BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

A great post by George Weigel that I missed when it first came out. One of the best things about it comes towards the end when the pre-eminent biographer of John Paul II says that "... the Vatican had finally acted, decisively, after three decades of half-hearted (and failed) attempts to achieve some sort of serious conversation with the LCWR about its obvious and multiple breaches of the boundaries of orthodoxy"... And it came about under Benedict XVI...

The Vatican and
the dissident sisterhood

April 23, 2012

In Chariots of Fire, two of the elders of Cambridge University invite the young Jewish runner Harold Abrahams to a formal, black-tie luncheon, during which they try to dissuade the upstart undergraduate from using a professional trainer to prepare for the forthcoming Paris Olympics. Abrahams declines to follow Oxbridge athletic orthodoxy and leaves in something of a huff. The Master of Trinity (brilliantly played by John Gielgud) sighs and says to the Master of Caius, “Another God, another mountaintop.”

It’s a scene worth keeping in mind when parsing the recent Vatican decision to take into a form of ecclesiastical receivership the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella association that represents the majority of American orders of sisters.

On April 18, after years of study, the Holy See appointed Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to oversee the LCWR’s activities, supervise the LCWR’s adherence to the Church’s liturgical norms, review its links to affiliated organizations like the political advocacy group “Network,” and guide a revision of the LCWR’s statutes.

Sartain will be assisted by Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill. (appropriately enough, a veteran ice-hockey goalie used to taking hard shots), and Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo (whose theological analysis of the LCWR’s activities over the past decade shaped the decision to appoint Sartain as the Holy See’s delegate in charge of the LCWR).

That imagery — three men, acting on behalf of a male-dominated Curia, assuming leadership of an organization of women religious — proved irresistible to Vatican critics, eager to drive home the point that the Catholic Church doesn’t care about one half of the human race (as the proprietor of a once-great American newspaper once told his new Rome bureau chief as she was leaving the U.S).

Others were eager to use the Vatican action to prop up crumbling public support for Obamacare: The good sisters of the LCWR supported Obamacare; the aging misogynists at the Vatican whacked the LCWR; see, Obamacare must be right, just, proper, and helpful toward salvation!

The problem with the former criticism, of course, is that the Catholic Church is the greatest educator of women throughout the Third World and the most generous provider of women’s health care in Africa and Asia; there, the Church also works to defend women’s rights within marriage, while its teaching on the dignity of the human person challenges the traditional social and cultural taboos that disempower women.

As for the notion that the Church’s Roman leadership put the clamps on the LCWR because “the Vatican” objects to Obamacare, well, that would be the first European-style welfare-state initiative to which “the Vatican” has objected in living memory.

What both these lines of critique fail to grasp is that the problem posed by many of the sisters within the religious orders that make up the LCWR, and by the LCWR as an organization, is precisely the problem noted by the Master of Trinity: “Another God, another mountaintop.”

The difference is that Harold Abrahams acknowledged his unorthodox views, while the LCWR leadership, to vary the cinematic metaphors, took on the role of Captain Renault, professing itself “shocked, shocked” that anyone could imagine anything doctrinally awry in the organization or its affiliated orders.

A few facts — not an abundant commodity in the early coverage of the controversy — might help clarify both the current situation and the likely next moves in this ecclesiastical drama.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious is a kind of trade association. Its membership is composed of orders (known in Catholic argot as “congregations”) of religious women who take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These women are often called “nuns,” although technically nuns live in cloisters and the LCWR congregations have active, public ministries in education, health care, and social service; thus their members are more properly called “sisters.”

These congregations control billions of dollars of assets, given to them back in the day when the sisters who ran Bing Crosby’s parish school in The Bells of St. Mary’s were the Hollywood idealization of an actual reality.

No more. Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) and the other sisters at the fictional St. Mary’s wore religious habits, lived in a convent, led a rigorous prayer life, taught the catechism without question, eschewed the public eye — and while they may have jousted with male ecclesiastical authorities like Bing Crosby’s Father Chuck O’Malley, it was O’Malley who made the final decisions for the parish and the school, and Bergman and the sisters who obeyed, even if they didn’t like it.

Yet the final scene in the movie has Sister Benedict teaching the somewhat-full-of-himself Father O’Malley a thing or two about faith — a resolution reached and a lesson taught, not by rebellion, but by obedience.

