Fr. Z's Blog

The LCWR’s leadership will now debate whether or not they want the Church’s true Magisterium in their lives.

They are poised to become irrelevant.  Then, irrelevant, the biological solution will have its way with them and all their institutes, which have no vocations.

There is an alternative to the LCWR and the institutes involved with it.

For example, I have known and admired the Mercy Sisters of Alma, Michigan for years.  They are highly educated and deeply faithful women who, as I saw in Rome, are ready to serve wherever there is need, even in very humble household work for some prelates.  For example, in my old mentor Cardinal Mayer’s later years, they took care of him with exceptional attention.

In any event, to pick up on something Card. Levada said about the meeting with the leaders of the LCWR, namely that if the LCWR doesn’t clean up its act the CDF can find a different, properly functioning group, I note with interest a story about the Alma Mercy Sisters in CNA.

Whereas the LCWR (a subsidiary of the Magisterium of Nuns) has members who support abortion and write books that skate near and over the edge of Christian orthodoxy, there are new groups of sisters who are faithful.

Have a look at the CNA article on the Mercy Sisters …. NOT the group to which Sr. Margaret Farley, RSM, belongs.

Sisters of Mercy doctors say LCWR is injecting politics into dialogue
By Kevin J. Jones

Alma, Mich., Jun 14, 2012 / 02:15 am (CNA).- Physicians who are also Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma are criticizing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and its defenders for using an impoverished “language of politics” instead of “the language of faith” in the dialogue with the Catholic hierarchy.  [In other words the LCWR types don’t even talk like sisters anymore.]

“There is no basis for authentic dialogue between these two languages. The language of faith is rooted in Jesus Christ, His life and His mission, as well as the magisterial teaching of the Church,”[not the alternative “Magisterium of Nuns” which the less-faithful women have proposed as over and against that of the bishops and Holy Father.]  said the physician-sisters’ statement, which was issued after a June 2 meeting on the contributions of religious women in the healing ministry of the Catholic Church.

[NB:] “The language of politics arises from the social marketplace,” they said. “The Sisters who use political language in their responses to the magisterial Church reflect the poverty of their education and formation in the faith.” [Do I hear an “Amen!”?]

[…]

Sr. Jane Mary Firestone, RSM, an internist at Sacred Heart Clinic in Alma, Mich., who helped write her religious congregation’s statement, spoke about it with CNA. She said that there is no issue with people representing their perspective to the Church and stating where they see problems.

However, she said that critics of Vatican’s assessment are taking their action into “a political arena of demonstrations” and are “garnering support in a political sense.”

“That doesn’t feel very appropriate,” Sr. Firestone said June 13. In her view, the social marketplace uses “the language of majority rule” and does not necessarily have “a regard for authority.”

“They’ve taken this into the public political arena and it no longer stays in the dialogue of faith. Representation is always possible, dialogue is always possible, but it’s with the reverence towards the hierarchical Church.”

She said that the “language of faith” expresses belief in the Church and the authority of the Church. Catholics believe that when the bishops speak, they have “a different degree of authority” than when someone else does.

[NB:] “In other words, the magisterial Church does direct for us the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives as religious women,” she said.

Sr. Firestone said that while Catholics do not believe the bishops are canonized saints, they are “not just ‘a bunch of men.’”

[…]

Read the rest there.