And We Watch The Neo-trads Devour Their Own, Bon Appetit.

Earlier this week Cardinal William Levada, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and, before that, Archbishop of San Francisco was arrested in Hawaii for driving under the influence of alcohol.   Levada, you may recall, was the bull dog sicced on the good Sisters of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious because they were suspect of supposedly unspeakable heresies.  The charges against the nuns were later dropped.  The charges against His Eminence probably won’t be.  

Despite his complicity in the LCWR mauling, Levada isn’t a bad man.  Like many who rose to power under Benedict and John Paul he was a careerist who bent his conscience and sold his soul to the prevailing winds of Church politics.  He had some good pastoral sense in his days as Archbishop of a very complex city.  While he stood firm on the Church’s teachings on abortion and on same-sex relationships, he refused to follow the lead of Archbishops Burke and Chaput to desacrate the Eucharist by making it a weapon in the culture wars over abortion or same-sex marriage.  When the City of San Francisco passed a regulation that all agencies dealing with the city had to offer spousal benefits for those in same-sex unions, the Archbishop bypassed the controversy by permitting Archdiocesan employees to designate any one person whomsoever of their choice—traditional spouse, parent, child, “friend,” milkman—regardless of relationship, as beneficiary.  It is hard to say why he agreed to go after the nuns.  The criminal minds behind that debacle were our old buddies Raymond Burke, William Lori, Bernard Law (aka the unholy trinity) and buffoon-in-residence, Carl Anderson—the grand poobah of the Knights of Columbus.    It may have been Benedict himself who ordered the inquisition; we will probably never know.  Pope Francis put an end to the nunsense however several months ago.

Pope Benedict replaced Cardinal Levada as the Grand Inquisitor with Gerhard Ludwig Müller when Levada turned 75.  It is normal for Cardinals who are not residential Archbishops to remain resident in Rome at least until their 80^th birthday as they remain members of the various congregations, but Francis (distanced himself from and) dismissed Cardinal Levada from this tiresome obligation and His Eminence joined other retired Archbishops of San Francisco living at Saint Patrick’s Seminar in Menlo Park.

When he was in office in Rome Cardinal Levada was a cherished icon of the Katholik Krazies.  They had had some misgivings at first given his pastoral solution to the complexities of San Francisco’s “diverse” population but had been won over by his hard line on the nuns and on other issues and especially by the support he received from Pope Benedict.  But it is interesting to see how they have turned on him now.  One particularly cheesy Krazy blog, Eponymous Flower, has gone on, without any evidence, to “expose” Levada’s “gay lifestyle,” claiming that he is “shacked up” with “life partner” and his successor in San Francisco, Archbishop George Niederauer, and implying that the night of the arrest the two were out in various gay bars on The Big Island.  In fact, Levada was alone when arrested for drunk driving and there is no mention anywhere of his having been at a bar of any sort.  But you see, this is how the crazies are.  They are so filled with anger that they devour their own when a more liberal target isn’t available.  The point of this entry isn’t about a Cardinal who had too much to drink—a sin many of us have shared at one time or another.  Or about a prelate who got behind the wheel of a car when intoxicated—a far more serious sin.  But it is about the tendency of the Krazies to make up stories and piss in the dirt to make mud to sling at whoever happens to be the object of their wrath.  Nice going, Eponymous Flower—a few more Krazies like you and the neo-traditional movement will be gone forever and never missed by Christians anywhere.  Oremus.  

Destined for the Rise and the Fall of Many in Israel

Pope Francis meets with Sisters
from the LCWR: they came to
the Vatican, I understand, on a
Bus.  

