ROME
National Catholic Reporter
May. 03, 2012
By John L Allen Jr
Analysis
ROME — At first blush, one compelling frame for the crackdown on the Leadership Conference of Woman Religious would seem to be “Rome vs. America,” and in a sense, that’s perfectly correct. This is, after all, an overhaul of an American body decreed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s powerful theological watchdog agency.
Yet drilling down, the picture becomes more complicated. At least part of the original momentum for the overhaul actually came from America, not Rome, and meanwhile, not everyone in Rome is quite on the same page. …
NCR has learned that during a meeting of Vatican personnel in early 2012 to discuss the LCWR assessment, a senior Vatican diplomat warned that launching a crackdown now might be a bad idea in light of domestic American politics, especially an increasingly nasty campaign season featuring rhetoric about a “war on women.”
According to sources with knowledge of that meeting, officials of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that such concerns were “exaggerated.”
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