Category Archives: Women’s Communities

Liturgical Year, News, Women's Communities

The Truth May Cost Us “Dearly”

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On May 18, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI expressed to US Bishops during an Ad Limina visit his “deep gratitude for the example of fidelity and self-sacrifice given by many consecrated women in your country, and to join them in praying that this moment of discernment will bear abundant spiritual fruit for the revitalization and strengthening of their communities in fidelity to Christ and the Church, as well as to their founding charisms.”

As the Year of Faith approaches (October), the Holy Father added that he hopes that all people will rediscover and “re-appropriate with joy and gratitude the priceless treasure of our faith.” Furthermore, “With the progressive weakening of traditional Christian values, and the threat of a season in which our fidelity to the Gospel may cost us dearly, the truth of Christ needs not only to be understood, articulated and defended, but to be proposed joyfully and confidently as the key to authentic human fulfillment and to the welfare of society as a whole.”

As we approach Pentecost, may we, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, have the courage of the Apostles to be bearers of the Good News in a world hostile to Christian values.

News, Women's Communities

EWTN’s Home Monastery is 50!

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On May 20, 2012, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration marked the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Mother Angelica’s Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Alabama. The monastery was dedicated on May 20, 1962.

By the early 70’s the sisters were duplicating Mother’s talks and printing “mini” books to explain the basics of the Faith. And in 1981, Mother launched Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) in the monastery garage and the rest as they say is history.

I remember visiting EWTN in the late 90’s and attending one of Mother’s Live shows. She wandered around the set before the show began greeting people as if she didn’t have a care in the world and sat down with only seconds to spare. Everything came from a heart prepared by and with prayer. I had a message to give to her from a mutual friend that day and felt somewhat awkward doing it just minutes before she was to go on the air but she gave me her full attention and spent sometime talking with me. I was very impressed.

I thank God for EWTN which gave my housebound relatives a participation in the life of the Church and great consolation in the weeks before their deaths. May EWTN flourish and grow to the ends of the earth in all the languages of the human race.

For the full article in the National Catholic Register and many reflections on the 50 years of history, click here.

News, Women's Communities

Hold Back Nothing of Yourselves

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Our local seminary’s magazine (The Bridge – excellent by the way) has an article this issue about a new community of young women in Chicago called the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist. Why are they in a seminary magazine? Because part of their charism is to develop a strong relationship with diocesan priests and they are in fact studying there to earn a Masters Degree in Divinity.

Led by Fr. Bob Lombardo, CFR, the sisters take to heart St. Francis’ admonition: Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, that He, who gives Himself totally to you, may receive you totally. They live in a desperate neighborhood of Chicago and they strive to help the local families with food and household goods and the children by keeping them out of gangs and off drugs. One of their goals is to have perpetual Eucharistic adoration in the newly renovated Church. After their theological training, they will teach religion in Catholic schools.

Please pray for them and the violent streets of Chicago that the Lord’s peace may come to dwell in all hearts.

News, Women's Communities

When Reverend Mothers Cease Being Motherly

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Tim Drake, writing in the National Catholic Register, has an excellent article which summarizes my frustration over the misleading, inaccurate and totally secular portrayal of the LCWR doctrinal assessment in the press.

One would think that every nun, sister and woman in America is up in arms and angry at the Vatican. Hardly the case.

Tim mentions a Washington Post article in which the female author writes:  “For more than a thousand years, women like Mary have entered religious life hoping to find a safe place where they might receive an education and protection from the oppression of marriage and the dangers of child-bearing.” She goes on to say that the Church’s contemporary view of women is that “they are equal, but inferior.”

Eh? Who besides Jesus, the Son of God, is considered more blessed in the Church than a woman – the Blessed Virgin Mary?

Tim goes on to say: “Would Mary, like Dominican Sister Laurie Brink, say that she was “moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus?”

I agree with Tim when he says that too many religious women have been betrayed by their leadership. They are the White Martyrs of our time. Tim calls it a generational hijacking. “How many dying religious orders continue to hang on to the property and money obtained through previous social capital while betraying the charism of their founders?”

Check out the whole article here.

News, Women's Communities

Fortnight for Freedom

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The bishops of the United States of America have issued a call to action to defend religious liberty and to protect the First Freedom of the Bill of Rights.

The bishops have asked that the fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More—to July 4, Independence Day, be dedicated to the theme of a “Fortnight for Freedom.”

This period will be a special time of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action that will emphasize the double heritage of Christian and American liberty.

“As Catholic bishops and American citizens, we address an urgent summons to our fellow Catholics and fellow Americans to be on guard, for religious liberty is under attack, both at home and abroad,” they declared.

In support of this effort, the Handmaids of the Precious Blood (www.nunsforpriests.org) in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, have asked that anyone interested in supporting this effort send their petitions for the nation and for our leaders to Cor Jesu Monastery, PO Box 90, Jemez Springs, NM, 87025. The petitions will be placed under the high altar throughout the nun’s Corpus Christi novena (May 30th – June 7th), included in their Mass intentions and will remain at the altar until July 4th.

The Handmaids of the Precious Blood, an IRL Affiliate Community, are cloistered nuns offering their lives for the sanctification of priests in Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration.