Those days are long gone, and it’s both absurd and dishonest for the media and the Catholic Left to propagate the myth that the 21st-century life of those religious women whose orders are LCWR members is just a modernized version of The Bells of St. Mary’s.


Yes, many sisters continue to do many good works. On the other hand, almost none of the sisters in LCWR congregations wear religious habits; most have long since abandoned convent life for apartments and other domestic arrangements; their spiritual life is more likely to be influenced by the Enneagram and Deepak Chopra than by Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein; their notions of orthodoxy are, to put it gently, innovative; and their relationship to Church authority is best described as one of barely concealed contempt. [Thanks, Mr. Weigel, that is a seemingly obvious reality that has generally been glossed over in all the reportage about these dissident sister, although the contempt comes across in billows of sulphurous smoke in every statement they make and in their actions. For some reason, I find their dissidence is somehow even more obnoxious than those Austrian and German dissident priests.]

Some communities of LWCR sisters no longer participate regularly in the Eucharist, because they cannot abide the “patriarchy” of a male priest-celebrant presiding at Mass. Thus faux Eucharists celebrated by a circle of women are not unknown in these communities.

Even those LCWR-affiliated communities that hold, tenuously, to the normal sacramental life of the Church regularly bend the liturgical norms to the breaking point in order to radically minimize the role of the priest-celebrant; at one such Mass I attended years ago, the priest did virtually nothing except pronounce the words of consecration.

The other fact to be noted about the LCWR congregations — largely unremarked in the Gadarene rush to pit plucky nuns against Neanderthal prelates — is that they’re dying. [I read in one recent report that the median age of these harpie-throwbacks was 68! Natural selection does work in wondrous ways]

The years immediately following the Second Vatican Council saw a mass exodus from American convents; and in the four and a half decades since the Council concluded, American Catholic women’s religious life in the LCWR congregations has suffered various forms of theological, spiritual, and behavioral meltdown.

In the face of those two large truths, young Catholic women have quite sensibly decided that, if they wish to do good works or be political activists while dressing like middle-class professionals and living in apartments, there is little reason to bind themselves, even in an attenuated way, to the classic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — each of which has undergone a radical reinterpretation in the LCWR congregations.

So the LCWR orders are becoming greyer and greyer, to the point where their demise is, from a demographic point of view, merely a matter of time: perhaps a few decades down the road, absent truly radical renewal. {There you are! Darwin's natural selection at work! In this case, 'survival of the fittest' begins with the natural attrition brought about by age. Too bad none of them will ever be the 'Martin/Martina Luther' they each dream to be.] (Meanwhile, the congregations of religious women that have retained the habit, a regular prayer life, and a commitment to Catholic orthodoxy are growing.)

There are more than a few ironies in this particular fire. One of them was pointed out by author Ann Carey in her 1997 book, Sisters in Crisis, which, while based on research in the LCWR archives and authorized by the LCWR, was subsequently denounced by the Conference — a preview of its “shocked, shocked” reaction to the recent Vatican action.

Carey was under no romantic illusions about mid-20th century American religious life when she began her work; by showing that many sisters of the pre–Vatican II decades were poorly educated, poorly formed, and badly overworked.

Carey made clear that genuine reform was essential if the remarkable flourishing of women’s religious life in the United States — something quite without parallel in the world, in terms of numbers — was going to be sustained.

Yet Carey also showed how the “reform” undertaken before, during, and after the Council pulled so hard on the central threads of religious life (and especially on the understanding of the vows) that the entire tapestry unraveled.

Moreover, Carey discovered that the beginnings of this “reform” were largely designed by men: priest-consultants brought in to advise the LCWR’s predecessor organization, address its annual conferences, and help redesign sister-formation programs. Ironically enough, it was men, not liberated women, who charted the path to the radical feminism that eventually led too many LCWR sisters and the LCWR itself into a mental universe unmoored from even the minimal requisites of Christian orthodoxy. [What a great way to describe the unhinged universe of these dissidents! And we are not surprised, are we, that dissident priests instigated them? But I bet the so un-female LCWR sisters - BTW, they couldn't pick a better name whose anagram would not read like 'liquor'??? - are spouting more sulphurous smoke to see that fact pointed out. Hah! They were instigated by males. Not exactly 'radically feminist', are they?]

