UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
BY MARY E. HUNT DECEMBER 18, 2014
The other shoe dropped on December 16, 2014 at a press conference announcing the “final report” on at least one phase of the long-simmering Vatican struggle with U.S. Catholic sisters.
It was not a red Prada slipper, and the devil is still in the details.
Despite herculean efforts to make nice, the 12-page report and its presentation reinforce the Roman Catholic Church’s patriarchal power paradigm. And although many have hailed the report as a sign of the Vatican’s warming toward women, I am not convinced.
Six Years of Scrutiny
The first shoe dropped in 2008 when Cardinal Franc Rodé announced an Apostolic Visitation of active women’s religious communities. The goal of the inquiry—akin to a grand jury— was “to look into the quality of life of apostolic Congregations of women religious in the United States.”
The benign-sounding rhetoric was, to those in the know, an unmistakable signal of disapproval of how women religious were living increasingly self- and community-directed lives.
The Visitation was in no way experienced by the subjects or meant by the perpetrators “to convey the caring support of the Church in respectful, ‘sister-to-sister’ dialogue, as modeled in the Gospel account of the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth” as one “eyebrow-raising paragraph” in the report asserted—this revisionist history is pure fantasy.
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