“We’ve had enough of exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues. I see the world is rotten because of silence”
(Catherine of Siena)
In a few days time the leadership conference of women religious (LCWR)in the United States are having their annual gathering.
They are under enormous pressure from the Vatican. They have been ordered to accept the jurisdiction of Archbishop Sartain of Seattle, the man appointed by the Vatican for this purposes. In future all major decisions about their gatherings will have to be approved by Sartain, most particularly the decision as to who will address them. In other words the Vatican will decide in future who the US sisters can listen to.
This is quite extraordinary. The sisters are now in a situation where they either accept this unjust and insulting imposition by the Vatican, or reject their order and effectively defy them.
i hope and pray that they will make a stand. If they become silent and submissive in the face of the Vatican’s bullying we will all be diminished by it. The quote above from Catherine of Siena rings down through the ages; the world is rotten because of silence. The Vatican is demanding that the sisters go silent. They made the same demand of me. I found that I could not live with myself if I agreed. I believe the same would be true of the women
I pray God will give them courage and strength. I will be watching anxiously for news of what is happening next week.