Well Pope Francis called the dogs of war off the American nuns and that marks another watershed day in the history of the American Church as it is a clear sign that the JPII/Benedict XVI old guard is finished, at least for the length of this papacy.  There had been a mounting tension between the American Religious Women and the Holy See dating back to 1979 when Sister Teresa Kane publically addressed Pope John Paul on behalf of U.S. nuns and asked him to consider admitting women “to all the ministries of the Church.” This opened the question of ordaining women, a question John Paul was quick to put the kibosh on and which angered him and his Curia that it was even mentioned.  Pope John Paul had very definite ideas on the place of women in the Church and in particular on how religious women should conduct themselves.  While his understanding of the role of women in the Church actually marked a step—or several steps—beyond what up to then had been Church practice, it hardly fit our current cultural conviction that men and women are equal and should have equal access to responsibility in our world today.  (I choose the word “responsibility” as it is more consistent with gospel values than the word “power,” but I certainly mean power when I speak of responsibility in this context.) 

The changes in religious life, and especially the life of religious women, has been remarkable in the decades after Vatican II.  In following the Vatican II mandate to return to the charisms of their founders, many religious women have renounced the monastic practices that were imposed on them in the late 18^th and in the 19^th centuries, adopting modern dress, moving out of large convents and the quasi-monastic life required in that sort of environment, taking more personal responsibility for their finances, and revamping authority structures to be more collaborative than directive.  They live now not as semi-monastics but as consecrated lay women living according to the evangelical counsels and devoting themselves to the works of the Church.  Of course there are still monastic and contemplative communities, generally enclosed (cloistered) but that vocation is essentially different than that of Religious Sisters in Apostolic communities.  The monastic life too has, in most places, undergone some external change, but remains essentially focused on prayer and the common life.  If anything, the changes in Religious Life after Vatican II have permitted the Apostolic and the Contemplative vocations to more clearly differentiate themselves from each other and permitted women to make the appropriate choice according to the graces given to each person. 

Of course the changes in Religious Life have also empowered women to take responsibility for their own life and mission and this has been deeply troubling to those who favor the misogynist hierchical power structures for which the Catholic Church was once so famous.  The last thing burned-out or incompetent male clerics need is to have self-confident religious women around.  And let’s face it, if there is anything the experience of the Vatican troubling the American Sisters has shown us is that the rank and file Catholics still love the nuns while the good folk in the pews are more reserved in their affection and respect for the clergy.  In 1995 the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life (once known as the Congregation for Religious) divided out the more “traditional” religious communities of women from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (originally known as Conference of Major Superiors of Women) and established for the more compliant nuns The Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious.  This left two distinct groupings of American Sisters.  About 80% of American Sisters belong to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. 

The LCWR’s problems began in earnest early in the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI when the Congregation of Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life announced a “visitation” of American Sisters belonging to the LCWR affiliated communities.  This was supposedly “for their own good” to see why they weren’t getting the vocations they had once garnered in the 1960 vocational heyday.  The problem obviously was that most of the good sisters weren’t properly veiled and they were living in apartments and had drivers’ licenses—oh, and minds of their own, and used them.  A moving factor behind the original investigation was that nemesis of change, our own beloved Cardinal Burke who, at the time, was a member of the Congregation of Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of the Apostolic Life.  (I am getting tired of typing and retyping that title—from here on out CICLSAL.)   Mother Mary Clare Millea, a Canon Lawyer and the Superior General of the Congregation of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (a community belonging to the Conference of Major Superiors of Women) was put in charge of the visitation.  This—it was thought—would be like putting Ted Cruz in charge of investigating Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  But guess what—it became clear that under the microscope of Mother Mary Clare, the Sisters of the LCWR looked just fine!!!  That wouldn’t do.  So stage II kicked in and Cardinal William Levada, an American who at the time was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (at one time known as “The Holy Roman Inquisition” and the most powerful of the Roman dicasteries) announced that the CDF was going to do a doctrinal investigation of the LCWR because they good Sisters were writing a lot of heresy and spreading false doctrines in their various ministries.  As if they had not learned with Galileo—some people just never learn.  Levada is not Torquemada and was only the front man for a cabal of the truly evil: Cardinal Burke (again!), Cardinal Law (the disgraced Archbishop of Boston whose intransience about a fictional princely immunity kicked off the sex-abuse scandal in the American Church), Archbishop Lori of Baltimore (a slimy sycophant of a prelate if there ever was one—you don’t want to know how he got where he got) and their bankrolling stooge, Carl Anderson, Grand Poobah of the Knights of Columbus whose generosity to Vatican causes with other people’s money has given him great influence in the hallowed halls of the pre-Francisco Reform Vatican Bank.  (Just mentioning these boys makes me want to take a shower.)  Well, the pyre was well on its way to being completed when Pope Benedict surprised the world with his retirement and within a month many things had begun to change.  Within a few months of his election, Pope Francis was addressing the Religious from Latin America and he said, in obvious reference to the North American nuns:

