From a friend on the LCWR (a subsidiary of the Magisterium of Nuns):
LCWR
It occurs to me that some people are just not understanding in general what a deviation this group is.
Would it be easier to understand if there was a big group of vegans and suddenly a subset became meat eaters, but still wanted to be considered vegans to get a group discount on the salad bar at a market? Or a group of meat eaters who suddenly had a subset of people who decided that cannibalism was the way to go, but still wanted to be considered part of the mainstream because, gosh, how bad is cannibalism anyway… everybody dies – why waste a source of protein?!
I do not know how to frame this, but this isn’t a tussle around a campfire about how gets to sit next to whom.
It’s about people who want to throw other people into the campfire itself and call it therapeutic.
The deviation from the normal standards are causing scandal to the rest of the people who are faithful and probably end up giving up more in their daily lives for their faith then these people who only pretend.
What about this?
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I really liked Cdl. Levada’s observation in an earlier posting that “Too many people crossing the LCWR screen who are supposedly representing the Catholic church aren’t representing the church with any reasonable sense of product identity.”
That’s the bottom line. You can’t represent the Church and pretend the Church doesn’t teach what it teaches or stand for what it stands for. Nor can you pretend that what it stands for doesn’t really matter or only selectively matters. It’s true of any organized group. What should be remarkable is not that the LCWR got investigated, but that its members and leadership did what they pleased for so long without someone saying, “Um, hey now.”
Someone who supports the LCWR’s dissenters (and I’ve seen all manner of loopiness on Facebook about this being part of Rome’s “war on women”) might say: but they’re just following their hearts. Their consciences. Okey doke. Why don’t those same conscience protections ever seem to apply to those who are in agreement and compliance with the teachings of Church?
“Would it be easier to understand if there was a big group of vegans and suddenly a subset became meat eaters…?”
This is a great analogy – let’s expand it: not only do they want to eat meat, but they want to teach and write books about how it’s perfectly OK to eat meat, and as a matter of fact vegans can eat dairy, too; and how it’s not fair to the vegans who crave meat and dairy that they’re being told they can’t eat those things, that they are being denied the support that they deserve from the greater vegan community. And that the vegans who have dabbled in meat and dairy are fully justified to follow those urges and become full-fledged meat-and-dairy-eating vegans. These books, of course, must not be challenged because it would be mean and intolerant of the faithful vegans to impose their arbitrary standards of veganism on those who feel differently. These meat and dairy eating vegans will hold tough and refuse to drop the title vegan because they have a noble goal: they want to change the face of veganinity and make it more inclusive.
That’s a metaphor I’ll steal.
We’ve got a family that’s friends with our family, their kids will ask ours if they are Christian Catholics or not. On further discussion, they were questioning our view of Mary, and I thought it was the old “you worship saints” misunderstanding. Turns out, though, it wasn’t that they knew very little about the Church and thought we worshiped Mary. They had Catholics in the family that apparently were of the “Mary is a co-redemptrix” flavor. So they legitimately wanted to know, are we the Catholics who believe Christ is the only way or do we believe Mary is the way, too?
It was very hard to explain that there aren’t two kinds of Catholics, Christian Catholics and a kind of Mary-ish Catholic. The folks who thought Mary was a co-Redemptrix weren’t actually Catholic. How could they understand that, the folks they knew of that POV called themselves Catholic?
So, next time I’ll try the vegan/ meat eater analogy and see if that helps. It’s frustrating, it’s hard enough when folks misunderstand Catholicism because they’ve never known any Catholics, harder still when they misunderstand it because of what Catholics tell them. Whenever I have a conversation about gay marriage or abortion, I invariably get the “Catholics don’t believe that, I know plenty of Catholics who don’t believe that at all” line.
My first thought on this is that those who are responsible for investigating things like this have been afraid for too long about opening these wounds and finding out what is there. And apparently the reaction from the (liberal) crowd seems like some justification that it was not such a great idea to tear into this problem. At least not if you want to have to deal with the “uproar” that will ensue. It is high time, though, that these “inconsistencies” between the teachings of the Church and the “Magisterium of Nuns” have a light shone on them. You just have to wonder why anyone who claims to be part of the Catholic Church would refute so many of the teachings of the Church, and then claim that the Church should change to conform to their twisted view of things? Isn’t this why the protestant denominations exist?
I found this article from CatholicCulture.org to have a good viewpoint on this situation, as well. He brings up some interesting points in that article that I had not seen (admittedly, I haven’t read too much on this, every time I see some interview with one of the LCWR representatives, it turns my stomach enough to discourage further reading.) But I’m getting around to it.
(sorry about the ugly URL in that post – I should have tried to clean it up a little, please feel free to do so, or delete it if you feel it was inappropriate to post it. A cleaned-up version might be: http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?ID=920)
Thank you, and keep up the great work!
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How many members of the leadership of the NAACP are allowed actively, publicly, to promote the work of the Klan?
How many members of the Klan are active public promoters of affirmative action?
Come to think of it, how many directors of abortion clinics are allowed publicly to promote abortion alternatives?
The point isn’t even the rightness or wrongness of the position held, but rather the active counter-witness to the stated mission of the organization.
Since liberals understand this idea instinctively, why can’t they grasp that it works both ways? (“Democrats” can’t be pro-life and expect to get elected.)
Dear Father, I am not surprised that you have a friend on the LCWR – you are as ubiquitous as Mr Allen!
I concur with the others, it’s a fantastic analogy. Very chuckle-worthy too. I’ll be pinching this before someone slaps a patent on it!
Not to change the subject…but when I went to Catholic school (many years ago) we learned that Our Lady was/is co-redemptrix with her Son. Not that they are equal but due to her co-operation in the Incarnation of the Word without which we would have no Redemption.
Marg,
You’re right that I got a little off topic, my understanding is that co-redemptrix along the lines you describe is on the no no side, but I think people mean different things by that so let me drop the “co-redemptrix” part and go with something like Catholics recommending to me “The Secret Life of Bees” — where a bunch of women living together to get away from evil men begin to revere Mary to the point where they create a fake communion ceremony where the communion wafer is supposed to be some kind of Mary-oriented thing. That’s definitely in the “you can call yourself Catholic all day but if you eat a piece of bread and call it Mary you ain’t Catholic” side of things, yet my nonCatholic friends, how are they supposed to discern when people self-label? So the vegan/meat eater metaphor may be helpful to me.
Great analogy. I’ve used something similar with pro-abortion acquaintances of mine…
Imagine if Planned Parenthood had an organization composed of development directors from individual Planned Parenthood branches. The group was created to allow them to talk shop, coordinate resources, etc. Then one day the leaders of the group announce, publicly, that abortion is a moral abhorrence and should be criminalized. They write books and hold conferences, under the auspice of Planned Parenthood, calling for the criminalization of abortion. No one in their right mind would fault PP from bringing them in line. And yet, when it comes to the Church…