The New Age and the Nuns.

Have American liberal nuns gotten so mired in New Age wackiness that they've lost their Christian faith.

In other words, the LCWR has continually shown its willingness—nay, its desire—to sever communion with the Church. Period. It is at a point of no return. Card. Müller notes the LCWR's fixation on New Age guru Barbara Marx Hubbard, a proponent of "Conscious Evolution":

We have even seen some religious Institutes modify their directional statements to incorporate concepts and undeveloped terms from Conscious Evolution.

Again, I apologize if this seems blunt, but what I must say is too important to dress up in flowery language. The fundamental theses of Conscious Evolution are opposed to Christian Revelation and, when taken unreflectively, lead almost necessarily to fundamental errors regarding the omnipotence of God, the Incarnation of Christ, the reality of Original Sin, the necessity of salvation and the definitive nature of the salvific action of Christ in the Paschal Mystery.

My concern is whether such an intense focus on new ideas such as Conscious Evolution has robbed religious of the ability truly to sentire cum Ecclesia. To phrase it as a question, do the many religious listening to addresses on this topic or reading expositions of it even hear the divergences from the Christian faith present?

That final sentence is especially notable, I think, because Card. Müller is openly and publicly asking, in all seriousness, if the LCWR leadership even has the capacity—spiritually, theologically—to recognize falsehood and dissent, and to step away from it. Well, after forty years, I think the answer is quite clear. 

First, keep in mind that this is not all nuns.

Second, keep in mind that this is the collection of nuns that are dying on the vine.

Third, the orthodox nuns are growing

Turns out that some nuns are grateful to the CDF.

Like a lot of mainstream Protestants in liberal denominations, it turns out that there are nuns who see their congregations dying a slow, self-inflicted death because of the embrace of wacky theology by their disengaged leadership.

Ann Carey writes:

Additionally, the CDF document emphasizes that the initiative is addressed only to the LCWR, a 1,500-member organization to which many leaders of women’s religious orders belong. The initiative is not directed to the other 54,000 sisters in the United States who do not belong to the LCWR, though press reports have tended to confuse this point and characterize all sisters as members of the LCWR.

This is quite incorrect, and many sisters who are in LCWR-related orders have contacted this writer to emphasize that they have neither membership, voice or vote in the LCWR, and they do not appreciate being associated with the organization. In fact, many sisters in LCWR-related orders are quite pleased about the CDF action. As one such sister wrote in an e-mail: “I am so grateful to Pope Benedict and to all in Rome and in the USA who have contributed to this resolution. It has been a long nightmare and a severe cross for 40-plus years!”

And:

Over the years, Catholic liturgies at LCWR meetings and assemblies were edged out in favor of New Age rituals and para-liturgies led by women. Workshops and speakers tended to focus on social and political issues rather than ecclesial, as evidenced by the resolutions passed at the 2000 LCWR assembly: To work for legislation to bring people out of poverty; for better working conditions for laborers in factories along the U.S.-Mexico border; and support for a “global peace force.”

Bad Religion.

Fr. Neri points out the departure from Catholic doctrine that has been embraced by the LCWR:

Just in case anyone out there is unclear about the reasons for the CDF's assessment of the LCWR's theological sanity, here's an excerpt from their 2012 assembly keynote speaker:

Although we may never know what really happened, we do know that the story told in the Gospels is that Jesus’ resurrection was a first demonstration of what I call the post-human universal person. We are told that he did not die. He made his transition, released his animal body, and reappeared in a new body at the next level of physicality to tell all of us that we would do what he did. The new person that he became had continuity of consciousness with his life as Jesus of Nazareth, an earthly life in which he had become fully human and fully divine. Jesus’ life stands as a model of the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo universalis.

Read the rest of the post for Fr. Neri's "fisking" of this bit of theological drool.

The Wedge Strategy - Is the "crackdown" on American women religious a countermeasure?

Te De Laudemas points to this surprisingly even-handed PBS report on the Vatican's attempt to reign in the loony-tune aspect of Catholic religious women's institutions.

The sane Catholic position is set forth by Donna Bethel as follows:

The second point is that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is an entity established by the Vatican, approved by the Vatican, its statutes approved by the Vatican for the purpose of supporting the Women Religious in their life and work. And so it's the responsibility of the Vatican to see that the conference is actually doing its job. And that's what it's done in this assessment.

The feminist position was articulated by Jeannine Hill Fletcher:

The other thing that the document does is, it criticizes the Women Religious for the things that they seem to be thinking or discussing or exploring. It criticizes their theological investigations within their own private conference, within their discussions among themselves.

And I think that that's a real -- one of the real problems for me as a scholar of women and religion is the document seems to be trying to tell Women Religious to stop exploring the dynamics of the faith and simply take the tradition as it's been handed to them. And I think that that's one fundamental difference.

Except, of course, that it is not "their own private religious conference." It is a Catholic organization and there are actually some settled Catholic distinctives.

You have to wonder about the timing of all this. The Vatican move has taken years to put together - but in light of the effort by the secular state and media and intellectuals to put a wedge between the hierarchical church and the laity, it almost seems that this is a countermove to eliminate a "Fifth Column."

And it appears that the women religious have been playing the role of Fifth Columnists. As Te Deum Laudemas points out:

The LCWR has effectively worked against the bishops in these "culture of life" issues, and on sexual morality. I say, "effectively" because they, and those with whom they collaborate, have worked the media and the White House like a well tuned orchestra. In fact, it was so effective, that the Obama administration admitted it didn't go to the US Catholic bishops to work through the Catholic issues on the HHS mandate; rather, it consulted "other groups" of Catholics.

Note: "LCWR" is the "Leadership Conference of Women's Religious."

During the recent HHS mandate controversy, the White House and leftist media appealed to groups other than the Bishops as being the "real" representatives of the Catholic Church.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and faithful Catholics, together with thousands of other religious leaders and their congregations, restated their opposition to the mandate and to the promised “accommodation.” But the President dismissed their concerns, knowing that his anti-life, anti-marriage, and anti-family policies had already permanently alienated these groups. That they should now be further disaffected by this assault on conscience and religious liberty is of little consequence to him. He instead elicited support from those “progressive” Catholics he knew would accept and promote the illusion that his “accommodation” corrects the abuses in the mandate.

He was right in thinking that his sleight of hand would give them an excuse to turn a blind eye to the truth of the matter. The CHA-USA and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) proclaimed their support for the “accommodation.” The latter group expressed its appreciation to the President for restructuring the mandate “in a way that respects the conscience rights of religious institutions.” The University of Notre Dame and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities also voiced their support for the “accommodation.” President Obama had succeeded in dividing Catholic opposition and in muting the voice of the bishops through the pronouncements of these dissident groups.