“Minimal requisites” is no exaggeration. As Bishop Blair’s analysis of the LCWR’s assemblies makes unmistakably clear — and from materials readily available from the LCWR — there is very little in the Creed and the Catechism of the Catholic Church that is not up for grabs in the LCWR’s world: the Trinity; the divinity of Christ; the sacraments; the constitution of the Church as episcopally ordered and governed; the very idea of “doctrine”; the notion of moral absolutes; the nature of marriage; the inalienability of the right to life — Catholic teaching on all of these is not infrequently regarded in the LCWR and among its affiliated orders as impossibly old hat because of that teaching’s alleged linkage to “patriarchy.”

That doctrinal implosion, further influenced by feminist leadership theory of the woolliest sort, set the stage for the tortured re-readings of poverty, chastity, and obedience to be found in the extensive literature that shapes the theological imagination of many of the sisters in LCWR congregations, those congregations’ leadership, and the LCWR itself.

And here is the next, great irony: In their determination to be countercultural, many LCWR-affiliated sisters have become precisely the opposite, parodies of political correctness who embrace every imaginable New Age “spirituality” and march in lockstep with American political progressivism as it has defined itself since the Sixties.

Thus the sisters formed in the LCWR cast of mind are not at all countercultural. In public life, it’s the pro-life cause, which they largely eschew, that is the real counterculture. And in religious life, it’s the dynamic orthodoxy of post–Vatican II, post–John Paul II Catholicism — the Church of the “New Evangelization” — that poses a dramatic and demanding challenge to the soggy “spirituality” of postmodern America.

Many LCWR sisters, for their part, regarded John Paul the Great as a hopeless misogynist and never forgave his 1994 apostolic letter reaffirming that the Church is authorized to ordain only men to the ministerial priesthood.

The Catholic Church that has stood fast against the Obama administration’s encroachments on religious freedom is the real counterculture; the LCWR, for its part, has become very much part of the progressive establishment.

The shock in all this, therefore, is not the shock the LCWR unpersuasively confessed when the Vatican decision to take it into receivership was made public. The shock was that the Vatican had finally acted, decisively, after three decades of half-hearted (and failed) attempts to achieve some sort of serious conversation with the LCWR about its obvious and multiple breaches of the boundaries of orthodoxy. [And it took BENEDICT XVI to see it through!]

Acts two, three, and four in this drama are not likely to be pacific. Given the LCWR’s self-understanding as an evolutionary (or revolutionary) vanguard challenging the patriarchal evils embedded in the Catholic Church’s forms of governance, it is not easy to see how the LCWR can accept a situation in which a man — Archbishop Sartain — will guide the revision of the organization’s statutes while making the final decisions about the topics to be discussed and the speakers to be chosen for LCWR annual assemblies.

Immediately after the public announcement of the Vatican action, Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B., a leading exponent of the LCWR worldview, said flatly that “there is only one way to deal with this . . . they [the LCWR] would have to disband canonically and regroup as an unofficial interest group.” [I did not realize Chittister was a Benedictine - the sort that gives Benedictines a bad name, like those monks in Germany who accused children in their care!]

Whatever else it may have conveyed about her ecclesiastical sensibility, Sister Joan’s reaction had the virtue of honesty. The LCWR and many of the sisters in its affiliated congregations have been living for decades in what I have come to call “psychological schism”: While they remain canonically inside the Church’s legal boundaries, they nevertheless adhere to “another God” and seek “another mountaintop.”

Sister Joan’s immediate reaction honestly recognized that and drew the curtain on a long-running charade.

To be sure, a self-dissolution of the LCWR would create any number of problems. It might well provoke payback in the form of congregations of women religious taking their health-care systems even farther out of the orbit of Catholic life and practice. That, in turn, might lead to all sorts of legal unpleasantness.

But that is almost certain to happen in any event, for the dying of the LCWR orders is going to lead to an endless series of legal battles over property originally given to the sisters on the understanding that they were an integral part of the Catholic Church.

Thus, if the LCWR refuses to accept the Vatican’s decision and dissolves itself, the realities of the situation will be clarified. And that would be an improvement over the muddle — created in part by the resistance of the sisters and in part by the fecklessness of Church authorities — that has gone on for decades.

A clear delineation of who stands on which side of the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxis, which are not infinitely elastic, would have a cleansing effect. [Not just for the LCRW but all Catholic dissidents, especially the organized ones.]

