THE Vatican has recently initiated a major reform of the association of women’s religious congregations, Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The LCWR, a Maryland-based umbrella group that claims about 1,500 leaders of U.S. women’s communities as members, represents about 80 percent of the country’s 57,000 religious women. The reform comes in light of a hardened defiance of the groups’’ leaders against Catholic morality in areas of family life and human sexuality and is meant to ensure the groups fidelity to Catholic teaching in areas including abortion, euthanasia, women’s ordination and homosexuality. According to the Vatican, such deviations from Catholic teaching have provoked a crisis “characterised by a diminution of the fundamental Christological centre and focus of religious consecration.”
The doctrinal assessment grew out of the Vatican’s “Apostolic Visitation of Religious Communities of Women in the United States,” a study of the “quality of life” in some 400 congregations, which began in December 2008. The purpose of that visitation was to examine the quality of religious life, learn about the ways women religious contribute to the welfare of the church and society and look for ways to strengthen, enhance and support the growth of the institutes. Why has all this become necessary and why are contemplative orders excluded from the visitation?
While we often hear about the present-day priest shortage, few seem aware that in Canada, the U.S. and Western Europe, nuns are vanishing at an alarming rate. A recent study by the U. S. National Religious Vocation Conference found the number of nuns in the United States had fallen a stunning 66% over the past four decades. In Canada, there are 19,000 nuns, down 54% from 42,000 in 1975. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1960s, Quebec was the region of the world with the highest number of women religious in relation to the population. Today, all sociologists agree that unless there is a reversal of the present trend, women’s religious life as we have known it will be only a memory in Canada.
Pope Benedict XVI has reduced the problem mainly to a certain “radical feminism” that has crept into women’s religious orders causing an identity crisis among active orders and congregations. Women religious, the pope says, have turned away from theology and sought liberation in psychologists and psychoanalysts, who can only say at most how the forces of the mind function but not why and to what purpose.
After Vatican II, religious communities began every kind of reform imaginable: abandonment of the religious habit, degrees at secular universities, insertion into secular professions, a massive reliance on every type of “specialist”. Not surprisingly, modern secular values were often uncritically adopted and the concept of “love of neighbour” was soon replaced by that of “social welfare”. In the process, Christianity gradually became reduced to an ideology of doing. Pope John Paul II later warned against this minimalist approach, saying that the true leaders are those who are “profoundly rooted in contemplation and prayer. Ours is a time of continual movement which often leads to restlessness, with the risk of ‘doing for the sake of doing’. We must resist this temptation by trying to be, before trying to do.”
Not surprisingly, cloistered, contemplative orders are under no such Vatican scrutiny. This is because they have withstood very well due to the fact that they are more sheltered from the Zeitgeist, and because they are characterised by a clear and unalterable aim: praise of God, prayer, virginity and separation from the world as an eschatological sign. Their wonderful capacity to give love, help, solace, warmth and solidarity did not give way to the economistic, and trade-union mentality of the “profession “.
We are at a point now when religious life in the Catholic Church should be presenting an alternative to the dominant culture of death, of violence and of abuse, rather than mirroring it. Hopefully the new reforms will remedy this.
One thing is clear: sisters need to refocus their communities on the founding charismas or original purpose of their orders. They also need, as a remedy against radical feminism, Mary, whose mystery was inserted into the mystery of the Church at Vatican II, making her a focal point for the equilibrium and completeness of the Catholic faith.
When one recognises the place assigned to Mary by dogma and tradition, one becomes more solidly rooted in authentic Christology. As both a Jewish girl and mother of the Messiah, Mary also binds together, in a living and indissoluble way, the old and the new People of God. She is, as it were, the connecting link without which the Faith (as is happening today) runs the risk of losing its balance by either forsaking the New Testament for the Old or dispensing with the Old.
Finally, according to her destiny as Virgin and Mother, Mary continues to project a light upon that which the Creator intended for women in every age.
Mary is the one who rendered silence and seclusion fruitful. She is the one who did not fear to stand under the Cross. As a creature of courage and obedience, she was and will always remain an example to which every Christian man and woman should look.