LCWR president says forum 'like no other we've had' [CNAU]

[Alan55]

Originally Posted by iloveangels

Your dog doesn't hunt, Alan.

Rogers did intensive work with religious orders, including many congregations of sisters who are specifically listed in Coulson's interview. The work he did was incorporated into the methods the sisters used to update their congregations. That stuff lives on, and you can see it explicitly in the LCWR's methods, albeit honed down to their "needs" and given a weird sort of nomenclatuere, on explicit display this last week.

If you are a participant in some of this stuff yourself, then I can see how you might not find any problems with it or find it odd. Most people, however, don't participate and they do find it odd.

There are several distinct categories we're talking about here that are different.
Aka, the difference between Tom Fox's progressivism vs the new method the sisters are promoting vs religious life as defined by history and canon law. You don't seem to be picking any of that up.

This appears also to be a one-on-one exchange and no longer a discussion of facts. Did you even read the Coulson interview? I'm not in any mood to bicker with you over this. I am willing to let what I've presented and documented stand on its own. I'm very sure of it because of years of experience and having lived through the 60s and 70s myself and seen it happen.

NB: Wikipedia. Really?

A more detailed description of the LCWR's contemplative process is available at:

https://lcwr.org/node/4690

Scroll to the bottom and get the "Guide for Contemplative Process."

Yes, I read the interview with Coulson. I agree with you that many of the LCWR leadership have experience with encounter groups. Whether I find encounter groups odd or normal, helpful or harmful is beside the point: I just don't think that the LCWR are running encounter groups in the name of group prayer. Anyway, I'm happy to stop bickering. We're looking at the facts and seeing different things.

I think that my experience of prayer, and particularly of group prayer and discernment, are different from yours. What the NCR article describes, and what is described in the "Guide" referenced above, is familiar to me. It's not my favorite form of prayer, even in a group setting -- I'm too "linear," logical, to really enjoy or profit that much from the process used by the LCWR. That reflects my training in science and law. But it's sometimes helpful to plumb people's emotional reactions and to get to creative responses.

Ignatian discernment, for example, goes to some lengths to identify people's emotional responses and subjective, non-rational responses to life circumstances as part of (not the whole of) the material for discernment. Most of these religious women would have a lot of training and experience in Ignatian prayer and discernment, for example in the context of retreats and spiritual direction, which is at least as influential as the encounter group experience. Add to the mix Centering Prayer and group lectio divina (which in some forms has people speaking out a word or phrase from their reading), and I think you get to their process.

My point is that the LCWR leadership are influenced by other things than Rogerian group process, and their group contemplation doesn't appear to me to be a type of encounter group process. We disagree, I guess.

[jwinch2]

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news...f-consecrated/

Originally Posted by Mother Mary Assumpta Long, OP

Recent media coverage has displayed a variety of responses to the doctrinal assessment, and members of the LCWR have issued public responses.

A timely consideration in the midst of these diverse reactions is the perspective of why the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would even undertake such a serious look at the LCWR. Why spend three years assessing the state of the LCWR and then subsequently mandate a five-year plan of change going forward? This intensive mandate seeking to initiate renewal within the LCWR reflects the Church’s love for consecrated life and is in continuity with the Church’s conciliar and post-conciliar call for renewal of religious life, according to the charism of her founders.

The CDF’s assessment states that it has a “sincere concern for the life of faith” in the various institutes represented by the LCWR. The document identifies that the doctrinal issues of the LCWR reflect a deeper crisis of identity among her members, both in terms of the very essentials of consecrated life and the inseparable communion of consecrated life with the Church. Such an assessment reflects the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s proper regard and reverence for consecrated life as a gift to the Church and determination to rekindle in the members of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious the “lively sense of the Church.”

The CDF, in both investigating and implementing a clear mandate for renewal of the LCWR, bears clear witness to the Church’s responsibility to safeguard religious life in its integrity — for the love of her members and the good of the whole Church. Various conciliar and post-conciliar documents on religious life echo this same ideal.

[iloveangels]

Alan, I'm not telling you that encounter groups and the like are the ONLY thing that might be going on, but then I never said that. I said that they were going on. Period. There is much evidence of that. If something else is, in fact, going on, then it's in addition to these things.

I also think we can certainly agree to disagree on our respective views of progressivism and tradition, but I really don't think that is what's at stake here at all. This is really and truly about something else.

Originally Posted by jwinch2

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news...f-consecrated/

Thank you, Jason. Yes, more proof that the CDF is not just trying to beat up on people in religious life. In fact, very very far from it. This must be a great relief to many people in religious life who have been literally tortured over this. I know that many older sisters have lived with this unfortunate state of affairs for years.

[Alan55]

Originally Posted by iloveangels

Alan, I'm not telling you that encounter groups and the like are the ONLY thing that might be going on, but then I never said that. I said that they were going on. Period. There is much evidence of that. If something else is, in fact, going on, then it's in addition to these things.

I also think we can certainly agree to disagree on our respective views of progressivism and tradition, but I really don't think that is what's at stake here at all. This is really and truly about something else.