They will make mistakes, they will make a blunder [meter la pata], this will pass! Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine (of the Faith) will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing... But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward... Open the doors, do something there where life calls for it. I would rather have a Church that makes mistakes for doing something than one that gets sick for being closed up...

Clear enough? One would think.  But just because Petrus locutus est doesn’t mean Roma locuta est, as is becoming increasingly clear in so many ways with top Cardinals publicly disagreeing with a reigning pontiff—something that hasn’t happened in a century and a half.  Ten months later, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made it clear that the heat was still on the good Sisters.  And then this past Thursday, suddenly, the Vatican said, in tones reminiscent of Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella on SNL, “never mind.”  There, gone. Poof.  Just like that.  Oh yes, there’s a new sheriff in town—or to put it more biblically for Law, Lori, Burke, Anderson and co: there came a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. 

As if that wasn’t enough news for one day, on Friday Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop emeritus of Chicago, passed to his eternal reward.  May God be good to him.  I will do a posting on his someday soon.  He was not a bad man, he certainly was not princely (or princessly) as some other prelates chose to be, but he represented that return to hierarchal autocracy that we witnessed during the reigns of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  It will be interesting to see that now that Chicago no longer has a living Cardinal, if the new Archbishop, Blase Cupich, will be given a red hat in the next consistory.  Of course, Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput’s predecessor, Cardinal Rigali turns 80 next Tuesday, freeing up another possible red hat.  Cupich and Chaput are cut from very different cloth.  Chaput, despite his Capuchin/Franciscan background is more of the sort of silk popular in Benedict’s papacy; Cupich, a diocesan priest, is more of the Franciscan homespun.  Yes, it’s true: the Religious take the vow of poverty and the diocesan priests live it.  I have seen it all before.  For the best food and wines, the friars and monks will guide the way. But I digress.  The Red Hat contest is further complicated by the fact that Francis will be the guest of Chaput in September for the World Meeting of Families.  Under the two previous popes, such hospitality was usually acknowledged by a cardinal’s hat for the hosting prelate.  But Francis is quite unpredictable.  Nevertheless, it would be perceived as a snub for Cupich to get the hat and Chaput not, after Chaput had organized the September event.  In the meantime, poor Bill Lori is still sporting a green galero on his coat of arms. I am going to be surprised if that changes in this papacy.  And disappointed.  

Thank You Dear Sisters For Empowering Today's Youth

The Madames at the NYC 

Convent of the Sacred Heart 

on 91st St "Back in the day"

I had some ties to the Convent of the Sacred Heart School on Manhattan’s upper east side back in the late ‘80’s.  Even then I was impressed.  Here you had high-school girls from the wealthiest families in New York volunteering in AIDS shelters back in the day when Doctors were refusing to treat HIV positive patients for fear of a disease we did not yet understand.  This was a school that turned girls into women and prepared them to take their place at the top echelons of whatever career they chose to go into.  But then that was the way that the Religious of the Sacred Heart—those nuns in “back in the day” were known simply as “The Madames”-- approached education.  They were the drill sergeants of the Church’s women marines and they weren’t going to waste their time on the arts of Eisenhower-era housewifery.  So I was delighted a month ago or so to see the following article appear on the local newstation:    

Some high school students in Manhattan are using their math lessons to lend a literal helping hand.  They've created and built a prosthetic using a 3-D printer.  It's not your traditional high school math class. Instead, it's a brilliant blend of math, engineering and problem solving, all with a purpose. With the help of a state-of-the-art 3-D printer and a group called E-NABLE, students at Sacred Heart are now constructing prosthetic hands for children in need.

