by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

At Vatican, Religious Women Lean In

     “The nuns won.”

That’s the nut of Jason Berry’s article for the Global Post about the rollback of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and, by extension, of American Catholic women religious – nuns – on the whole.

Berry (Georgetown ‘71) knows the bad side of the church better than anybody – where the bodies are buried and all that.  But he also knows that sometimes there is more to the story than the inside story.  So  before spelling out some of the particulars of the controversy over the nuns, he calls attention to the photograph of Pope Francis meeting the Leadership’s leaders, which says as much as any CDF report:  

What a difference a papacy makes.
In a photograph circulated by the Vatican City newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, four sisters sit smiling across from Pope Francis, none wearing habits. The pope also smiles, but made no statement and is not quoted in the documents released by the LCWR, and Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that polices theologians and church officials on doctrinal disputes.
“Pope Francis met with them for fifty minutes,” FutureChurch co-founder Sister Christine Schenk told GroundTruth. “We’ve never had the leadership meet in a private office with the pope. That is a very significant valuing of the leadership and the role of women in the church. On balance, there are tremendous positives from this resolution.”

It’s amazing to think that fifty years after Vatican II, a photograph of Catholic religious women sitting in a meeting with the pope should be so unfamiliar as to warrant comment.  But it does.  It is that uncommon, even for Francis.   To the extent that this pope has a blind spot, many commentators say, it has to do with women and the role of women in the church.  But there he is, meeting with the women’s leadership at the Vatican – an image that puts him steps ahead of his predecessors.    

The nuns won.  But so did the rest of us.  

Now how about adding a meeting with women of all stripes to the agenda – already jammed – for Francis’s U.S. visit?  It would pick up the conversation that was arrested after Sr. Teresa Kane, welcoming John Paul II to a meeting with 7,000 women religious in Washington in 1979, urged him to consider making it possible for women to serve in all the ministries of the church.

It’s a conversation in need of a pickup.