Thank you, Jason. Yes, more proof that the CDF is not just trying to beat up on people in religious life. In fact, very very far from it. This must be a great relief to many people in religious life who have been literally tortured over this. I know that many older sisters have lived with this unfortunate state of affairs for years.

By the way, I've reviewed some of your other posts about the LCWR, and I agree that some religious congregations have been far too influenced by New Age stuff, and that it's not good for them or the Church.

[iloveangels]

Originally Posted by Alan55

By the way, I've reviewed some of your other posts about the LCWR, and I agree that some religious congregations have been far too influenced by New Age stuff, and that it's not good for them or the Church.

No it's not. No matter what our respective views are within the Church, we don't need that kind of stuff coming in from outside to confuse matters any more than any of us are already confused.



Life is tough enough without that.

[jwinch2]

The Rise and Decline of Catholic Religious Orders: A Social Movement Perspective (SUNY Series in Reli (Suny Series in Religion, Culture, and Society)

ISBN-10: 0791422305
ISBN-13: 978-0791422304

Written by a sister who also happens to be a sociologist, it's one of the only scholarly treatments of the sociology of religious life, and while one has to approach it in a more scholarly fashion, it's a fine account of what really happened and what religious life has been like before on the inside, both before and after VII. Because it's a good account, the "transformations" that enabled what we're looking at and that we're concerned about are included in the discussion.

This book was recommended to me in addition to the other two which were posted earlier in the thread. The quote, is the recommendation provided to me, and not my assessment as I have not read it.

Peace,

[jwinch2]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...20115/abstract

In the 1960s, humanistic psychology changed the relationship between psychology and religion by actively asserting the value of individual experience and self-expression. This was particularly evident in the encounter group movement. Beginning in 1967, Carl Rogers conducted a series of encounter groups, in order to promote “self-directed change in an educational system,” for the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a religious order in California running an educational system. William Coulson, one of Rogers's associates in the project, later charged that the encounter groups undermined the religious order and played a major contributing part in the breakup of the order in 1970. The article examines these charges, situating the incident within the context of the changes occurring in religious life and in psychology in the 1960s. The article concludes that an already existing conflict the nuns had with the conservative Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles led to the departure of some 300 nuns from the order, who began the Immaculate Heart Community, an organization existing today. Nevertheless, encounter groups proved to be a psychological technology that helped to infuse a modern psychological—specifically, a humanistic psychological—perspective into contemporary religious life. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

[jwinch2]

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/ann-c...-lcwr-assembly

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news...tican-dialogue

[nordskoven]

RE: LCWR's "contemplative process"

This contemplative process is really a forced march into Rogerian gnosticism by women: commanding, instead of drawing forth, consensus and solidarity; claiming unity in spirit but only giving voice to generic, euphemistic do-gooding that is amorphous and undirected, in short, lost; confusing guiding inspiration for a blank slate of "change" upon which may be writ the likes of Barbara Marx Hubbard's "kinder, gentler Final Solution" per Hannah Newman. Lacking vision, they are perishing demographically and taking their uninspiring, self-absorbed, self-righteous self-hypnosis with them. Adieu.

[Celtic Maiden]

Originally Posted by jay29

The LCWR forgot who formed them: The Vatican.

They are disobedient nuns. They need to either reform themselves to authentic teachings or get booted out of the Church. These are the only two options.

My feelings exactly not that I want to tell the Holy Father what to do but personally I think all these disobedient nuns should have the the title Pontifical Order, now reduced to one of under the Bishop (Diocese) if they then refuse to obey the Bishop let them now be reduced to a Lay Association with there vows taken off them, if the Priests can get there's taken from them so should the nuns. They have got to cocky, and disobedient, want to take note from the Orthodox Nuns who are totally obedient to there Bishops and the Orthodox Church. My best friend well her blood sister is a nun, (wont mention the Order) her mother left all five children 120,000. 00 each, what did the nun do put it straight into her Bank account for when she comes home so that she can dress herself (they wear no Habit) and go on a fancy holiday and treats a fellow nun to come along with her , not as you might think to Lourdes, Fatima etc, no its generally a seaside where the two of them get into Bathing costumes and generally enjoy themselves. The Church is the Bride of Christ, and if Peter has spoken that is it. The late Pope John Paul 11 had the same issues with a lot of these disobedient nuns who wont "obey" like Satan said "I wont obey"

[jwinch2]

For those of you who may not be aware, there is a book written by C.S. Lewis titled, The Screwtape Letters. In the book, Screwtape is a demon who is training a younger demon how to go about tempting humans. This quote was posted on another thread on the subject, but I felt it so appropriate that I wanted to put it here as well.

Originally Posted by Screwtape

Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. The let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him onto the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

In my view, in some of these sisters who have gone off track, they have fallen right into what Screwtape is talking about. They have made the faith their means, but their social works (though good works) the end instead of the other way around as it should be. Even though Lewis' book is a work of fiction, it is a stark reminder for all of us to keep our focus in the proper place, remembering that it is God we are to serve through his people, not the other way around. If those sisters who are dissenting from the Church had always kept that focus, we would not be seeing this situation in my view.


Peace,