Scottish Catholic Observer

The US nuns association rebuked by the Vatican has committed to hold talks with the bishops appointed to overhaul the organisation but said it would not ‘compromise its mission.’

The leaders of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) met this week with Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle, who is in charge of reforming the group. Prior to the meeting, Sr Pat Farrell, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), called a Vatican assessment charging the sisters with tolerating dissent a ‘misrepresentation,’ adding that the 900 women who attended the group’s national assembly in St Louis last week were open to discussion with three bishops appointed by the Vatican to bring them into line.

“The officers will proceed with these discussions as long as possible but will reconsider if LCWR is forced to compromise the integrity of its mission,” Sr Farrell said.

Ongoing progress

The LCWR represents about 80 per cent of the 57,000 Roman Catholic nuns in the US.  The St Louis meeting was the group’s first national gathering since a Vatican review concluded the sisters had ‘serious doctrinal problems’ and promoted ‘radical feminist themes’ that undermined Catholic teaching on issues like priesthood, birth control, homosexuality and abortion. Sr Farrell acknowledged the nuns’ plan going forward was vague, but noted the process was to last five years and had only just started.

“Dialogue on doctrine is not going to be our starting point,” Sr Farrell said. “Our starting point will be about our own life and about our understanding of religious life, and the [Vatican] document’s, in our view, misrepresentation of that, and we will see how it unfolds from there.”

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Archbishop Robert Carlson of St Louis had welcomed the group to his city last week and spoke highly of the dedication and work of the nation’s women religious. He urged the assembly’s participants to have a prayerful discussion of the critical assessment of their organisation issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“I pray that the dialogue between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and LCWR is not politicised but worked out within a community of faith,” he said.  “As people of faith… we have some lessons to look back upon.”

He made reference to the First Council of Jerusalem where Sts Peter and Paul engaged in a dispute over circumcision.

“They managed to work out things then and I pray that you will resolve things now,” he added.

Vatican findings

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith undertook the assessment of the group in 2008, following years of complaints from theological conservatives that the American nuns’ group had become secular and political while abandoning traditional faith.

Vatican investigators praised the nuns’ humanitarian work, but said the conference had ‘serious doctrinal problems.’ Archbishop Sartain has been appointed to oversee a full-scale reform of the conference, including rewriting the groups’s statutes, reviewing its plans and programmes, approving assembly speakers and ensuring the group properly follows Catholic ritual.

One criticism focused on the speakers the nuns had at annual meetings. The keynote address this year was from a woman who described herself as a futurist who leads a movement called ‘conscious evolution.’

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