| At Call to Action, stories show softer side to
disputes
By TOM ROBERTS
NCR Staff
Milwaukee
A quiet irony was at work when two women religious, known
primarily for their celebrated jousts with Rome, took the stage during the
opening session of the recent Call to Action national conference in
Milwaukee.
Two stories emerged that shed light on a different, human side of
the disputes that School Sister of Notre Dame Jeannine Gramick and Mercy Sr.
Theresa Kane have had with the institution. The two continue to work on behalf
of reform issues, but the tales that surfaced showed that behind deep
disagreements may be room for moments of accord and respect between those on
opposite sides of divisive issues in the church.
The stories represented a kind of alternative leaven for a
conference that otherwise maintained its historically edgy relationships with
the church, through its persistent calls for renewal and reform, and with the
world, through its growing commitment to themes of justice and human
rights.
The tales surfaced in different ways. In the case of Gramick, it
was through a public recounting at the opening night session of the conference,
which drew more than 3,000 from around the country to the Midwest Express
Convention Center in downtown Milwaukee.
Kane’s account, on the other hand, circulated primarily
through her religious community and, gradually, to a wider public.
The evening opened with Kane receiving Call to Action’s 1999
Leadership Award in a presentation that recalled her welcome, on behalf of
religious women, to the pope during his first trip to the United States in
1979. Kane at the time was president of the Leadership Conference of Women
Religious and urged the pope to open “all ministries of our church to
women.” The award recognized the significance of that moment in spurring
wide discussion of the topic of ordination of women and women’s rights
generally within the church.
In the 20 years since, in every recounting of that encounter
before 5,000 sisters at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington,
the two are cast as combatants. And there is substantial reason for that
perception. Pope John Paul II has attempted to remove the matter of
women’s ordination from even the remotest consideration, while Kane and
others remain unceasing advocates of women’s rights within the church,
including ordination.
So Kane, who now teaches at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.,
and volunteers at a Bronx shelter for women and children, said she was moved,
after all these years, to receive a personal greeting from the pope. “I
was surprised, pleasantly surprised. It was a pleasant greeting to
receive,” she said.
As Kane, who confirmed the story and elaborated for NCR,
tells it, Sr. Sharon Euart, associate general secretary of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops and also a Mercy Sister, was with a group of
U.S. bishops who met in October of 1998 with the pope in Rome. The pope, when
he was told that Euart was a Mercy sister, asked if she knew Sr. Kane. When she
said yes, the pope asked about Kane, if she was still active and what she was
doing. Euart reportedly told the pope what she knew, and then he said,
“Give my regards to Sr. Kane.”
Some time later, when the meeting was ending and goodbyes were
being said, Pope John Paul took Euart’s hand and told her to remember his
message and “be sure to give Sr. Kane my greetings.”
Euart confirmed that she had conveyed the message, but said that
while she had no objection to Kane telling the story, she felt constrained from
adding any details for press reports because she “considered it a private
exchange at the time.” The story, however, was told in detail earlier this
year when the Mercy sisters held their chapter meeting in St. Louis.
Gramick told of a serendipitous or perhaps providential encounter.
Earlier this year, Gramick and Salvatoran Fr. Robert Nugent were banned by
order of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, from any pastoral work with gay and lesbian Catholics. The
ruling was the culmination of nearly two decades of intense scrutiny by church
leaders in the United States and in Rome. Gramick said she would attempt to
have the ruling reversed.
The story Gramick tells occurred about a year before the ruling on
a flight from Rome to Munich. She had visited Rome to meet with her superior to
pray and discuss how to respond to the latest exchange in the long legal
process.
The two decided to visit the grave of the order’s founder in
Munich.
On the plane they saw a man dressed in a black suit, who looked
like Cardinal Ratzinger, but who was not wearing a Roman collar or other
clearly clerical garb.
The seats next to the man were empty, so Gramick, curious, sat
down and began chatting. She asked if he was a priest, and he said yes. She
said she was a School Sister of Notre Dame from the United States.
He said he knew the order because his father’s sister was a
member.
“And what is her name?” asked Gramick.
“Ratzinger,” was the response.
