What’s behind the continuing Vatican attack on the Women Religious!?

Georgene Wilson is a Wheaton Franciscan Sister. Georgene lives in silence and solitude and offers spiritual ministry from her neighborhood home, Wisdom Webbings Anchorhold, in Wheaton, IL. She is the author of several books, including: Sabbath Bread: For Personal Sacred-searching and Group Faith-sharing

What gets stirred up in you when you hear the words “War on Women”?…

My take on it is that the ecto-order of the Vatican is in deep evolution toward an endo-ordering.  Some male, hierarchal, ordained, leaders seem not to have entered this consciousness with any practice or pleasure.  So they do not know who they are or how they have power or purpose without the outer structures.  Thus some Vatican rulers are trying to reign in the evolutions and keep what they know and think that they have power over under their rule and expressed in only their crafted religious language.

The Women Religious have been rooting themselves in inner practices that urge us to flow out to the world’s needs as the Spirit and documents of Vatican II asked us to do.  So we seem too free and out from under the hierarchy’s prescribed practices, language and ministries.  Some Vatican men want to reign in and over the women.

We trust the Spirit of Christ who has formed our conscious and our conscientiousness.  Our spiritual lives, leadership among the People of God, and our compassionate and wise ministries among the poor and needy will not be destroyed.  But we do not know yet, how to respond to the Vatican.  Our ways have become ways of dialogue and communion.  Their ways seem to be of demands and domination.

We are in silence and solidarity, in prayer and even in compassion with and for the Vatican men, as we wait for the Spirit to show us the way to resist domination of our ways or control of our consciences.   Two of the women leaders of LCWR are going to Rome next week to try to dialog with Cardinal Lavada, Archbishop Sartan at the Office of Faith and Morals.  And we have the support of millions, no exaggeration, of people of the USA and many from around the world who are supporting us.

The pre-Vatican II name of this Papal office was the Office of Inquisition.  Seems the name changed 50 years ago but not much else!

I trust that our suffering is in communion with the energy of all women, all female mammal creatures, who have laboured to bring forth new life since the creation of time.  So we labour now to bring forth even more new life.