And that cleansing might, just might, be the beginning of authentic reform among the once-great orders of women religious in the United States that are members of the LCWR. That reform would not aim to re-create the lost world of The Bells of St. Mary’s.

It would aim at the further development of forms of women’s religious life — already being lived in orders that are not members of the LCWR — that make their own unique contribution to the culture-forming counterculture that is the Catholicism of the New Evangelization.



The Church and the sisters:
What is really happening?
The standard media account about the CDF and LCWR
lacks essential information and historical background
by Ann Carey

April 26, 2012

From the moment the United States Bishops announced on April 18 that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) had issued a document ordering a supervised renewal of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), confusion and misinformation about the initiative have run rampant.

Sensational headlines have appeared, such as: “Nuns Gone Wild! Vatican Chastises American Sisters” (Daily Beast, April 20), “Vatican waging a war on nuns” (Chicago Sun Times, April 20) and “Guess Who the Vatican Is Picking on Now …” (Philly Post, April 23).

The common theme in most media reports about the CDF initiative, as these headlines suggest, is that out-of-touch men in the Vatican are unfairly criticizing the most faithful and hard-working members of the Church — the sisters. So, is this really the case? Hardly.

On page one of the eight-page CDF document, the accomplishments of women religious are cited and praised: “The Holy See acknowledges with gratitude the great contribution of women Religious to the Church in the United States … .”

However, the document goes on to point out that vowed religious are much more than social workers: they are consecrated persons who have a special place in the Church that must be marked by a strong faith and allegiance to Church authority.

The LCWR, it continued, has shown a “diminution of the fundamental Christological center and focus of religious consecration which leads, in turn, to a loss of a ‘constant and lively sense of the Church’ among some religious.”

Additionally, the CDF document emphasizes that the initiative is addressed only to the LCWR, a 1,500-member organization to which many leaders of women’s religious orders belong. The initiative is not directed to the other 54,000 sisters in the United States who do not belong to the LCWR, though press reports have tended to confuse this point and characterize all sisters as members of the LCWR.

This is quite incorrect, and many sisters who are in LCWR-related orders have contacted this writer to emphasize that they have neither membership, voice or vote in the LCWR, and they do not appreciate being associated with the organization.

In fact, many sisters in LCWR-related orders are quite pleased about the CDF action. As one such sister wrote in an e-mail: “I am so grateful to Pope Benedict and to all in Rome and in the USA who have contributed to this resolution. It has been a long nightmare and a severe cross for 40-plus years!”

What have this “nightmare” and “cross” involved? In the 1950s, the Vatican asked religious superiors all over the world to organize themselves into national conferences under the direction of the Holy See.

The idea was to help religious leaders network with each other to improve their orders and to facilitate communication and cooperation with Church authorities. Thus, the Conference of Major Religious Superiors of Women’s Institutes was canonically established in 1959.

However, in 1971, the women’s conference led a version of renewal of religious life that went far beyond anything envisioned by the Second Vatican Council, which had asked religious orders to discard outdated customs and to adapt their apostolate to modern needs, not to change the very nature of religious life.

At its 1971 annual assembly, the LCWR changed its statutes, its purpose and its name without Vatican approval, thus beginning 40 years of conflict with the Vatican. The Vatican insisted on changes to the new bylaws, to acknowledge the authority of the bishops and the Holy See. The Vatican also took three years to approve the name change, and only then said the new name should be accompanied by a sentence giving the original name.

Two sisters who had been executive directors of the LCWR for the 14 years between 1972 and 1986 wrote a book describing this metamorphosis of the conference: The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters (Temple University Press, 1992). The authors, Sisters Lora Ann Quinonez, CDP, and Mary Daniel Turner, SNDdeN, wrote:

The newly-adopted bylaws and title signaled a transformed understanding and appreciation of the raison d’être of the conference; not only was it to be a forum for enabling leadership, it was also to become a corporate force for systemic change in Church and society.

As the book’s authors went on to note, this transformation of the conference caused conflicts with Church authorities and other sisters that centered around the nature of religious life and relations with ecclesiastical authority. These conflicts in turn filtered down to the orders led by LCWR members who were heavily influenced by the LCWR agenda that has insisted on the right to “loyal dissent.”