"It makes you want to go to math class every day, as funny as that might sound," one student said."

And how it all works is surprisingly simple and inexpensive. Through E-NABLE, the students were matched with 16-year-old Justyn, who needs two hands made, as well as Nathanial and Isaac, who are both 6 and need one hand each.  By calculating and scaling each boy's measurements and taking into account their unique personalities, the kids have been creating custom designs.

"We're designing him a Wolverine X-Men-themed hand, which is really exciting," one said.  They are designs that can easily become a reality with the help of the printer.  According to teacher, Tanya Lerch

"One of the biggest things you get that makes you cringe as a teacher is that question, of when are we going to use this in the real world," "So to suddenly have this project where they not only saw how it was helping the real world, but there was a real person receiving it on the other end."

When Lerch first heard of the E-NABLE project, she knew her students would jump on board. Now, the all-girls school on the Upper East Side is one of only a select few in the country participating in the project.

"They're using their heart, they're using their brain, they're here after school working hard when they don't have to be, I think it was a really nice change of pace for them to do something that is helping someone else, and to see that engineering can be used for the good of people."

It's truly a labor of love that will undoubtedly be well received this holiday season. In fact, Nathanial is planning to visit the school next Friday to receive his custom prosthetic in person.

"We take having hands for granted so often, at least I know I do, so I think the fact that we can give a little boy a hand that he doesn't have, it's something that's so simple and absolutely amazing," one student said.

And believe it or not, this is not an expensive endeavor. Granted, these aren't medical-grade prosthetics, but they're functional and only cost about $20 a hand to create.  The staff at Sacred Heart hopes upon seeing this, more schools will jump on board.

The Religious of the Sacred Heart, by the way, are members of LCWR.  This is one of the things that causes the fear and anxiety about the modern nuns of people ranging from Archbishop Lori and Cardinal Burke all the way down the ladder to the Katholik Krazies like our friends at Restore DC Catholicism and The Tenth Crusade (which apparently has moved back to its previous name from being—for a while—What The Pope Really Said.  Why do so many people fear competent nuns?  Is it because they serve as the perfect foil for us to see the incompetency of so many priests and bishops?  Whatever the reason, we need more women like the Religious of the Sacred Heart that can give our future generation both a mission and the tools with which to accomplish it  

Reflections On An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life --It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun V

So the report came out on American Religious women from the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and gave the Sisters a clean bill of health.  This investigation and report needs be differentiated from the ongoing investigation and concerns of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which is not nearly so positive.  The “difference of opinion” between the two Congregations says more about Roman politics and infighting over curial reform than it says about the Sisters, but that is somewhat beside my point in this posting.   The harassment of the Sisters has been political from its inception and now very much reflects the stress between the pro-Francis faction in the Curia and the anti-Francis faction.  This will make it all the more interesting to see if Archbishop Lori of Baltimore gets a red hat in the upcoming February consistory as Lori, along with his mentor Cardinal Law and with Cardinal Burke, has been one of the primary movers in the persecution of the Sisters.  I am not saying not to expect Lori to be made a Cardinal—Pope Francis can be very unpredictable when it comes to balancing out his supporters with opposition members—but just that it will be interesting to see what happens and how it plays out.  But let me get back to the subject of an evangelical renewal of the Religious Life.

In earlier posts I drew eight principles for the renewal of Religious Life from George Weigel’s description of what he means by Evangelical Catholicism in his book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform for the 21^st Century.  I am not advocating Weigel’s program for reform, either for Religious Life or for the Church in general as I think it is in fact anything but evangelical.  I do think, however, that his basic description of Evangelical Catholicism is superb and it is from that description that I picked the eight principles.  We have looked at the first three in previous posts and more recently have been looking at the fourth which is that the integrity of Religious Life—and thus the success of its evangelical renewal—comes from the Religious having a friendship with Christ.  Of course, for any of us to live out our baptismal vocation with any degree of integrity means to live in friendship with Christ.  In the previous post I differentiated piety and spirituality with the claim that piety alone is not sufficient to sustain a truly intimate friendship with Christ and that the Religious—or any Christian—who wants such friendship needs to mature beyond piety into a genuine spirituality.  Now the question arises: what do I mean by “spirituality” and this segues into the next principle which is “This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the scriptures.”

