Cover
story Nuns
firm under fire
By PATTY McCARTY
NCR Staff Dublin, Ireland
Under Vatican threat of serious
penalties, Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister addressed June 30 the first
international conference for womens ordination groups around the world.
Based on letters sent to her superior and conversations with canonical
advisors, Chittister said she believed she could be expelled from her religious
order or excommunicated.
Under a similar Vatican threat, Notre Dame de Namur Sr. Myra Poole
of London came out of retreat and addressed the conference on the same day.
Poole, who played a major role in organizing the conference, had also been
ordered by the Vatican to stay away.
Sr. Christine Vladimiroff, prioress of Chittisters
community, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pa., declined to deliver to
Chittister a March 20 Vatican order forbidding her to speak or attend. The
order, a formal precept of obedience, was in the context of a letter to
Vladimiroff from the Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life.
Vladimiroff could also face just penalties, which, under the
churchs Code of Canon Law, could include her removal as prioress.
All three women said they had agonized over their decisions to
disobey Vatican orders, which derive from a 1995 church ban on even discussion
of womens ordination. Chittister was among conference participants who
said the Vaticans intervention had turned what would have been a quiet,
though international, conference into a watershed in the movement for
womens ordination to the Catholic priesthood.
In response to an NCR inquiry after the conference, though,
the Vatican appeared to soften its stance. Archbishop Piergiorgio Silvano
Nesti, secretary of the congregation, directed questions on the matter to the
Vatican press office. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told NCR,
The Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and the Societies
of Apostolic Life believed that the participation of the two female religious
in the womens ordination conference would not be opportune without the
permission of their superior generals. The congregation has not taken -- in
this case -- disciplinary measures into consideration.
Vladimiroff said she was gratified by the statement. It represents
a major step forward, she said, in that it suggests a willingness to dialogue
and recognizes the legitmate role of a religious superior in decisions
affecting members of her community.
Some 370 participants from 27 countries attended the conference,
held June 29-July 1 at University College Dublin. The event was sponsored by
Womens Ordination Worldwide and hosted by an Irish group known as BASIC
(Brothers and Sisters in Christ). Womens Ordination Worldwide was founded
in 1996 as an umbrella organization over womens ordination groups and
movements around the world. Poole was the organizations first
chairperson.
Many delegates were from womens ordination groups in their
own countries. Participants gathered to discuss, plan and pray about what one
of the events organizers called the wonderfully disturbing gift of
womens ordination.
The Vatican issued its ban on discussion in November 1995,
declaring Pope John Paul IIs Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, to be
infallible teaching requiring definitive assent. In that document,
issued in May 1994, the pope said the church has no authority to confer
priestly ordination on women.
The threats applied to the three nuns derive from canon 1371 in
the churchs 1983 Code of Canon Law. The canon says that Catholics who
teach a doctrine condemned by the pope or a council, or who refuse to comply
with legitimate precepts or prohibitions of the Holy See, or of an
ecclesiastical superior, are to be punished with a just
penalty.
Precept of obedience
Canon law provides for removal of superiors in religious orders
for violating church teaching or law. Chittister said she had been advised that
attending or speaking at the conference could result in expulsion from her
order, excommunication or interdict -- a formal ban from all the
sacraments.
Vladimiroff and canonical advisors met May 28 with members of the
Vatican Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life, the curial office
that deals with matters pertaining to religious orders.
The day before she left for the conference, Chittister told
NCR in a telephone interview that she was waiting for Vladimiroff to
hand her the precept of obedience, as the Vatican required. Chittister had
already decided to disobey the order. But it never came.
Instead, during evening prayer Vladimiroff read a letter
shed written to Vatican officials explaining why she felt she was unable
to deliver the precept and invited all 128 active nuns in the community to add
their signatures to the letter.
Only one of the 128 nuns declined to sign. Nuns in the community
then gave Chittister a special blessing. After that, Vladimiroff
said, we had dinner together. Thats what families do.
