UNITED STATES
Crisis Magazine
ANNE HENDERSHOTT
In a news story that received little media attention last year, LifesiteNews.com and Breitbart, reported that the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation awarded the National Catholic Reporter a $2.3 million grant to provide positive publicity for the work that is being done by Catholic women religious. It was a noble goal that emerged from Conrad Hilton’s experiences having been taught by faithful nuns during his childhood. Keeping with his wishes to provide for the nuns that helped to shape him, the Hilton Foundation has long supported women religious through its Conrad Hilton Fund for Sisters—a foundation that has been funded with nearly $200 million and has made almost 10,000 grants to various religious communities over the past 26 years.
But, Conrad Hilton could not have predicted that his foundation would one day be helping to fuel the animosities between the Magisterium and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) by funding a newspaper which has had a long history of attacking individual bishops, and criticizing the teachings of the Church. Recalling the faithful women religious of his youth who taught him to love and serve God, it is unlikely that Hilton would have wanted his money to support the kinds of attacks on the bishops—and the teachings of the Catholic Church itself—that the National Catholic Reporter is now engaged in. This new Hilton-funded initiative has effectively purchased positive publicity for the nuns—at the same time the bishops’ are attempting to bring the LCWR closer to the heart of the Church through the doctrinal assessment they have been conducting since 2009.
Defending against such a suggestion, Brad Myers, senior program officer, was quoted in the article published in LifeSiteNews as claiming that the Hilton Foundation “does not take a position on the controversy between the Vatican and the leadership conference.” Myers published a policy paper in February, 2013, indicating that the grant was not related to the current issues related to the doctrinal assessment of the LCWR.
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