UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Eugene Cullen Kennedy | Aug. 15, 2014
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious spent the first day of its annual assembly in Nashville, Tenn., exploring the group’s “contemplative, collaborative process for making decisions,” which we know the Vatican has found troublesome.
This is, in fact, but an example, much as patients use in their search to explain to doctors what is bothering them, of the fundamental conflict between Roman authorities and America’s women religious.
The complaints made against these valiant women by Roman authorities are also illustrations of what bothers these officials about these women that they have not, cannot, or dare not express simply and directly.
That is why the indictments brought against American women religious appear to be a compilation of trivialities about problems, such as with the speakers they invite to their assemblies or those, theologian Sr. Elizabeth Johnson in particular, they honor for their work for the church.
These matters have been raised to an operatic level of complaint — or perhaps we might better say, “irritation” — by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who insisted that the offenses were so grave that he needed to use “blunt” rather than “flowery language” in questioning whether the LCWR leadership was promoting programs “opposed to Christian Revelation.”
It might have been better — and more expressive of his deepest reactions — if Cardinal Müller had simply said, “We just don’t like the way you decide things.” And perhaps he could have added, “We never went along with you women thinking for yourselves, and I’m reasserting our male hierarchical control over you.”
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