UNITED STATES
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Colleen Carroll Campbell | Posted: Thursday, May 10, 2012
The Vatican called it a reform but it’s actually a “war against nuns,” an unprovoked “crackdown” on the dwindling ranks of America’s 55,000-plus religious sisters by a power-hungry pope and his ungrateful bishops. Rather than thanking the aging sisters for their years of service to the oppressed, the patriarchal Catholic power structure is punishing them by putting their chief umbrella organization into receivership. The goal: Force the good sisters to stop focusing so much on the poor and start fixating on the same petty social issues that preoccupy bishops.
Well, at least that’s what the wire stories say. Complete with photos of sweet-faced young nuns sporting old-fashioned habits as they kneel in communal prayer, most reports about the doctrinal assessment released by the Vatican last month have portrayed its planned reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious as an out-of-the-blue, over-the-top assault on America’s most beloved and uncontroversial Catholics. It has been cast as the equivalent of a bishop excommunicating Mother Teresa because she skipped the March for Life to nurse lepers.
As is often the case in secular press coverage of Catholic matters, though, that isn’t the full story — or even the half of it. For starters, Mother Teresa’s sisters — and most of the religious orders boasting those young, habited nuns typically pictured in articles about this controversy — don’t even belong to the group targeted by the Vatican. The Missionaries of Charity, like several other thriving Catholic religious communities here in the St. Louis area, belong to the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, another, smaller umbrella organization founded two decades ago by American religious sisters voicing the same concerns about the LCWR that the Vatican did last month.
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