Fr. Z's Blog

At the blog Domine, Da Mihi Hanc Aquam there is a reposted summary of themes which emerged from the writer’s close reading keynote speeches presented at the annual assemblies of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR – a subsidiary of the Magisterium of Nuns).

Some large excerpts, but you should read the whole thing there:

I read through several of the keynote speeches, and I noticed a couple of themes (that’s what we Old Lit Teachers do–look for themes). Here’s just a few in no particular order:

1. “Mission”: all of the addresses I read (four of them) exhort the sisters to mission. But never the mission of the Church that we would recognize as evangelization, that is, the preaching and teaching of the gospel that Christ gave to the apostles. The mission the sisters are exhorted to take up is always, always some form of left-liberal social engineering disguised as caring for Earth or insuring access to adequate health [care] for women. […]

2). Insularity: despite the exhortations to “mission,” all of the addresses I read include broad descriptions of the history of women religious as a way of “situating” the experience of these women within their own “mission,” in other words, they spend a lot of page space on talking to one another about one another’s grand innovations after the VC2 and how these innovations are radically different from anything that’s come before […]

3). “Prophetic”: as a corollary to their mission and insularity, the addresses harp on how “prophetic” women religious are in these innovations. As far as I can tell, “prophetic” means whatever they want it to mean. It clearly does not mean what the Church means by the term. If the examples used are typical, “prophetic” means something like “doing what we please and then accusing the Church of being too traditional, oppressive, and isolated from the world for not following our lead.” Beware self-anointed prophets! […]

4). “We missed out”: probably the most interesting theme is what I will call the We Missed Out theme. This theme arises in several discussions of the scientific and technological revolutions of the 20th century. Apparently, this theme is meant to demonstrate the superiority of a modernist worldview over and against a wholly Christian worldview. […]

5). Futility: without exception the addresses I read painted depressing portraits of women religious as a tiny rebel band fighting the Sheriff of Rome. As part of the insularity painted by these addresses is a tragic sense of loss and the futility of their “mission” in the face of overwhelming authoritarian oppression by men. Apparently, we are to believe that women religious in the U.S. are guerrilla-fighters engaged in a war of attrition against the Church. Unfortunately for them, the attrition is all on their side. Rhetorically, these portraits serve an important purpose: by painting themselves as righteous rebels fighting a losing battle against the Man, the sisters are able to both continue their rebellion and justify their material failures all the while claiming moral victory. Neat, uh?

6). Jesus ain’t the Way: also without exception the addresses forthrightly deny Jesus’ own claim that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. As a way of undermining the Church’s legitimate mission of evangelization, Jesus becomes just another good guy with a really cool message of pacificism, egalitarian communal life, and a feminist concern for eco-politics. In one address, delivered by Joan Chittister, the arrival of mosques in historically Christian lands is celebrated as a great advance for liberty and the pursuit of religious diversity. […]

7). Monotonality: the addresses are uniformly written and delivered by women religious who tell the gathered sisters only what they wanted to hear. There were no addresses that seriously challenged any of the preconceived notions held dear by these women. Without exception. the meme’s of “We Are the Future and Our Agenda is of God” is heard in terms of ecclesial revolution and theological dissent. Not one address challenged the sisters to rethink their assumptions along orthodox lines. Not one address asserted a theme, idea, theology, or political notion that would upset or stir the secular feminist pot these women are stewing in. […]

8). New Stories: as a result of the We Missed Out theme, the addresses pull on recent developments in cosmology to construct “new stories” about creation, space-time, human evolution, and the role of consciousness in our pursuit of holiness. Of course, none of these new stories read like anything found in scripture, tradition, science, or Church teaching. In fact, the purpose of the new stories is to lay a narrative foundation for a particularly gnostic-feminist view of the human person that “frees” us from the confines of patriarchal thinking by re-situating the human race as just another evolved species living and dying in a vast cosmos. Routinely, the addresses privilege “new cosmologies” over and against our biblical narratives of creation and the end of space-time, and undermine God’s Self-revelation in scripture. […]

If you are following the The Reform of LCWR at all, you should read the whole piece and file it away.

In the meantime, I suggest some of you readers go to the LCWR site and download some of their stuff before they change their page and make it disappear.