IDENTITY: RESTORING SANITY
Leading with Integrity
LCWR’s journey into increased faith-based integrity is a long and complex tale, filled with examples of extraordinary leadership. And grace. Here are just a few things I witnessed:
Immediately, they created principles for how to move through this. They would not use the media; they would seek to be in respectful, open dialogue; they would never violate or compromise their integrity. They would act with respect, stay open to learning, seek to develop relationships of trust, and not succumb to the inherent disrespect and aggression of the demands coming at them. These principles stayed vital to their discernment processes during the entire three years.
At the beginning, they knew they had to define the nature of this struggle: they were working on behalf of all women and men, not just sisters, who suffer from institutional abuse of power. They believed the “God of the Future” had called them to this work on behalf of oppressed people everywhere, especially women.
They relied on their tradition and experience with contemplative practices. No decisions were made in haste. Prayer and contemplation were trusted to discern right action. This was true both for individual leaders and in meetings with their members.
They had confidence in their professional skills—consensus building; canon law; theology; church history; politics; women’s rights. They were the right ones to undertake this cause, and they undertook it willingly.
They educated themselves, and then their members, to the complexities of trends and dynamics that had coalesced in the Mandate. They brought in a diverse group of experts—historians, theologians, civil and canon law—to help them discern how best to respond. From this information, they discerned possible scenarios that presented a range of actions, from compliance to the possibility they could no longer walk with the Church. During the summer months, regional meetings explored all of these possibilities in deep conversation and contemplation, so that when the members gathered for their assembly in August, they knew what was at stake and could offer their full support to the presidency to engage in negotiations.
They never retreated into isolation but used the participative, consensus-building processes many sisters use. At every meeting, they received votes of confidence and the full support of their members to act as they deemed necessary. The levels of trust between their leaders and most U.S. nuns (over 40,000) was extraordinary. Today, now years later, the leaders continue to receive expressions of deep gratitude for what they accomplished and the contemplative approach they used.
Their highly participative structures enabled them to slow down the process. They could make no decisions on their own; everything had to be brought to regular meetings of the national board and the annual assembly. Time was an ally, even more so after the change of popes. The intense struggles for power that erupted between the craving-for-control bishops and Pope Francis created more time for the women.
At the end of three years (it was to be a five-year process), the presence of Pope Francis, and the building of increased understanding through communication, served to bring everything to resolution. Agreements were reached that maintained the autonomy of LCWR. The fruits of working in respectful dialogue with all those involved resulted in LCWR’s full participation in determining the final agreement. In a minor but significant act, both sides agreed that, following the press release of the final agreement, there would be a thirty-day period of silence, with no interviews to the press. (The LCWR presidents later noted what a gift it was to have this period of silence within the organization as well as with the outside world.)
After the conclusion of all this, Pope Francis unexpectedly welcomed the three presidents and their executive director into his chambers for a private audience. No one else was present except for the pope’s translator. They spoke in honest conversation for nearly an hour; primarily, they shared the joy of working for the Gospel. The photos from that meeting are exceptionally moving to all who knew of the long struggle: Beautiful Benevolence welcoming the women leaders who had served their faith so well.
In 2015, Pope Francis declared the Year of Consecrated Life. He continues to welcome the sisters into meaningful conversations about the future of the Church. In June 2016, he issued a formal Constitution Statement on “Women’s Contemplative Life” that includes this tribute:
Dear contemplative sisters, without you what would the Church be like, or without all those others living on the fringes of humanity and ministering in the outposts of evangelization? The Church greatly esteems your life of complete self-giving.
LCWR is able to turn its full attention back to serving the cries of the world. Even during this period, LCWR continued its mission and service, developing its Call for 2015 to 2022. Here is how it begins:
Standing on the rich history of our past and the communion present among us, we, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, commit ourselves to seeking God who beckons to us from a future abundant in grace, full of challenge, and rich in possibility. . . . Affirming LCWR’s mission and setting direction for the coming years, we embrace our time as holy, our leadership as gift, and our challenges as blessing.
IDENTITY: NOTES
1 In a recent study of ancient cells, evidence suggests that bacteria, very soon after life began (about 500 million years into life’s 4-billion-year history), already had the sophisticated cellular machinery that exists today. This is much earlier and quicker than previous theories. See “Bacteria Perfected Protein Complexes More Than 3.5 Billion Years Ago,” www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160609134243.htm.
2 The latest UN figures on the global refugee and migrant crisis caused by climate change, conflict, environmental degradation, lack of employment, and other elements are much larger than originally thought. It is now estimated that up to 700 million people will be forced to migrate as refugees from their countries by 2050.
3 The Linguistic Society of America predicts that of today’s roughly 5,000 to 6,000 languages, within 100 years the number will almost certainly fall to the low thousands or even the hundreds. More than ever, communities that were once self-sufficient find themselves under intense pressure to integrate with powerful neighbors, regional forces, or invaders, often leading to the loss of their own languages and even their ethnic identity. See http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/endangered-languages.
Wade Davis, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and filmmaker, notices that the Wisdom Keepers of a tradition, the elders, are dying at the rate of roughly one every two weeks. “We will be witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity’s social, cultural and intellectual legacy. This is the hidden backdrop of our age.” The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, pp. 2–3.
4 Read the details of how we’re manipulated online from a former Google designer of how to do it well: “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds,” https://medium.com/swlh/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3#.z9xh4yaai.
5 Teddy Wayne, “The End of Reflection,” New York Times, June 11, 2016, nytimes.com/2016/06/12/fashion/internet-technology-phones-introspection.html.
6 This term was coined in the late ’70s and took hold as a definition by the late ’90s. The term identity politics has been applied retroactively to varying movements that long predate its coinage. It is fraught with emotion, opposition, and criticism, as you might suspect and can observe daily now. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics.
7 Articles continue to appear on the motivation of young terrorists. Here are five from the summer of 2016:
Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, “In the Age of ISIS, Who’s a Terrorist, and Who’s Simply Deranged?” nytimes.com, July 17, 2016.
For a historical look at terrorists, with emphasis on Northern Island, see John Gray, “Excitement, Hatred and Belonging: Why Terrorists Do It,” newstatesman.com, July 28, 2016.
Very chilling to read from Germany: Katrin Kuntz, “Islamic State: How the IS Trains Child Soldiers,” spiegel.de July 29, 2016.
How imprisoning suspects facilitates radicalization: Noemie Bisserbe, “European Prisons Fueling Spread of Islamic Radicalism,” wsj.com, July 31, 2016.
About U.S. terrorists: “‘In-Betweeners’ Are Part of a Rich Recruiting Pool for Jihadists,” nytimes.com. September 22, 2016.
8 Globally, suicide is the second-leading cause of death in young people, aged 15–29. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that each year approximately one million people die from suicide, a global mortality rate of 16 people per 100,000 or one death every 40 seconds. It is predicted that by 2020 the rate of death will increase to one every 20 seconds.
9 See Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1998).
10 See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016.
11 In my book A Simpler Way (1996), I attributed this wonderful quote to Brother David Steindl-Rast. When someone asked him for the source of this, his office wrote me because they couldn’t find it anywhere in his writings. I offer it here as a very good thought of unknown origin, inspired by Brother David.
12 Apple’s online dictionary.