When Chittister spoke at the meeting here, she noted that some of
the nuns who signed did so from wheelchairs. Further, she said, 35 of the
younger nuns had taken another step: They signed a statement asking that any
punishment meted out by the Vatican to Chittister be given to them as well.
Chittister carried the signatures of the 35 with her.
Before the meeting, Soline Vatinel, cofounder of the 180-member
BASIC with her husband, Colm Holmes, put out the word that no women were to be
ordained at the conference, squelching rumors that ordinations could occur.
Conference sponsors called attention to the conference by erecting seven
billboards in five Irish cities, three in Dublin (including one across from the
residence of Cardinal Desmond Connell), one each in Cork, Limerick and Galway
and one in Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Vatican moves to chill the gathering may not have been confined to
warning Catholic nuns.
Aruna Gnanadason, an official of the World Council of Churches and
a member of the United Church of India, in early May withdrew her commitment to
be the meetings keynote speaker. Gnanadason coordinates the
councils Justice, Peace and Creation team, with special responsibility
for the womens program.
Regarding Gnanadasons withdrawal, Vatinel told the The
Irish Times, The official reason was that the World Council of
Churches said it didnt want to interfere in the internal affairs of the
Catholic church. The unofficial reason was that the Vatican said it would
withdraw from commissions involving the World Council of Churches if Ms.
Gnanadason spoke at the conference. Catholics constitute half the
membership of the councils Faith and Order Commission.
Vatinel told NCR that her information about the unofficial
reason came from friends of Gnanadason.
However, a spokesperson for the World Council of Churches said,
It is not correct to say we had pressure from the Vatican, even though
that would be a very enticing story. Of course, she added, I cannot
monitor internal conversations of [council] officials.
Chittister, author of some 20 books and one of Americas
best-known nuns, said she had gone through weeks of turmoil and hours of
discussion with her prioress and other members of her order before deciding to
honor her commitment to speak.
How is it that the church can call other institutions to
deal with women as full human beings made in the image of God when their
humanity is precisely what the church itself holds against them in the name of
God? Chittister said in her talk, titled Discipleship for a
Priestly People in a Priestless Period. She referred to the churchs
refusal to ordain women because they are physically unlike Jesus, a man.
To preach a theology of equality and at the same time
maintain a theology of inequality, a spirituality of domination that bars half
of the human race on the basis of gender from full participation and [that] in
the name of God says that women have no place in the dominion of the church and
the development of doctrine, is to live a lie, she said. In a global age,
what was once a hierarchy of human kind is coming to be seen for what it
is: the oppression of human kind, she said. The church preaches the
equality of women but does nothing to demonstrate it in its own structures.
Ecclesiology of superiority
Chittister, recovering from surgery and walking with a thick,
carved cane, told NCR after her talk, This isnt an
ordination question. This is a question of freedom of speech, of human rights,
authority, adulthood and development of doctrine in the church. This is a
question of the sensus fidelium [the sense of the faithful].
This is a strong doctrine of the church -- the primacy of
conscience -- in conflict with its position on women priests, she said.
Chittister said Vladimiroff and others had been in dialogue with Vatican
officials in an effort to help them understand monastic obedience.
Its not like military obedience, she said. Benedictines
see authority as relational. We do not see a prioress as having a base of
power.
Benedictines have been around for 1,500 years, Chittister told the
conference. We survived the Dark Ages, feudalism, two world wars.
Were not going to let a little letter from Rome get us down.
At the end of her talk, Chittister received a long standing
ovation.
In a telephone interview after her talk, Chittister expanded on
the difference between the hierarchical or military model and the
Benedictine model of obedience. We dont give people orders,
she said. We give them information, and on the basis of their sense of
responsibility and their own discernment, they make decisions. And we support
those decisions. We trust those decisions.
Both Chittister and Vladimiroff said the basis of their decisions
was a strong sense that they would be violating their own integrity as
individuals and as religious women if they followed the Vaticans
directives.
Vladimiroff, 61, said, I felt it would be a lack of
integrity on my part to give a precept for something I do not agree with. I
cannot accept an order of silencing.
