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The Vatican and the LCWR: it's not about Obamacare

CWN - April 25, 2012

Countering the many superficial stories in the secular media that have suggested the Vatican is demanding changes in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) because of the group’s support of Obamacare, George Weigel observes that the Vatican’s real problem with the group involves the LCWR’s fundamental vision of religious life and even of Catholicism.

(In passing, Weigel notes that if the Vatican actively opposed Obamacare, it “would be the first European-style welfare-state initiative to which “the Vatican” has objected in living memory.”)

Using clear, blunt language, Weigel reminds readers of National Review that the women religious represented by the LCWR are not much like the American nuns of a previous generation:

On the other hand, almost none of the sisters in LCWR congregations wear religious habits; most have long since abandoned convent life for apartments and other domestic arrangements; their spiritual life is more likely to be influenced by the Enneagram and Deepak Chopra than by Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein; their notions of orthodoxy are, to put it gently, innovative; and their relationship to Church authority is best described as one of barely concealed contempt.

That, not the group’s stand on political issues, is the fundamental problem the Vatican has set to resolve.

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  • Posted by: impossible - Apr. 26, 2012 8:14 AM ET USA

    The LCWR positions might be compared to those taken by the union-thug vote at a duly called union meeting but which vote is taken after the ordinary Joes, the family men interested in the legitimate concerns of a union, have gone home to their families. Like the union thugs the power elite "nones" in the LCWR do not really represent the views of the real nuns (the brides of Christ) they profess to represent.

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