Women's religious orders
By Paul Kokoski
The Vatican recently initiated a major reform of women's religious in America. Particularly targeted was the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) which represents about 80 percent of the country's 57,000 women religious. The reform comes in light of a hardened defiance against Catholic morality in areas of family life and human sexuality and is meant to ensure the nuns' fidelity to Catholic teaching in areas including abortion, euthanasia, women's ordination and homosexuality.
While we often hear about the present day priest shortage, few seem aware that all religious communities, great and small, male and female, contemplative, active or mixed, if not strictly decimated, have been reduced to a fraction of their former selves in the course of the past fifty years. In Canada, the U.S. and Western Europe, nuns are vanishing at an alarming rate. A recent study by the U. S. National Religious Vocation Conference found the number of nuns in the United States had fallen a stunning 66% over the past four decades. In Canada, there are 19,000 nuns, down 54% from 42,000 in 1975. Indeed, at the beginning of the sixties, Quebec was the region of the world with the highest number of women religious in relation to the population. Today, all sociologists agree that unless there is a reversal of the present trend, women's religious life as we have known it will be only a memory in Canada.
Pope Benedict XVI has reduced the problem mainly to a certain "radical feminism" that has crept into women's religious orders causing an identity crisis among active orders and congregations. Women religious, the pope says, have turned away from theology and sought liberation in psychologists and psychoanalysts who can only say at most how the forces of the mind function but not why and to what purpose.
After Vatican II, religious communities began every kind of reform imaginable: abandonment of the religious habit, degrees at secular universities, insertion into secular professions, a massive reliance on every type of "specialist". Not surprisingly, modern secular values were often uncritically adopted and the concept of "love of neighbor" was soon replaced by that of "social welfare". In the process Christianity gradually became reduced to an ideology of doing. Pope John Paul II later warned against this minimalist approach saying that the true leaders are those who are "profoundly rooted in contemplation and prayer. Ours is a time of continual movement which often leads to restlessness, with the risk of 'doing for the sake of doing'. We must resist this temptation by trying to be, before trying to do."
A major cause of the decay is a distorting of the evangelical councils by taking them as a psychological and sociological outlook rather than as a special state of life structured in accordance with the counsel Christ gives in the Gospels. True renewal means an adaptation of external activities with a view to a more effective pursuit of holiness. It is begotten by a disgust with weakening of discipline and by a desire for a life that is more spiritual, more prayerful and more austere. Post conciliar reform tends to move from the difficult to the easy or less difficult rather than from the easy to the difficult or more difficult. Today, a religious order questions itself, confronts experiences, demand creativity, searches for a new identity (which implies that it is becoming something other than itself), moves toward building "true communities" (as if for centuries past religious orders had consisted entirely of false communities).
Ultimately the crisis among religious is the result of an excessive conforming to the world, and a taking up of the world's positions because one has despaired of winning the world over to one's own. A by no means small or unimportant sign of this alienation is the change in the dress of members of religious orders, inspired by a wish that it should no longer differ from that of secular persons.
This drift in reform of religious life today is parallel to the one governing the reform of the priesthood. On the one hand there is the obfuscation of the difference between the sacramental priesthood and the priesthood of all believers; and on the other, of the difference between a state of perfection and the common state. What is specific to religious life is washed out or watered down in thought and behaviour. Take for example, the three evangelical councels (chastity, poverty, obedience) that are essential to religious life. Today, there is a certain distaste for chastity. A certain decline in delicacy and care are obvious not only in the widespread slackness in clerical dress, but in the more frequent mixing of the sexes, even on journeys, and in the abandonment of the precautions adopted even by great and holy men.
In regards to poverty there is a habitual and at times uncontrollable use of such technology as the television and internet. Of all the councels, obedience is the one where the drift towards relaxation in religious orders shows itself most clearly. The concept of obedience has been lowered by lowering the principle of authority and mixing it up with a kind of fraternal relationship by means of a fruitful dialogue. True Catholic obedience, however, implies submission to the will of the superior -so long as the command is not manifestly illicit - and not a re-examination of the superior's command by the one obeying. Catholic obedience does not seek a coinciding of the wills of subject and superiors. Such an agreement negates any sacrifice of one's own will by conforming it to somebody else's. It ultimately produces self-government, self-teaching, self-education and even self-redemption.
