UNITED STATES
GlobalPost
Jason Berry
Trailed by bitter controversy, a six-year investigation of American nuns ended Tuesday with the release of a Vatican report that praised the religious sisters “for all that they contribute to the church’s evangelizing mission.”
The document released by Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life – a major Vatican office – drew on dozens of interviews in convents and religious houses which disproved allegations that caused Cardinal Franc Rodé, as prefect of the congregation in 2008, to order an investigation into “a certain secular mentality … and perhaps also a certain ‘feminist’ spirit,” as Rodé told Vatican Radio at the time.
One of the more conservative cardinals in the Vatican, Rodé was not at the Tuesday press conference at which his successor, Brazilian Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, struck a tone of harmony with the nuns.
Within the politics of the Roman Curia, Braz de Abriz has also emerged as an ally of Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the American organization representing superiors of 80 percent of the orders of religious sisters. A separate Vatican office, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had imposed an overseer, Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain, the vet the group’s speakers and publications.
“The Vatican realized they messed up this situation and they are trying to mend fences,” Sister Christine Schenk of Cleveland told The GroundTruth Project. …
As the investigation Rodé launched made news, Vatican officials saw the blowback in media coverage which cast the nuns, working on the margins with the poor, confronting cold male bureaucrats in Rome.
Rodé was an unstinting supporter of Father Marcial Maciel, a notorious pedophile and founder of the Legion of Christ, an order enmeshed in lawsuits in America for duplicitous fundraising. …
Cardinal Rodé, in an interview with this writer in his Vatican apartment two years ago, said that the call to investigate had come from Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned as Boston archbishop in 2002 amid the abuse crisis, and soon found redemption in Rome as pastor of a great basilica. The other prelate behind the call, said Rodé, was Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore.
In 2003, Lori approved a $21 million abuse victims settlement involving several priests. Voice of the Faithful criticized him for allowing an accused monsignor to stay in his parish until he resigned, facing 2011 sex harassment allegations from a female church worker.
That double standard in leadership – bishops stained by scandal in the abuse cases, accusing nuns of bad faith – may be at its eclipse.
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