The Woodstock for religious orders was held in Fort Worth last weekend. Dom has his usual insightful insights which are linked above. I urge you to read his commentary on this story in the Dallas Morning News – “Among faithful, mum isn’t the word.”
The irony of the title is plain. Faithful who? The unfaithfully faithful? The religious who openly defy the bugaboo of modernity, the Vatican?
“Security in our church has come to be identified with the controlling power of the clergy to the detriment of the people in the pews,” said the Rev. Michael Crosby, a priest from Milwaukee. “We are perishing numerically because we have not been public enough in our protest of patriarchy.”
The security Fr. Crosby mentions was of the false kind. Some Bishops thought they could sweep the problems of sexual abuse under the proverbial rug. We know what the result is. Fr. Crosby speaks, though, as one who would give more power to the laity. But power to do what? Elect a pastor? Force a priest out they don’t like? There are many who like to make the Church into a democracy and they would make the immutable truths of faith and morals as flighty as the age.
Fr. Crosby’s subsequent statement about the cause of the lack of vocations is incorrect. He says they haven’t been public enough in their protest of the patriarchy. I say many orders are dying on the vine because they have rejected their patrimony, traditions, and the patriarchy of the Church. The orders that embrace them are flourishing, such as the Nashville Dominicans and the CFR’s. The Legionaries of Christ and Opus Dei are other examples of groups that are truly faithful to the Church and thriving. I was considering entering the Legionaries, actually, but my hair is parted on the wrong side and I’m no good at soccer. But never you mind that – what I’m saying is Fr. Crosby and his confreres don’t see the writing on the wall.
Take the traditional habit, for example. It’s a symbol, it’s not just a garment. A symbol always leads one to the substantial meaning it symbolizes. That’s why it’s called a symbol. Religious habits are made in the form of a cross. The religious who wears a habit is truly taking up the Cross, putting it on, making the Cross central to their interior and exterior life.
The Claretian martyrs of Barbastro would disagree with the “progressive” religious of today. The Spanish Marxists killed some fifty Claretian seminarians in 1936 because they were faithful Catholics in formation for the priesthood and because they wore the cassock. Their lives would be spared, they were told, if they took off the cassock. The Claretians, truly faithful to the substance behind the symbol, refused and went to their death.
You’re right. When I was in Boston, the Daughters of St. Paul and the nuns from St. Faustina’s order seemed to have no trouble picking up young vocations. The kids want Tradition/tradition because they’re attracted to authenticity. Same thing w/ the Missionary Sisters of Charity.
I see it here in Jersey. The orders that ditched their original charisms and habits are mostly over 60.
As far as young vocations, I think we are in a “springtime”. The dead wood is headed for the fire.
Here’s a question that’s been bothering me for years: if Jesus Christ wanted to join the Legionnaires, would they make him shave his beard first?
Let Fr. Crosby and his fellow postconciliar revolutionaries bleat all they like. As you noted, Sal, it’s the orders that are faithful to the Tradition, and teach doctrinal orthodoxy and moral orthopraxy, that are thriving. I really hope for Crosby’s sake that he is genuinely deluded, for which he might not be culpable, and isn’t lying in the face of data that on their face must be as apparent to him as to us.
In a generation, the feminists and wiccans of, say, the Leadership Conference of Womyn/Wimmin Religious, will have passed from nursing home to grave. The Nashville Dominicans will still be thriving, a beacon of faith and Christ’s abundant life.
Two puzzles here, both related to the anti-Church bias of the media.
(1) Why in a report of the meeting of the Leadership Conference of Religous WOMEN does the reporter give almost all the ink to a MAN, Fr. Crosby; his most well known book is The Dysfunctional Church (Ave Maria Press, 1991). In the first chapter he lays the foundation for his argument “It is my contention that the ‘deadly disease’ undermining the church in our day is the addiction of the papacy and its extension in the hierarchy to the preservation of the male, celibate model of the church (pg. 7).”
He goes on to say “Finally, I will show how the ‘religion’ of the Latin Rite of Roman Catholicism, which has resulted from this addiction, has become an insular, white, Western European phenomenon, which identifies its unspiritual behavior as religion (pg. 66).”
The back cover of the book summarizes “Reduced to its simplest form, The Dysfunctional Church maintains that:
-The Catholic church is an addict, an institutional addict.
-It’s addicted to preserving the male, celibate, clerical model of the church.
-Many Catholics exhibit patterns of classical codependency which reinforces this addiction.
-The result is a dysfunctional church unable to confront a problem many members know is there.”
Franciscan “Fr. Crosby was one of the 163 signers of the letter sent in August to Bishop Wilton Gregory, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, asking to open a discussion of optional celibacy.”
So much for the views of the much quoted Fr. Crosby of Milwaukee. He was a speaker at just one of the many break-out sessions, but the newspaper makes it seem like he was leading the whole show!
(2) Why didn’t the reporter say anything about the keynote speaker, Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, or the topic of world peace in a time of war?
Among other agenda items at the meeting: “breakout sessions will deal with topics as varied as terrorism and justified war, domestic violence, and being missionaries in places of violence. Presenters include Bud Welch, the father of a 23-year-old woman killed in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the Reverend Richard Blackburn, executive director of the Mennonite Peace Center in Chicago.”
Why does the reporter omit all the significant stuff, and “give voice” to a dissenting priest?
Where is Rod Dreher on this?
Frankly, I think Fr. Crosby hit the nail on the head when he said, “Security in our church has come to be identified with the controlling power of the clergy to the detriment of the people in the pews.” I would imagine that under Abp. Weakland, Fr. Crosby felt very secure, and engaged in a lot of that sort of activity.
Maybe he’s feeling less secure nowadays, hence his current bleating.
b: It wasn’t a meeting of women alone: men’s religious orders were represented too, according to the article.
Mary Robinson would have provided an interesting topic on her own: she’s the Irish politician who led a campaign against protecting the unborn in Ireland’s constitution. Apparently this is the ideal sort of Catholic for LCWR and CMSM.
keep the members of these religious orders in your prayers. As their numbers continue their inevitable decline and as they watch the orders they disparage grow and flourish, their sense of bitterness and invective will only increase unless and until they realize that it’s they who’ve taken the wrong path, not the rest of the Church. Ironically, many of these folks who revelled in the Youth Culture of the 60’s and joyously overthrew and disrespected their elders are now in the position of being the old curmudgeons complaining about “kids these days.” I hope and pray that the new young religious in the vibrant Orders avoid the “I told you so” tendency that will only increase the bitterness and instead mirror Christ’s love for these deluded people, most of whom are very sincere, if misguided, in their devotion to the Gospel.