Over the years, Catholic liturgies at LCWR meetings and assemblies were edged out in favor of New Age rituals and para-liturgies led by women. Workshops and speakers tended to focus on social and political issues rather than ecclesial, as evidenced by the resolutions passed at the 2000 LCWR assembly: To work for legislation to bring people out of poverty; for better working conditions for laborers in factories along the U.S.-Mexico border; and support for a “global peace force.”

Speakers at annual assemblies and LCWR publications often questioned the authority of the hierarchy. In a 2000 National Board report, vice-president Sister Mary Mollison, CSA, wrote about “talking points” developed by the LCWR to “‘initiate conversations with official leaders’ at all levels of the Church ‘to address the exercise of ecclesiastical authority experienced as a source of suffering and division by many within the Catholic community.’”

Further, the conference seemed preoccupied with transforming religious life. The LCWR Annual Report for 2006-2007 recalled that speakers at the 2006 assembly “spoke of this moment as a new era in religious life, a time for creative thinking, a time for envisioning consecrated life in ways previously not imagined.”

Indeed, the Vatican and some bishops tried for years to get the LCWR and its members to adhere to canon law and the essentials of religious life, but these efforts were rebuffed by LCWR leaders.

For instance, in 1971, Pope Paul VI issued the apostolic exhortation Evangelica Testificatio, giving his observations about how religious orders were renewing themselves. While he praised religious for their dedication, he also noted that some religious orders were not adhering to norms of religious life.

The LCWR reacted by publishing Widening the Dialogue, a 1972 book of essays critical of the apostolic exhortation. The essays from that book were then used in LCWR workshops for sisters. Similarly, the LCWR dismissed a 1983 document from the Congregation for Religious that detailed canonical norms for religious life.

The LCWR also adopted the technique of deflecting criticism of its activities and philosophy by reminding critics of all the good works sisters have done, and many in the media have looked no further than noting the sisters’ accomplishments.

What is often missed is the fact that sisters were able to accomplish all they did because the traditional way of religious life — daily prayer and life in common, a corporate apostolate, strong adherence to the teachings of the Church, and close cooperation with bishops—enabled their ministries.

However, many orders influenced by the LCWR have changed that traditional way of religious life in favor of individual ministries, small or single living units, independent prayer, and distancing from Church authority.

The LCWR also became adept at neutralizing criticism by prolonging “dialogue” so that conclusions were never reached. And it embraced the concept of instructing Church authorities. As then-LCWR president Sister Nancy Sylvester, IHM, wrote in her 2000 President’s Report: “We free ourselves to offer such insights to our brother bishops and invite them to see anew some of the official teachings of our Church.”

Like the headlines of today, efforts over the years by Church authorities to encourage religious orders to reform themselves aroused sensational media charges of hierarchal “patriarchy” and “misogyny” and headlines like “Battling for ‘Nuns’ Rights” (Newsweek, Sept. 8, 1969) and “American sisters of 1980s look beyond ‘Roman roulette’ to bigger challenges” (National Catholic Reporter, Feb. 27, 1981.

Meanwhile, doctrinal difficulties and defiance of Church authorities continued. For example, in 1985, the LCWR invited Sister Margaret Farley, RSM, to be the featured speaker at its annual assembly, even though she had signed the New York Times 1984 statement sponsored by Catholics for a Free Choice that claimed there was more than one legitimate Catholic position on abortion.

The U.S. Bishops and the Vatican asked the LCWR to withdraw the Farley invitation, but it refused, so Archbishops John Quinn of San Francisco and Pio Laghi, apostolic delegate, cancelled their scheduled appearance at the assembly, where they also had been invited to speak. Similar problems arose over the years on life issues and sexual morality.

The transformation of the superiors’ conference, which moved the organization away from Church authority and the traditional models of religious life to emphasize political, justice, and liberation issues, caused some sisters to leave the conference in the early 1970s and form their own small group of superiors.

The Vatican tried for years to reconcile the women superiors, but finally concluded this was impossible, and canonically erected another group of women’s superiors in 1992, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR) for superiors of orders that have retained a more traditional style of religious life and close ties with the institutional Church.

Currently, the superiors in the CMSWR lead orders with about 8,000 members, and the LCWR members lead orders with about 48,000 sisters. (A few superiors of women belong to neither group, and some belong to both). Even though CMSWR members represent fewer sisters, CMSWR communities are receiving the majority of new vocations and have an average age in the 30s, whereas the average age in LCWR-related communities is in the 70s.

