THE PULPIT: Vatican investigates U.S. sisters. Why?

Some Catholic experts say sisterhoods are the Rodney Dangerfield of the Catholic Church. They don’t get no respect — especially from the Vatican.

If these folks ever needed ammo for their argument, it came last December, when the Vatican embarked on a three-year investigation of the 341 Catholic sisterhoods in the U.S. In spring, it started investigating the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 95 percent of the 59,000 U.S sisters.

The Vatican says it’s examining “the quality of life” in convents, according to the Web site apostolicvisitation.org, created by church authorities to answer questions about the investigation. But critics say it’s a pretext to reign in nuns who have embraced the liberalism of the Second Vatican Council, a meeting of church heads in the 1960s to update the faith. Decisions in Vatican II included allowing nuns to live in apartments and wear regular clothes rather than the habit and veil, and allowing Mass to be said in the vernacular rather than in Latin.

As part of the investigation, U.S. sisterhoods must submit a completed questionnaire to the Vatican by Nov. 20. On-site interviews of sisters will begin soon after. The Vatican says it will not reveal the findings to order heads, and has given no indication of what it plans to do with the findings.

Most sisters, including the combined 96 at Benet Pines and Mount St. Francis monasteries in Colorado Springs, won’t talk about the investigation. The Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs will say only that, as with other U.S. dioceses, the Vatican has asked it to help pay the $1.1 million cost of the inquiry. The diocese has not decided if it will pony up.

The Rev. Donald Cozzens, former rector of St. Mary Seminary in Cleveland, Ohio, told me the Vatican wants to determine why sisterhoods are declining in numbers. “But I also feel there is another factor operating — a grave suspicion about religious life in the U.S., a suspicion I think is misplaced,” he said.

Paul Lakeland, director of Catholic studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut, said the inquiry is a “scandal.”

He pointed out how U.S. sisters have started hospitals and schools, and more often than not are highly educated.

“It astonishes that in a church where we have so many problems that they would go after the strength of the church,” Lakeland said.

A sister who teaches at a U.S. Jesuit theology school in Berkeley, and who wanted to remain anonymous, said the inquiry is driven by a patriarchal institution that doesn’t understand women.

“They’d like us in veils and habits,” she told me. “They don’t have much experience dealing with adult, intelligent and educated women.

“That is not their idea of a good sister.”

For more interviews and information on the investigation, go to my blog, “The Pulpit,” at www.thepulpit.freedomblogging.com.

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