There is no authentic spirituality in the Catholic Tradition that does not find its principal foundation in a prayerful approach to Sacred Scripture.  Dom Jean LeClercq, the great historian of Christian mysticism wrote that in the literature of the Desert Monks the most important source for learning the virtues was the Scriptures and that the goal of the monastic in his or her search for God was to come to know the scriptures by heart.  Now some Religious will argue that they are not monks and that such a principle of spirituality does not apply to them, but as I wrote in an earlier blog that if Religious of any Order or Congregation hope to have any purpose at all it must be that the principal drive of their vocation is the hunger to find God.  And indeed, as I agree with Karl Rahner, that the Christian of the future will either be a mystic or be nothing at all, let me express my opinion that each and every Christian—if they want to persevere in their baptismal vocation—must set themselves on this path to find God.  And there is one language and only one language in which this search can be pursued and that is in the Scriptures.  The Scripture is the Word of God, it is the means by which God communicates God’s Self to us.  A prayer life that is not closely tethered to the reality of the Sacred Scriptures is all too likely to drift off into the lalaland of religious fantasy.  Every acknowledged mystic in the history of Catholicism from Saint Paul to Origen to John Cassian to pseudo Dionysius to Gregory the Great to Gertrude of Helfta to Teresa of Avila to Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross to Thérèse of Lisieux and all those in between peppered their writings or sayings with words from Scripture.  They knew the scriptures inside out because the scriptures provided them the vocabulary of their prayer.  

But beware the Word of God is a two-edged sword and an encounter with the Word will challenge and change one.  It is like a mirror in which we both see ourselves for whom we truly are and for whom we can be if we take that Word seriously and let it refashion us in its own image. 

In the years since Vatican II Catholics have been exposed to the Word of God much more than we had ever been before.  There was a day in which many Catholics were discouraged from reading the Scriptures for fear that they would fall into “Protestant heresy.”  (Talk about not trusting in the Holy Spirit.)  But since the Council we have been accustomed to hearing Scripture read to us at Mass.  Many Catholics belong to Bible Studies or Bible Sharing Groups.  Even more read the scriptures on their own daily or at least several times through the week.  And while we, as a Church, still have a long way to go until exposure to the Word of God reaches each and every Catholic “where we live,” the effects have been incredible.  Reading the Scriptures we see that “Social Justice” is not only the legacy of the prophets, but part of the very warp and woof of Christ’s own Gospel.  Reading the Scriptures we see a vision of Church which is—as Pope Francis speaks of—A Church for the Poor.  Reading the Scriptures we see that the humility of a contrite heart is an even greater gift than one’s own moral righteousness.  Reading the Scriptures we see that the self-appointed judges of others are liable to judgment themselves.  In other words, reading the scriptures we see that God has taken all the fun out of being churchy people and instead challenge us to a personal conversion where we have to leave all we cherish behind if we are to be disciples.

I think this is a huge challenge for Religious today—indeed a huge challenge for any and all who want to lead a full Christian life.  Joan Chittester writes a scathing critique of her fellow Religious that all Religious should take and examine with self-searching honesty.

We started renewal and then left it in mid-flight.  We know that renewal has “slowed down”  we do not realize that we abandoned it.  …we live within all the rules …docile and dutiful, and risk very little to get it, not our reputations, not our clerical connections, not even the peace at our dinner tables.  We want the ministries of the congregation to continue, we tell ourselves, but too often we concentrate more on funding our retirement programs than on subsidizing the ministries that are needed and trusting our retirement programs to take care of themselves if we take care of others, as our foundresses did before us.  We vote in chapter after chapter endorsing postures, positions, and actions that are wildly prophetic and prophetically wild, and then we retire to our separate little worlds and wait for someone else to do them on the grounds that we ourselves are too old, too unprepared, too tired, too involved elsewhere in more important things to shift direction now. Or worse, we support nothing at all that would in any way damage the reputation or the security of the group because “What good will it do to irritate people?,” or so that we can challenge without confronting.  We want the future without having to pay the price to get it.  We regard the local prophets with great suspicion and sink deeper and deeper into ourselves every day. We become old religious sissies, far from the quality of the visionaries who withstood social, political and theological resistance of their time so that we would do the same in ours.