A 2009 study on “Recent Vocations to Religious Life” by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University found that young people prefer the “more traditional lifestyle of religious life” in which members live and pray in community, work in a common apostolate, wear religious garb and “are explicit about their fidelity to the Church and the teachings of the Magisterium.” (See "The CARA Study and Vocations", Catholic World Report, May, 2011.)

Even with the aging of their communities, many members of the LCWR have continued to support the LCWR agenda that has often brought it into conflict with Church authorities. Other members who may not be as supportive of that agenda have maintained membership to take advantage of resources provided by the LCWR.

However, many of those resources have been named as problematic in the CDF document, which was quite comprehensive in delineating “serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life,” such as a distortion of the role of Jesus in the salvation of the world and undermining “the revealed doctrines of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the inspiration of Sacred Scripture.”

The document also noted a rejection of the faith and Church authority and unacceptable positions on women’s ordination, ministry to homosexual persons, and human sexuality, as well as inadequate presentation of the life issues.

The CDF document cited canon law, which governs superiors’ conferences, and said, “It is clear that greater emphasis needs to be placed both on the relationship of the LCWR with the conference of Bishops, and on the need to provide a sound doctrinal foundation in the faith of the Church.”

In order to “implement a process of review and conformity to the teachings and discipline of the Church,” the CDF named Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle as apostolic delegate, to be assisted by Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, a civil and canon lawyer, and Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, a member of the U.S. Bishops Committee on Doctrine who conducted the doctrinal assessment of the LCWR.

Assisted by an advisory team of his choice, Archbishop Sartain was directed to spend up to five years seeing that:

• the LCWR establishes a formal link with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops;

• the LCWR statutes are revised to reflect clarity about the scope of the mission and responsibilities of the conference;

• LCWR publications are reviewed and revised where necessary and speakers at future programs be approved by the delegate;

• LCWR future programs be developed to provide a deeper understanding of the faith;

• LCWR events and programs are given review and guidance to insure a proper place for the Eucharist and Liturgy of the Hours;

• LCWR links with the organizations Network and Resource Center for Religious are reviewed.

How will the LCWR react?

The LCWR “presidency” (past president, current president and president-elect) posted a brief statement on the LCWR website soon after the CDF document was released, saying they were “stunned by the conclusions of the doctrinal assessment of LCWR by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Because the leadership of LCWR has the custom of meeting annually with the staff of CDF in Rome and because the conference follows canonically-approved statutes, we were taken by surprise.” The statement also said the LCWR board would meet within the month to “review the mandate and prepare a response.”

However, it seems that while the contents of the CDF document may have been a surprise, the fact that the sisters would receive it at their annual visit to the CDF was not really a surprise.

The second sentence of that LCWR website statement was changed a day or so later to read: “We had received a letter from the CDF prefect in early March informing us that we would hear the results of the doctrinal assessment at our annual meeting; however, we were taken by surprise by the gravity of the mandate.” No explanation was given for the amended statement.

Thus, while the sisters might have been “stunned” by the contents of the document, they had no reason to be surprised that it was coming. Additionally, the LCWR had been given a “doctrinal warning” by the CDF in 2001 to correct doctrinal problems. When no progress had been made in seven years, the CDF told the LCWR in 2008 that it would undertake the doctrinal assessment. Thus, eleven years passed between the first warning and the issuance of the CDF directive.

Now speculation rages about how the LCWR will react. Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, a former president of the LCWR (1976), told the National Catholic Reporter that to remain true to themselves, the LCWR members should simply “disband canonically and regroup as an unofficial interest group.” However, if that occurs, that secular group would become just one of many secular professional organizations, and would certainly lose much of its credibility among women religious.

On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether there are enough moderate members of the LCWR who want to keep the organization afloat and work with Archbishop Sartain and his team to reform and renew as a legitimate superiors' conference.

On April 25, the LCWR presidency announced that the LCWR board would meet May 29 to June 1 to discuss the CDF mandate “in an atmosphere of prayer, contemplation and dialogue and will develop a plan to involve LCWR membership in similar processes. The conference plans to move slowly, not rushing to judgment.”

No doubt intense and lively conversations will be taking place within the LCWR in the next few weeks.