In a piece from Fishwrap, aka National Sodomitic Reporter, about the closing the LCWR annual confab in view of the Great Swirly, we find this:
If critics thought the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s doctrinal Massessment and mandated changes were going to rein in U.S. women religious and get them to focus more on fighting same-sex marriage and abortion and less on serving those at the margins, they were wrong. [In other words, they are going to go as if nothing had happened with the CDF?]
Not only have sisters simply continued to do what they do, but when presented with an open microphone Thursday morning, several called for expanding that work in a way that may be the opposite of what critics were hoping for.
It happened during what was supposed to be an open discussion of the morning’s keynote address by Divine Word Fr. Stephen Bevans. The plan: Tables drawn randomly would send a representative to the mic to share what their table had talked about while processing Bevans’ presentation.
But one sister approached the microphone, saying that her table hadn’t been called but they wanted their voices heard anyway.
“We think it’s time we stood for the gay and lesbian community. These people are suffering profoundly,” she told the group. “They are coming to our churches, our programs — when are we going to stand for them?”
Another sister said her table had also sent her to the microphone despite not being called on.
She said that all of what LCWR has learned about contemplative dialogue in the last three years should be put to use in not only ministering to the gay and lesbian community, but in fighting discrimination. It may be easier to stand up to the government than it is to stand up to church leaders, she said, but that does not mean sisters can stand by and allow discrimination to continue.
My response…
I am hereunder reposting something I posted (only) 3 years ago…
The 2020 annual LCWR Assembly
I picked this up from a future edition of the National catholic Reporter.
Breaking down barriers, affirming freedom
by Jamie O’Brien12 August 2020
HONOLULU (NcR) The 2020 annual national assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is underway in Honolulu, under the swaying palms and by the sparkling sandy beaches. Once again the gathered sisters have met to affirm each other in their respective callings.
Beth Mackee, LCWR co-mentor, introduced this year’s national assembly speaker Dyna Moore. Moore, the latest in a series of transgendered Daughters of Charity to profess vows, told the assembly in her keynote speech how liberating it was for her now to be a woman.
However, Moore directed the majority of her remarks to the Assembly’s theme, “Age: The Final Frontier“.
Picking up on the assembly’s strong anticipation of President Obama’s fourth term, Moore reminded the group that “much still needs to be done to carry forward the liberation of women from all forms of oppression, especially sexual oppression”.
Congratulating the LCWR for its defeat a decade earlier of the CDF’s attempted 5-year takeover, Moore recalled the women religious who in the meantime “heroically fought the male hierarchy’s strong support of legislation banning polygamous lesbian marriages”.
Yet Moore challenged the assembled sisters to intensify their efforts in support of a national law aimed at lowering the age of sexual consent to 11.
In her talk, Moore, a professor of linguistics at Notre Dame, surveyed the negative history surrounding language concerning women’s rights.
Moore claimed that “terms such as abortion and prostitution and polygamy, and now pedophilia, have been used by men to stigmatize women in their search for sexual liberty”.
After fighting for the right of women of all ages to have abortions without parental knowledge or consent, Moore suggested that women religious should “lead the battle for the relational freedom of females of every age”.
The assembly rose in a standing ovation when Moore declared that “the human right of girls to choose sexual partners regardless of age represents the final frontier of women’s sexual and reproductive freedom”.
While Moore was speaking, members of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Nuns, SNAN (formerly known as SNAP) protested outside Honolulu’s most expensive hotel, where the Assembly was held.
“They are compromising the future repressed memories of countless children,” said a SNAN spokesperson.
Prophetic.
One of the commentators under that post offered these as possible future workshops:
Age: The Final Frontier
LCWR Workshops:
- Dropping the R?
- Looking ahead: What about the W?
- Education: Reaching the young remaining in innocence.
- Recognizing the hormonal effects of contraception begun at 12 in public schools by sight.
- Cloning: Extending the frontier.
- Homogenizing gender: makeovers, fashion sense, and hair styling.
- Retreat planning.
- Retreats for kids .
- Latest developments in motorized rollaters, wheelchairs, and vans.
- Maintaining community life in condocare villages.
- Music: make your own.
- Water ballet and hula dancing.
- Planning and ordering buffets: Baking and storing sweets.
- Campaigning and coffee hours.
- Social networking and liberation. b-y-o-tech.
Loading ...
Swirly or squirrely?
“We think it’s time we stood for the gay and lesbian community. Which begs the question of just what it means to “stand for” the gay and lesbian community. Except I think we all know what they mean by that, and it’s not working to stop people in the parish being mean to LGBT members in RCIA class.
Next up: the NcR story from the 2030 LCWR conference, which struggles heroically to have its gathered members speak truth to power via teleconference, a regrettable necessity due to the inability of most surviving members to travel any longer as a result of infirmity of body.
But, Fatherrrrr Zeeeee! When will you finally get the message that your criticisms are not welcomed? I just hate to see you, as a critic, have your hopes dashed time and time again. The discrimination you received in being rejected press credentials to cover the caucus events and fraternizing was bad enough. There is obviously far too much man in your manifesto, and I am sorry to be the one to have to break it to you.
Age: The Final Frontier:
Time to update Benson’s Lord of the World (Book I, Ch. I.iii)?: “Why, you know in your heart that the euthanatisers are the real wymynpriests. Of course you do.”
Perhaps Fr. Z could affirm Translingual Nomenism in applying – what’s ‘John Zuhlsdorf’ analyzed into, for instance, Arabic, Persian, or one of the Berber family of languages? He could attach a photo of himself suitably hooded and cowled as to be taken for someone bearing Truly Liberating Culture-Specific Clothing (TLCSC) that reveals no smallest glimpse of flesh.
And, once there, not only apply but extend the ‘hallowed principle’ of coming “to the microphone despite not being called on.”
The Great Swirly calls to my mind the poem of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. on the Chambered Nautilus: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!” Not particularly Catholic though.
Well that’s just sad. Why do these women think no one wants them to help “people on the margins” or whatever trendy term they want to use? If they did that, who in the world would criticize them? It’s their far-left politics — and their deliberate public political action for AND against doctrines of the Church — that get them into trouble. I can see, I hope we ALL can see, that people who care very strongly about helping some particular group of poor and desperate people can get so fed up with the status quo that they think they must advocate for this or that radical political program they are sure will help it… but that’s how religious people get into trouble.
Anyone who has read Sr. Simone’s bizarre book knows the ratio of her time spent in political activism and in actually helping people, and it’s not heavy on the helping people side. I went to one of her “Nuns on the Bust” stops and the talks began with some young woman who was really, truly running some charity helping people (I forget what it was). You could not have had a bigger contrast between her and Sr. Simone’s silly “proposed budget.”
It is so sad to me that women who (one hopes) began their religious lives wanting to serve God are ending them with calls to “serve” whoever is the most de rigeuer “oppressed” group at the moment. People with same-sex attraction need help and love and Christ. Not this kind of “help.”
One thing I will never understand, and that is the position of lcwr, fishwrap, and various Catholic authorities, elites, politicians, academics, mouthpieces, media types that saving the babies is mutually exclusive with welcoming homosexuals. Somehow they made the decision long ago that not only we in the Church could not do both, and thus denied the vast majority of important opportunities to cooperate with grace, but even have organized, agitated and taught many that the former must be sacrificed to the priority of the latter, which defies reason and is bizarre. It is almost as if they desire a foregone conclusion, or many such.