UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | Apr 17, 2015 |
“Yes, it looks like they backed down,” said a learned nun I know. “But some of us had better not be caught saying so!” So much for the huffing and puffing the Vatican has directed at her and her sisters over the past few years.
In December, an “apostolic visitation” of 350 communities of religious women, undertaken amid charges that they were beset by secularism and feminism, ended with a buss on the cheek for a job well done. And yesterday, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) gave its approval to an anodyne “Joint Final Report on the Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religion (LCWR).
The LCWR, the nuns’ main umbrella body, had come under repeated attack for embracing ideas at odds with fundamentals of the faith. After the roll-out of the “Joint Final Report,” a four-woman delegation from the LCWR spent fifty minutes chatting with Pope Francis.
Over at the Boston Globe‘s Crux, John Allen characteristically minimized the widespread sense that all this was a big deal. “Both the more sweeping investigation of women’s orders and the LCWR investigation were orphans almost as soon as they were born,” he wrote. They’d been pushed “by a handful of well-placed American cardinals in Rome coming to the end of their careers” who “persuaded friends in the right Vatican departments to set the wheels in motion.”
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