UNITED STATES
New Yorker
Posted by Amy Davidson
American nuns are sending two leaders of their main organization to Rome—on a mission, not a pilgrimage. Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and Sister Janet Mock, the group’s executive director, want to meet with a cardinal and an archbishop to ask why their group is being disciplined as the result of a harsh “assessment” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and, more extraordinarily, to object to the Vatican’s findings.
The assessment had talked darkly about “radical feminist” influences and “a distorted ecclesiological vision,” by which the Vatican seemed to mean, mostly, that the nuns were not listening enough to bishops. Strikingly, the problem wasn’t just the things that they were saying, but what they weren’t saying—that they weren’t fervent enough advocates for the bishops’ positions on issues like gay marriage and contraception. (See Margaret Talbot’s Daily Comment for an example.) It was, as I wrote when it was issued a month and a half ago, part of a broader war on nuns on the part of the Church in America, or rather on the part of the Church’s leadership; the women, it turned out, had a great deal of sympathy within local parishes, where people held prayer vigils and told the nuns that they were on their side.
But it was hard to tell what that support was worth: Where are you left when the Church to which you have given your life says that your work isn’t good—that its whole direction is wrong? Their position is a vulnerable one, to say the least. For many of the nuns, the past few weeks seem to have been a hard time, and even a lonely one. When the board of the L.C.W.R. finally met this week in Washington, Sister Pat Farrell said, in an interview today with the National Catholic Reporter, “There was an overall mood of really serious, prayerful reflection, I would say—a gamut of emotions of ups and downs. But I would say that the major thing is that it was a real consolation for all of us to finally be together in one place and to be able to process some of the feelings around this … to finally be able to talk about that face to face.”
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