Secondly, she said, no religious superior should
be put in the position that I have been put in: to deliver a precept from Rome
to a community member. The relationship between a community member and her
superior is sacred.
She said the decision had been extremely difficult.
Extremely. I love the church. In my role as prioress I need to protect the
community and to support Joan, and all those forces had to be in
play.
My community met many times around this issue, giving me
counsel and advice, Vladimiroff said, and I met many times with
Joan. It was a discernment process. We are looking at obedience from the
position of people who live in this tradition, and the Vatican is looking at it
from a tradition of canon law. The norms are different.
Vladimiroff, an Erie Benedictine since 1957, has been the
communitys prioress since 1998. Benedictines are organized as autonomous
communities who join together in federations. Unlike many other religious
orders, Benedictines have no single authority in Rome.
In a statement issued to the press, Vladimiroff said, My
decision should in no way indicate a lack of communion with the
church.
Chittister said in the telephone interview, Sr. Christine
told me of the Vaticans concern that my participation in the conference
would not be good for the church. Curial officials had told Vladimiroff
that religious have to be in communion with the church at all
times.
My discerned judgment was, after checking with a lot of
people, that what was bad for the church was not discussion but the oppression
of ideas, the silencing of people, the repression of conversation, the
reflection that leads to doctrinal development. Thats whats not
good for the church.
I did not do this in defiance of the church,
Chittister said. I did this because the best history of the church is in
discussion. To suppress discussion, Chittister said, is a sin against the
Holy Spirit.
It didnt work with Humanae Vitae, she
said, referring to the 1968 papal encyclical banning artificial means of
contraception, which is widely ignored. There was no public
discernment on that issue. People didnt own that. Its
affected the church negatively ever since.
The other nun ordered to stay away from the conference, Myra
Poole, had decided after what friends described as great suffering
to comply with the Vatican directive, and during the first half of the
conference she stayed away. She was staying south of Dublin praying for the
success of the conference, a friend, Dorothea McEwan, also of London, told
NCR.
Late Saturday afternoon at the close of a panel of women from
Hungary, Brazil, South Africa, Uganda, Mexico and Japan, Poole bounded up the
steps of the speakers platform and took the microphone. Poole was largely
responsible for arranging for the attendance of women whose voices are less
frequently heard on church topics.
Poole, 68, said, The spirit of Julie Billiart is here in
this room. The statement honored the founder of her order, the Sisters of
Notre Dame de Namur, and was also a plug for Pooles new book about
Billiarts spirituality, Prayer, Protest and Power, published by
Canterbury Press and available at the conference along with other books on
women in the church.
The church is in grave error on the question of womens
ordination, Poole told the group. I have been a member of my
community for 42 years. I will never leave the Catholic church. I will never
leave my community.
Poole told the reporters who immediately circled her, I had
to speak for the women of the developing world. On Vatican efforts to
squelch the conference, she said, Its tied into violence against
women.
Following her meetings with reporters, Poole greeted Genevieve
Chavez of Las Cruces, N.M., executive director of Womens Ordination
Conference, a U.S. group that marked its 25th anniversary last fall. Thirteen
of the groups 14 board members were at the conference.
At the end of May, Poole and her superior in Rome were summoned to
the Vatican, The Irish Times reported. In addition, she has had three
letters from the Vatican related to the conference. Pooles order is based
in Rome.
Speaking in Gnanadasons stead was the Rev. Rose
Hudson-Wilkin, a Jamaican Anglican who explained how, as vicar of two London
East End congregations, she faced rejections along with the welcomes.
Its been a bit of a double whammy -- being a woman and black.
Hudson-Wilkin pointed to all the energy taken up preventing
women from contributing to the full life of the church. Women are being
barred from ordination by so-called gatekeepers, who know more than God
and who dare to say that they know the will of God, and women play no
significant part in that, she said.
Two speakers had nothing to fear from the Vatican. One was Nobel
Peace Prize winner Máiread Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of the Community
of Peace People in Northern Ireland.