Women's Communities

Servants of Mary Visit Thomas Aquinas College

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On Friday, April 20th, twenty members of the Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, visited Thomas Aquinas College (TAC). In town for their annual provincial meeting, the sisters were given a tour of the campus and plan to return for a vocations talk to interested women in the fall. The Director of College Relations, Anne S. Forsyth, said that roughly 10% of Thomas Aquinas alumni enter the priesthood or religious life (Wow).

The Servants of Mary care for the dying and gravely sick in their own homes, at night, free of charge, in addition to their work with hospitals, orphanages, hospices and nursing homes. Their foundress was St. Maria Soledad, canonized in 1970 and they, along with TAC, are IRL Affiliates.

I pray that one of those young women who will hear the sisters speak later this year may have a vocation to their beautiful life and so needed charism.

News, Women's Communities

The Attractiveness of Truth

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When Pope Benedict XVI visited Great Britain in 2010, the Press had their pens poised to write stories about the dismal failure of his trip. You didn’t read any stores of the kind because guess what, it was a big success. The crowds were big (even in Protestant Scotland over 100,000 people lined the streets to wish him well) and the critics seemed to disappear in light of the outpouring of love for the Holy Father.

Now comes an article in The Times of London which indicates that the number of women entering religious orders has almost tripled since the Holy Father’s visit.

Laura Adshead, the former girlfriend of the current Prime Minister David Cameron,  entered Regina Laudis Abbey in the USA. A congregation in York, after years of no activity, has six solid inquiries. In another order, three women are entering their novitiate in the fall. Still another has had no novices for twelve years but now has one with two more coming.

Father Christopher Jamison, National Office for Vocation, said, “In the last few years, the number of people applying to seminaries has been gradually increasing and, in more recent years, just in the last couple of years, ever since the Papal visit, the number of women approaching women’s congregations has also been increasing.”

Also, 1 in 5 new vocations are converts. The Lord calls. And women are responding.

Women's Communities

St. Joseph the Worker

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Today, the Sisters of St. Joseph the Worker of Walton, Kentucky, will celebrate their patronal feast day. They have a special devotion to St. Joseph observing with joy all of his feast days and offering a special weekly votive mass in his honor.

The Sisters chose the title “Sisters of St. Joseph the Worker” because the Church had instituted the feast of St. Joseph the Worker just a few years before, in 1955, during the pontificate of Pius XII.

Their apostolate is prayer and through their union with Christ pours forth their ministry to the elderly and to children. At Taylor Manor, they prepare their residents for eternal life, upholding the dignity of human life and the unique witness the elderly have to offer. At St. Joseph Academy, they provide an authentically Catholic education for grades Preschool-8th, cultivating not only the intellectual well-being of their students, but their appreciation for and knowledge of the Catholic faith.

“My Sisters, I exhort you to continuously recall God’s goodness to us, to take full responsibility for the holiness of the Church and the Community, by being ourselves holy.  Let us never rest on our laurels and feel that we have done enough in the pursuit of holiness.  We will have all eternity to rest and to realize that no hardship or sacrifice was too great to obtain the ‘pearl of great price.’” Mother Ellen Curran (d. 2008), Foundress


 

 

News, Women's Communities

“That All of Them May Be One” John 17:21

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Some communities believe that as their numbers dwindle, their job is to empower the laity to do what they used to do. The laity however needs to empower them, through our prayers, to live out their vocation, infused with the charism upon which their community was founded. They need to rediscover anew their historical roots in this upcoming Year of Faith. We also need unity among women religious in this country, an “ecclesiology of communion founded on faith in Jesus Christ and the Church.”

A case in point is the recent document issued by the Holy See about the needed renewal of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). It cites the following issues:

– Talks at assemblies mentioning things like “moving beyond the Church” or even beyond Jesus, and distorting faith in Jesus, His Father, the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Christ and the inspiration of Sacred Scripture

– Letters from the LCWR taking positions contrary to the Church in matters of women’s ordination and a correct pastoral approach to homosexual men and women.

– Silence on abortion and euthanasia

– Non-promotion of the Church’s teaching on family life and human sexuality

– Public statements disagreeing with positions taken by bishops

Let us pray for the renewal of the LCWR and for all women religious who are called to be a symbol, as spouses of Christ,  of Christ’s union with His Body the Church.

News, Women's Communities

Safeguarding the Consecrated Life

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A very thoughtful response to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious’  doctrinal assessment by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith comes from Mother Mary Assumpta Long, OP. Mother asks:  Why spend three years assessing the state of the LCWR and then subsequently mandate a five-year plan of change going forward?

Answer: It is the Church’s responsibility, assumed in love, to safeguard the beauty and gift of consecrated life at all times. This responsibility is most acute when the integrity of consecrated life begins to diminish, evidenced in this case by clear examples of dissent from the hierarchy and lack of authentic ecclesial communion. The CDF hopes that, through this mandate, members of the LCWR will awaken to once again “think with the Church.”

Read all entire article and the background behind Mother’s assessment at the National Catholic Register website.

Pope John Paul II wrote: Its universal presence and the evangelical nature of its witness are clear evidence — if any were needed — that the consecrated life is not something isolated and marginal, but a reality which affects the whole Church. … In effect, the consecrated life is at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission (Vita Consecrata, 36).