramatic drop in numbers since is due to the move away from hardline Catholicism. Conservative orders make up about 20% of nuns in America, are more likely to live in convents and wear habits, and are not members of the leadership conference. "The Nashville Dominicans tend to be the model conservative group held up to show how bad the liberals are," said Briggs. The conflict between liberals and the Vatican has built up since the mid-1960s Second Vatican Council, which handed nuns new freedoms.

"Many nuns stopped wearing habits and moved out of their convents, going into new professions instead of just teaching and working in hospitals," said Briggs. "The Vatican handed them freedom, they took it, but then the boys in the office noticed."