UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Eugene Cullen Kennedy | May. 14, 2014 Bulletins from the Human Side
With the apparent relish associated with autocratic triumph, Cardinal Gerhard Müller of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has “accused U.S. women religious leaders of not abiding by a reform agenda the Vatican imposed on their leadership organization following a doctrinal assessment of the group.”
The self-righteousness that rose like mist from Müller’s torrent of accusations makes one wonder if he has a Bismarck hiding in the high branches of his family tree. NCR described his rant as “the most direct and confrontational language since the Vatican began to rein in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious two years ago.”
You might think that a world bearing the stigmata of war, poverty, plagues, and immeasurable, uncomforted suffering might trouble a high religious leader, but what upsets Cardinal Müller? Why, the speakers these women religious invite to their annual assemblies; the failure to have counterpoint views when the women are, as he intimates, preaching heresy; and, specifically, their bestowing their 2014 Outstanding Leadership Award to a Fordham theologian, Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, who (and you can’t make this up) was “criticized by the Bishops of the United States because of the gravity of the doctrinal errors in that theologian’s writings.” Müller seems unaware of how fully and professionally Johnson defended her work while some of the bishops most critical of her got indigestion from trying to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Wondering aloud if the leadership conference has “the ability truly to sentire cum ecclesia,” a classic bureaucratic phrase that, like snow, covers everything when officious Vatican investigators indict theologians without any real evidence, means, “to feel with the church.” The problem the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is addressing is, of course, how to feel with the suffering world, the beat of whose breaking heart cannot be heard in the vaulted tunnels of heresy hunters.
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