If Religious return to a monastic spirituality in which they forge a friendship with Christ rooted in an ardent attachment to his Word, they can fight this tendency to be “old religious sissies” and their communities can be lively and  life-giving. 

 But if they stay rooted  in the spiritual apathy of some communities or the quasi-spiritual silliness of others or the unhealthy pieties of a revived past that some of the newer communities have embraced, they are ultimately doomed for death.  

Evangelical Catholicism And It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun II

Benedictine Nuns serving Native
Americans at Mission Station in
South Dakota in late 19th century

I want to continue the subject that I wrote about in the last post and that is the importance of a genuine evangelical renewal of Religious Life.  I believe that the renewal of the Religious Life is a critical building block—perhaps the single most critical building block—in the renewal of the Church and consequently of the new Evangelization to which we, as Church, are called in our mission to bring the Gospel message to the post-Christian societies of the developed world.  And while I think that George Weigel nowhere misses the boat more in his book on Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21^st Century Church,  than in his chapter on the renewal of religious life, I do think his description of Evangelical Catholicism is a good starting point for Religious to consider the re-kindling of their vocation in the Church. 

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

From this statement let me draw the following principles

1.    The Religious vocation, like all other vocations in the Church is rooted in the baptismal vocation common to all Christians.

2.    Therefor all Religious, of whatever tradition they belong, are called to participate in the evangelizing mission of the Church

3.    The authenticity and power of the Gospel to which they bear witness will be dependent on their integrity as human persons (human decency)

4.    Their integrity, in turn, flows from their friendship with Christ

5.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the scriptures

6.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by a rich sacramental life

7.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is sustained by a life of deep personal prayer

8.    This friendship with the Risen Lord will bring us into a profound solidarity with the least of his sisters and brothers.  

Let’s start with proposition one.  The Religious vocation, like all other vocations in the Church is rooted in the baptismal vocation common to all Christians.   There are those who want to see Religious as set aside from the rest of the people of God, but the Religious Vocation is essentially a lay vocation.  The Church, by ancient tradition going back into the first centuries, is divided into two segments of equally sacred character, clergy and laity.  Each have their different functions in Christ’s Body (the Church).  All, regardless of their lay or clerical status, are equally called to holiness and all find their vocation to be an expression of our common baptism which is what makes us part of this Body of Christ in the first place.  While some Religious are ordained to the diaconate, the priesthood, and even the episcopacy, the majority of Religious belong to the laity.  The monastic progenitors of the 3^rd and 4^th century were overwhelmingly lay.  Saint Benedict was not ordained.  Francis of Assisi had been a layman at the inception of his Order of Friars Minor but was later induced to be ordained a deacon so that he could be canonically licensed to preach. He always refused to be ordained a priest however.    Teresa of Avila, Louise de Marillac, Jane Frances de Chantal, Madeline Sophie Barat and other founders of Religious Communities of women were, of course, all members of the laity.  Many Religious men, and especially among the monastic and mendicant Orders, do not seek ordination even today.  In almost all monastic and mendicant Orders ordained and non-ordained have total equality and seniority has nothing to do whether or not one is in Orders. Ordained and non-ordained wear the same habit in most communities and among some monastic and mendicant communities both ordained and non-ordained go by the title “Brother” rather than the ordained be distinguished by the title “Father.”  (The mendicant communities are the Franciscans, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Augustinians.) 

