Every year around Christmas and Easter, the usual hyenas emerge from the brush to worry at the Church’s heels. This year, as a little gift to the Christ Child, the National Catholic Reporter (aka Fishwrap) has teamed up with an entity I’ve never heard of, the Global Post, to excrete a series of articles which have no other purpose than to harm the Church through distortion of facts.
The Global Post, which is funded by the Ford Foundation, which also funds anti-Catholic groups such as “Catholics For Choice“, and which has board over-lap with Planned Parenthood, and Fishwrap are teamed up to lie about what the Holy See is doing in regard to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR – a subsidiary of the Magisterium of Nuns). See this too, to get an idea of the connections.
Global Post/Fishwrap would have you believe that the “the Vatican” is being mean to the wonderful nuns because they work with the poor, etc.
Not so.
The Holy See’s doctrinal concerns are not at the thousands of religious sisters in these USA who work with the poor, care for the sick, and teach children properly, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, and whom the Holy See says we owe “admiration”.
To get at what the Holy See is really doing, we have to go back to the Doctrinal Assessment (at the Vatican website HERE and at the website of the USCCB HERE) issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). There, and only there, can any true investigation of what is happening begin.
The Holy See clearly states why the LCWR has been reined in. The Church’s enemies will ignore the Doctrinal Assessment and, as a deception, repeat in a mantra that nuns work with the poor, etc.
The Pope and his Curia have already expressed several times their “admiration” (the word they use) for the work of US nuns in schools, hospitals and care of the poor. The Doctrinal Assessment clearly states that appreciation.
If you want proof, read the Doctrinal Assessment.
The actions taken by “the Vatican” in regard to the LCWR have nothing to do with these good works by nuns in these United States. Nor is “the Vatican” trying to get nuns back into wearing habits or living in convents (good as these things would be). No, the CDF’s disciplinary action against the LCWR concerns doctrine only. For Fishwrap readers, that means it’s about Catholic teaching.
Specifically, the CDF’s Doctrinal Assessment, published in English on the Vatican website (NB: they are not hiding it!), accuses the LCWR of distancing itself from Catholic teaching concerning women’s ordination and homosexual behaviors. The CDF’s written assessment offers as an example “specific passages of Sr. Laurie Brink’s address about some Religious ‘moving beyond the Church’ or even beyond Jesus.”
Get that?
Sr. Brink tells the nuns that they should move ‘beyond Jesus’.
What’s at stake is the drift among some U.S. nuns away from the Church’s faith in the central role of Christ and His Body, the Church, in human salvation. The CDF implies that some in the leadership of the LCWR have embraced forms of inter-religious dialogue based upon the alleged or supposed equality of all religions.
The CDF’s intervention in the LCWR is not aimed at the nuns’ good works on behalf of the poor.
The CDR is not asking the sisters to renounce Vatican II reforms.
By contrast, the nuns and their allies hurl that false charge back at the CDF while refusing to address the real issues which the Pope and his Curia have openly expressed, in writing, for all the world to read.
Fishwrap and its “global” Ford Foundation/Planned Parenthood/Catholics For Choice allies are engaged in a campaign of obfuscation.
