Men Are from Mars

The Economist
August 23, 2013

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/08/americas-catholic-nuns

PROGRESSIVE and socially-engaged nuns, and bishops with a mandate to bring them into line, have promised to avoid name-calling and try harder to understand one another, but it will be a long hard road. That is about the only clear message to emerge from this month's gathering in Florida of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents about 80% of America's Catholic sisters.

It was an unusual sort of meeting. For much of the four-day assembly, around 800 sisters were joined by a tiny handful of men, including Archbishop Peter Sartain who has been put in charge of a Vatican initiative to reform the organization, guide it back into doctrinal orthodoxy and induce it to change the tone of its publications and public statements. His mandate follows a "doctrinal assessment" by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2011 which spoke of "certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith" which had allegedly entered the discourse of the American sisters.

But it was the sisters, not the hierarch, who delivered to the world a report on the outcome of the two sides' deliberations. They said they they had enjoyed a "profound and honest sharing of views" and that "although we remain uncertain as to how our work with the bishop delegates will proceed, we maintain hope that continued conversations of this depth will lead to a resolution of this situation that maintains the integrity of the LCWR and is healthy for the whole church."

Behind these careful and subtle words lies a disconnect in the ways that the estranged parties—the Vatican and the American sisters—see the situation. The Vatican's pronouncements have been couched in the language of a top-down, old-world hierarchy which expects its words to be enforced and obeyed. The LCWR derives its sense of legitimacy from the fact that its members were elected to leadership positions in 330 religious communities, many of them working at the coal-face of social problems like poverty, addiction or clandestine migration.

And in an American context, sisters who "go the places the hierarchs can't go" on the margins of society enjoy far more public acceptance than a male episcopate which has been deeply tainted by child-abuse scandals. So it may not be humanly possible for male bishops to call women religious into line in a scolding way without further undermining their own authority.

Another factor driving the two sides apart is that both are hurting financially. Among many religious orders, there is a high average age and an acute problem over how to offer sisters the barest minimum of security in their final years. But whether they rebel or conform, they won't get much help from the bishops. America's dioceses have never helped religious orders all that much, and these days, many have seen their funds drained by payouts to child abuse victims.

Given that they are used to finding creative ways to survive, the female religious orders may well do better at coping with financial crisis than the church's male hierarchy does. All this makes it very hard for Archbishop Sartain to tell the sisters what to do.