Every Religious Order, Society, and Congregation in the Church has its own distinct charism and traditions so it is difficult to generalize among them.  There are some, especially those founded in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, that are often more clerically orientated than the older Orders.  Among communities of Religious women, of course, this distinction doesn’t exist although among some monastic and mendicant communities of enclosed nuns there was a tradition—mostly gone now—of lay sisters and choir sisters.

All this stuff about clericalism in Religious Life is just the whipped cream frosting.  It isn’t the heart of the matter.  The heart of the matter is that Religious Life, of whatever sort, is simply one way to live out one’s baptismal vocation to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.  If it is to have any substance, however, it must differ in some way from the general call of the baptized to live lives of discipleship.  It isn’t a matter—it can’t be a matter—of giving more of our lives to Christ as all the baptized are called to live lives of total commitment.  Perhaps though it can be seen as a call to be more intense, more consciously purposeful, of the universal call to discipleship.  I don’t mean this in an elitist way, but more as those who set the tempo for the race.  We don’t need Religious to wear different clothing (though I am not against Religious habits) or live in some institution that looks like a medieval castle; we need men and women who by their commitment to Christian discipleship make the rest of ask ourselves: why am I not doing that?  Why am I not giving even more of myself?  Am I living my Christian life half-fast (as the internet commercial puns it). 

This brings us to the second principle we can draw from Weigel’s book.  Therefor all Religious, of whatever tradition they belong, are called to participate in the evangelizing mission of the Church.  An evangelical life is an evangelizing life.  There is no purpose to Religious Life if it is not a spark of life to kindle the hearts of all in the Church and beyond the Church to an awareness that there is more that Life offers and that more is Life in Christ.  Saint Francis told his first friars: “Preach the Gospel always; use words only when you must.”   We need Religious to be living witnesses of the Kingdom of God—that Kingdom which is Justice, Peace, and the Joy that comes from the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17).   We don’t need preachy witnesses—we need living witnesses.  Frankly we are tired of hearing people get up in the pulpit and tell us how to live a Christian Life.  We aren’t stupid.  We can read the scripture’s ourselves.  Some of us—a lot of us—seem to know the scriptures a lot better than some of those guys—a lot of those guys—who are up in the pulpit, especially the ones with the long red capes and the self-aggrandizing Latin mumbo jumbo.  I am friends with several communities of enclosed (cloistered) nuns.  I sometimes get invited to give talks on Church history and the history of Religious Life in particular.  Let me tell you, some of the best evangelizing is done by these ladies who rarely leave their monasteries.  You wouldn’t believe how many people find solace sitting in their chapel while the nuns sing Vespers in the afternoon.  You wouldn’t believe how many letters these women get asking for prayers—“for my son who is in Afghanistan” or “for my daughter whose husband left her,” or “for my grandson who has given up the faith,” or “for me, because I am lonely.”  The nuns take these letters seriously.  They pray long hours for their correspondents.  They usually write back.  You don’t have to go out and preach or teach to be an evangelizer.  You just have to be the sort of compassionate soul that witnesses to the broken and disillusioned hearts around you of the infinite compassion of God.  You can do this in a classroom.  You can do this working with the elderly.  You can do this in a hospital.  You can do this driving some old lady to the hair dresser.  You don’t have to be working directly for the Church you just have to keep in mind the way that Saint Thérèse of Lisieux described her vocation: My vocation is to be Love in the Heart of the Church.  That is what we need Religious to be first and foremost: the Love in the Heart of Christ.  Do that and inspire the rest of us to do that and the world will belong to Christ within a generation. 

Weigel says that the truth of our Catholic life will be measured by the way in which we give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from our friendship with Christ.  This is true for all Catholics in our baptismal mission to evangelize, but for Religious I rephrased Weigel to say that  the authenticity and power of the Gospel to which they bear witness will be dependent on their integrity as human persons.  Whether or not Religious wear a distinctive clothing or live in convents is not a primary concern.  What is the primary concern is that they walk the walk of the Gospel.  The various traditions of Religious communities or their distinctive customs or dress are all secondary to the primary focus of living a Gospel life. 