Maguire said in her talk, Many people are coming to see that
this kind of theological argument based on biology is nonsense. She
described the Vaticans stance as spiritual violence against
women.
Spiritual violence against
women
The other was John Wijngaards, who resigned from the priesthood in
1998 to protest the popes apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem
(In Defense of the Faith), which placed discussion of womens
ordination under severe penalty. Wijngaards, who holds a doctorate from
Gregorian University in Rome, served 14 years in India and was for six years
head of the Mill Hill Missionaries, maintains that Romes arguments
against the ordination of women are untenable from a scriptural and theological
point of view.
In the question period following his afternoon talk, Wijngaards
drew laughter when he offered this proposal for nudging ahead the cause of
women priests: plan an event and pray it stirs controversy.
Also attending the conference was Fr. Eamonn McCarthy, who has
been denied an appointment in his Dublin archdiocese for more than a year, ever
since he defied a request from Cardinal Connell that he refrain from commenting
on women priests.
Connell made no statement about the conference. It was an
unofficial event, and the churchs teaching is clear, Ronan Mullen,
the archbishops spokesman said July 3.
The danger is, if we focus on the impossible, we may lose
sight of the possible -- the urgent need for renewal in the church,
Mullen said. To fulfill the teachings of Vatican II, he said, laymen and
women must become more knowledgeable and active in living the faith and in
giving witness to it in the workplace, as educators, parents and participants
in public life.
On the final day of the conference, those attending adopted 11
resolutions, including one calling on the pope to revoke the ban on discussion
of womens ordination.
Participants described the conference as historic in that it marks
the beginning of a coordinated worldwide movement for ordination of Catholic
women. Vatinel declared, Its success exceeded our wildest dream.
Former Jesuit William Callahan of the Quixote Center in Baltimore
said the meeting takes away the myth the Vatican has promulgated that
this is a North American movement.
Vladimiroff, Chittisters prioress, said of the
Vaticans post-conference statement: Its heartening to me that
the Vatican would continue the dialogue so that there would be better
understanding between religious communities place in the church and the
role of religoius leadership in their communities and with the churchs
hierarchy. This will be great news for religoius all over the world, because
its been difficult for religious to establish that kind of dialogue. We
want to be able to exercise leadership within our communities and want our
judgment to be trusted.
We have simply asked, and they seemed to have heard
us.
Of the 350 attending the conference, nearly 300 who had
pre-registered were women, and about 30 of those were nuns. Before the
conference opened, registrants included 93 from Ireland, 82 from the united
States, 67 from England, four from Northern Ireland, 20 from Germany, 11 from
France, seven each from Austria and Scotland, six from Australia, five each
from Spain, Holland and South Africa, three each from India and Mexico, two
each from Japan, Portugal and Uganda and one each from Kenya, Ghana, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Denmark and Hungary.
Velisiwe Mary Mikhwanazi of Durban, South Africa, said, The
most important thing to take home is the spirit of solidarity.
The assembly defeated one resolution, which called for withholding
of the Peters Pence payment to Rome and redirecting contributions to
organizations that support the ordination of women. It narrowly failed to get
the 60 percent required to pass.
Other resolutions adopted called for:
- Women to study for the diaconate and priesthood, along with
provision of suitable training courses where they are not available to women;
- Ministers in all churches to use gender-neutral language in
liturgies;
- Women and men who have been punished for their support of
womens ordination to tell their stories and make public the
Vaticans actions. In some cases, such penalties, some involving prominent
theologians, have become public only years later.
The conference closed with a colorful liturgy. Many participants
wore purple stoles, a symbol of priesthood. and of the movement. There was no
official celebrant. Instead, all participants joined in blessing the bread and
wine.
Some reporting for this story was done by NCR staff
members in Kansas City, Mo., NCR Vatican correspondent John L. Allen
Jr., and Patricia Lefevere, a correspondent in New Jersey.
National Catholic Reporter, July 13,
2001
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