STEPHANIE SALTER: May the Spirit of love make us one, indeed
I ask that you do us true Catholics a favor and STOP claiming to be a Catholic if your articles are not going to represent the Church.
— from a recent e-mail
By Stephanie Salter
Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — Earlier this month I spent some quality time in contemplation in a retreat house at St. Mary-of-the-Woods. Part of the stay included attending late-morning Mass on weekdays with the Sisters of Providence in the chapel of Owens Hall.
Like so many places at The Woods, the chapel is the epitome of inclusive community: The altar and celebrant, usually the Rev. Dan Hopcus, are almost surrounded by pews. While the focus is, of course, on the lectern and the altar, most congregants’ faces are visible from anywhere, contributing to a sense of individuality as well as intimate unity.
The atmosphere reminds me of a lyric by the superb liturgical composer, Marty Haugen: “We are many parts, we are all one body, and the gifts we have, we are given to share.”
As I looked around at the sisters each morning before Mass, I felt two prevailing emotions. One is familiar. I experience it every time I worship with a group of nuns from any order: awe at the size and weight of their fidelity to, and their humility before, God.
That collective, humble fidelity evokes the kind of power I associate with the Holy Spirit — mysterious, independent of three-dimensional form, gentle but intrepid, invincible and equally eternal with God and Christ.
The second feeling I experienced was less familiar but not unknown: sadness at how these and other women religious are the current objects of official church suspicion and investigation.
Since I learned awhile back that the Vatican has asked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to raise more than $1 million to help finance Rome’s three-year investigation of American nuns, I have tried to make sense of it — and to find the hand of a loving God in the massive effort.
Vatican officials insist the “Apostolic Visitation” is a non-threatening probe into the “quality of life” of some 59,000 U.S. nuns. Significantly, though, the project — and a related investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — have been nicknamed “the Inquisition” by many lay Catholics and many of the sisters being investigated.
There is something about questions like, “What is the process for responding to sisters who disagree publicly or privately with congregational decisions, especially regarding matters of Church authority?” that leads folks to wonder if the nuns’ quality of life is really the issue here.
The money thing is … astonishing.
It seems the original funding for the Apostolic Visitation — kicked in by private donors the church declines to identify — was not enough to complete the task. So, all across a land that is in a deep recession, where dioceses and deaneries are being shrunk, churches and parochial schools shuttered, and outreach services downsized, the men who run the Roman Catholic Church are asking American Catholics to pay for an investigation of U.S. nuns that almost no one outside the hierarchy ever wanted in the first place.
Studying the bowed heads in the chapel at Owens (most of them capped by gray or white hair), I could not help but wonder where such investigatory zeal was when multiple reports of child sex abuse by clergy began surfacing in multiple dioceses in the early 1980s. Had church leaders looked into those reports, instead of away or to their secular attorneys for advice, they likely would not be out the $2 billion that countless lawsuits have cost them and us.
Now they seek additional financing for a prolonged investigation of women religious. What’s next? A monthly second collection to pay for guards who’ll pull remarried Catholics without annulments out of the Communion line?
You would not know it from most news coverage, but the Catholic Church in the United States is a lot like the country itself. Significant divisions exist, and the spectrum of attitudes among the faithful is broad. It stretches from ultra-right conservatives who believe the reforms of Vatican II must be reversed for the “true church” to survive, to ultra-left liberals who believe the institutional, male-centric hierarchy must disintegrate for the “true church” to survive.
In between are all the rest of us, watching church governance return to a preoccupation with minute detail and spit-and-polish form. Genuine dialogue about several subjects is discouraged; questions about the boundaries of authority for the church’s very real human stewards are not in vogue.
Many American Catholics welcome this approach. Many others feel a fearful hand tightening on the reins, determined to demonstrate who is, and is not, in control.
Earlier this month, one of my fellow parishioners told me about attending Mass with his wife not long ago in a suburban church in another state. The couple are cradle Catholics, tireless contributors to our busy parish life and our many community outreach programs.
Much of the Mass was in Latin, the man said, as all Masses were before Vatican II. In the Communion line, when my friend extended his hand for the host, the young priest stopped and fixed him with a severe look.
Audibly, the priest demanded, “Are you Catholic?” Startled, my fellow parishioner said yes, waited, then finally received his consecrated wafer.
After the service, he asked the priest what that had been about. He was told he hadn’t presented himself properly for Communion and thus appeared to be a possible Catholic imposter. “We can’t let the Eucharist get into the wrong hands,” the priest said.
The Sisters of Providence are among some 340 religious congregations in the United States currently under the Vatican’s microscope. Before the Apostolic Visitation and leadership conference investigations are complete, the superiors general and other leaders of these orders will be made to produce voluminous reports to church leadership about activities, attitudes, charisms, founders, missions, ministries and finances.
The time and energy that will be spent on these examinations may yet match the considerable sum of money (yet to be raised) that will pay for the effort. The moral justification of the expenditures in a church charged with caring for the poor and marginalized of society may prove the most daunting task of all.
A few days after my retreat at St. Mary of-the-Woods, I was reading through Henri Nouwen’s, “In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership.” A Catholic priest from 1957 until his death in 1996, Nouwen taught at Notre Dame, Harvard and Yale, but ultimately chose to spend the rest of his life ministering to the mentally disabled. In his essay, “The Temptation: To Be Powerful,” he wrote:
“The long, painful history of the Church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led. Those who resisted this temptation to the end and thereby give us hope are the true saints.”
A lot of them can be found weekdays in Mass at Owens Hall.
Stephanie Salter can be reached at 9812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.