Though not a part of the Religious Life—or to the life of most of the baptized for that matter—but something for all of us to reflect on is that when a man is ordained a deacon, the Bishop hands him the Book of the Gospels and says:

Receive the Gospel of Christ, Whose herald you are.

Believe what you read

Preach what you believe

Live what you preach.

These words have never failed to strike deep into my soul.  This Rite should be transferred from Holy Orders to Baptism/Confirmation.  We are all called to evangelize and we will evangelize not by our glib words (whether from the pulpit or in our blogs) but by our living out the Gospel in our daily lives.  And for Religious, those who set the pace of our striving for Christ and for his Kingdom, it is particularly important.  The caricature of the mean nun in seventh grade is only too well known because there were, in fact, too many of them and there are too many “former” Catholics who alienation from the Church is due to a menopausal bitch in a veil.  On the other hand, there are many of us today whose love for our Catholic faith is owed to the wonderful Religious women (and men) who taught us in school, nursed us in hospital, mentored us in College and University to ask tough and real questions in the search of Truth, and prayed for us every day of their lives.  But integrity is more than kindness, it is fidelity to the ideals towards which we strive.  We have a rather high-end grocery store in our town.  It has lovely things—and you pay somewhat dear not only for the lovely things but for the ordinary box of  Cheerios or box of penne.  I shop there for the olive bar or the fresh bakery but not for the things I can buy much less expensively at Wegmans.  And I am a bit put off when I see our local Franciscan Sisters pushing a cart through the aisles with their overpriced orange juice and canned tuna.  The superior of a local community of friars gets a brand new Ford Explorer every year.  I am not sure what Francis or Dominic would think about that.  I know that I would be more open to his ideas when he talks about our need to reach out to the poor if he drove a Ford Focus like Pope Francis.  I am not judging—or trying not to judge—and I have to get my own house in order, but I want Religious to be more because I want them to make me think about how I can be more oriented to the Kingdom of God in my life.   

Now, if the integrity is to be effective in witnessing, there must not be the sort of barriers that set the Religious off from the rest of the baptized and put them in a separate category by themselves.  If they are not in the exact same race for the Kingdom that we are, they can’t set the pace for the rest of us.  I think this is one of the problems that religious life set before the changes of Vatican II.  The Religious were in a league by themselves and consequently while we admired their fidelity it didn’t challenge us to be more faithful.  Poverty, chastity, and obedience for the sake of the Kingdom were their thing, not ours. 

I have a funny story about religious habits.  Some years ago I was visiting a monastery of cloistered nuns in Saranac Lake and they were telling me a story about a family acquaintance of mine, the local funeral director.   He was a generous benefactor of the nuns and he and his wife and their seven kids would often visit the nuns on a Sunday afternoon.  In those days, you not only were separated from the nuns by an iron grille through which your vision was somewhat blocked, but the nuns on the other side of the grille wore their grate veils.  A grate veil was a common Carmelite custom before Vatican II.  It was a veil that could be pulled down over the nun’s face—somewhat like a widow’s veil—so that one could not see the individual nun.  The nuns had to wear these veils while meeting in the parlor with visitors who were not immediate family.  They did not have to wear them, however, when talking with children.  The Prioress told the parents that if they left the room, the nuns could pin back their veils and talk with the children face to face.  The parents left the room.  The nuns pinned back their veils.  The youngest child—about six at the time—in astonishment said: “Holy shit!  There’re ladies inside those things!”  This was often the problem in the “old church”—the mystique of Religious Life led us to see Religious as someone different than ourselves and thus excused us from the sort of evangelical commitment to which the friar or monk or nun religious priest is called. 

I think that a lot of the anger today about Sisters in ordinary garb or priests being called by their given name has to do with the fact that the Religious or priest has climbed down from the pedestal.  I think this has been a very healthy development—certainly psychologically and spiritually healthy for the Religious or priest, but also healthy for the laity as it reintegrates the consecrated person into the fullness of the Church and lets them inspire the rest of us to a deeper and more intense life of prayer, community, and service that is our baptismal commitment.    To be cont.