“I’m Sister Jeannine Gramick,” she said.
“Ah, I’ve known you for 20 years,” he replied.
The Austrian cardinal and the U.S. nun then had a conversation
that Gramick describes as “delightful.”
“He was very gracious,” she said. The conversation
covered her past as a mathematician and her awareness in the late 1970s of the
deep alienation of gay and lesbian Catholics and the need for a ministry to
them.
She and her superior were going to Munich in pursuit of a miracle,
she said. She mused that perhaps the chance meeting with Ratzinger was a
miracle all its own. In the years of answering questions for the Vatican,
Gramick and her order had repeatedly asked for a meeting with Ratzinger.
“But that’s not part of the process,” Gramick told
the Call to Action gathering. She said that several times during their
conversation Ratzinger called their meeting “providence” and
“providential.”
“I believe he was doing what he thought was right, just as I
am doing what I think is right,” she told the assembly.
Despite the ultimate ruling, she urged her listeners to refrain
from “demonizing” those who are on opposing sides of issues. The
meeting, she said in a later interview, “put a human face on the
institution” and convinced her that she “can’t let ideological
differences put a distance between Catholics.” She said she
“can’t attribute unworthy motives” to those who oppose her.
“They are just as sincere as we are.”
Instead, she said, Catholics “have to raise up how processes
within the church don’t reflect human values.” People should work,
she said, to change the structures that prohibit dialogue and end up excluding
people who challenge authority.
To that end, she said, she will continue to appeal the ruling and
to talk about her case and the issue of gay and lesbian Catholics.
If there was an air of rapprochement in the Kane and Gramick
stories, it did not blunt the call for reform, a call that would appear to be
picking up momentum in membership numbers and financial support for the
organization.
According to Call to Action officials, the organization,
headquartered in Chicago and highly concentrated in the Midwest, is at its
highest membership level ever, approximately 20,500, with a geographic spread
that keeps increasing each year. This year alone saw expansion of chapters in
Texas, Washington, New Mexico, New York and Indiana, with informal groups in
various stages of development in Georgia, North Carolina and Missouri.
A $500,000 fund drive, named in honor of Patty Crowley of Chicago,
a leading church reform figure, has already crossed the $400,000 mark as the
public phase of the campaign begins.
The fund will help the organization with regional development as
well as with outreach to ethnic groups and young people and with establishing
an international network.
A strong call for renewal came from Bishop Raymond Lucker of New
Ulm, Minn., who, during one of the workshops, referred to those attending the
conference as “holy people of God”
A central question today, he said, is “how do we foster a
more adequate dialogue concerning many of the serious pastoral concerns that we
face as a church?”
He cited changes in past church teachings. For instance, the
teaching that once held that the human race began with Adam and Eve eventually
changed to accept the possibility that humanity may have developed as a group
at an unspecific moment “at the dawn of creation.” The first teaching
was promulgated in 1950 in an encyclical that stated, according to Lucker,
“that once a teaching on a controversial matter is declared by an
encyclical, the issue is closed. Fifteen years later it was changed.”
That was also the case with teaching that held “that
membership in the church of Jesus Christ is made up of those who are Roman
Catholics.” Again, at the Second Vatican Council that teaching was changed
to speak of membership in the church as broader than just the Roman Catholic
church.
“We have come to realize that popes in encyclicals and in
official teachings have made mistakes,” he said.
Earlier he emphasized, “We’re not speaking here about
infallible teaching. Dissent from that would be heresy. We’re not speaking
here about definitive teaching. The opposite of that would be error. What
we’re talking about is authoritative teachings, which is another way of
saying this is the best we can do at this point.”
Disagreement with such teachings including “ordination of
married men or the involvement of women in every aspect of church life and
ministry” will lead to dissent, he said.
While dissent has taken on negative connotations, it can be good
for the church. “A thoughtful critic is a friend. And yes, dissent within
the church has pastoral and doctrinal, practical limits. But within that
framework, dissent can play a very healthy role in the life of the
church.”
Lucker added that central to any renewal would have to be reform
of the Roman curia, which he termed “one of the obstacles to the ongoing
reform of the church.”
National Catholic Reporter, November 19,
1999
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