“Difficult”

That is how the LCWR described its recent meeting at the Vatican, in a statement posted this morning.  CNS reports:

Top officials of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious said their meeting at the Vatican in mid-June “was difficult because of the differing perspectives” they and the leaders of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have.

Franciscan Sister Pat Farrell, LCWR president, and St. Joseph Sister Janet Mock, executive director, met with U.S. Cardinal William J. Levada, prefect of the doctrinal congregation, and with Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle June 12 to talk about the Vatican’s ordered reform of the LCWR.

The two officers returned to the United States and, on June 15, briefed the board members of LCWR, a Vatican-recognized umbrella group that claims about 1,500 leaders of U.S. women’s communities as members and represents about 80 percent of the country’s 57,000 women religious.

In a statement posted on the LCWR website June 18 and later released to the media, the group said: “While the LCWR officers reported that they were able to express their concerns during the (Vatican) meeting with openness and honesty, they acknowledged that the meeting was difficult because of the differing perspectives the CDF officials and the LCWR representatives hold on the matters raised in the report” about the LCWR released by the Vatican in April.

The report, a doctrinal assessment of LCWR programs and publications, was designed to assist the organization “by promoting a vision of ecclesial communion founded on faith in Jesus Christ and the teachings of the church as faithfully taught through the ages under the guidance of the magisterium,” the Vatican said in a statement.

The doctrinal assessment had said a major reform of the LCWR was needed to ensure its fidelity to Catholic teaching in areas including abortion, euthanasia, women’s ordination and homosexuality.

You can read more here.

And over at the sisters’ website, you can read the full text of the LCWR statement.