News round-up on the LCWR

Steven Spearie of the State Journal-Register has written a good article about Bishop Paprocki's recent appointment to assist Archbishop Sartain in his task with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. 

Paprocki said he’s read many articles dealing with the fallout of the CDF report, articles often accompanied by “nuns in habits” stereotypes “that are misleading or outdated.”Paprocki said he doesn’t know how efforts to re-form LCWR will fly canonically, given that organization was set up by and is responsible to the Holy See. 

“If you took a survey of LCWR individuals, my guess is that the vast majority haven’t moved beyond Christ or they wouldn’t be nuns,” said Paprocki. “My hope is that this wouldn’t be a problem for them. 

“If it is, it says something else” [more].

Spearie has clearly done his homework on this one.

If you're curious as to what brought about this assessment of the Holy See, Father Zuhlsdorf has put together a post to help you: Nuns Gone Wild: A Trip Down Memory Lane.

Since the release of the assessment, the Get Religionistas have been doing there own good work examining the reporting concerning the new panel.  Terry Mattingly wonders if the Vatican picks a side in the nun wars and Mollie is skeptical about "stunned" sisters.

George Weigel reminds us that this assessment is not, in fact, a condemnation of nuns or their good works, nor is it a support for Obamacare:

That imagery — three men, acting on behalf of a male-dominated Curia, assuming leadership of an organization of women religious — proved irresistible to Vatican critics, eager to drive home the point that the Catholic Church doesn’t care about one half of the human race (as the proprietor of a once-great American newspaper once told his new Rome bureau chief as she was leaving the U.S). Others were eager to use the Vatican action to prop up crumbling public support for Obamacare: The good sisters of the LCWR supported Obamacare; the aging misogynists at the Vatican whacked the LCWR; see, Obamacare must be right, just, proper, and helpful toward salvation! The problem with the former criticism, of course, is that the Catholic Church is the greatest educator of women throughout the Third World and the most generous provider of women’s health care in Africa and Asia; there, the Church also works to defend women’s rights within marriage, while its teaching on the dignity of the human person challenges the traditional social and cultural taboos that disempower women. As for the notion that the Church’s Roman leadership put the clamps on the LCWR because “the Vatican” objects to Obamacare, well, that would be the first European-style welfare-state initiative to which “the Vatican” has objected in living memory.
What both these lines of critique fail to grasp is that the problem posed by many of the sisters within the religious orders that make up the LCWR, and by the LCWR as an organization, is precisely the problem noted by the Master of Trinity: “Another God, another mountaintop.” The difference is that Harold Abrahams acknowledged his unorthodox views, while the LCWR leadership, to vary the cinematic metaphors, took on the role of Captain Renault, professing itself “shocked, shocked” that anyone could imagine anything doctrinally awry in the organization or its affiliated orders [more].

The Curt Jester takes a look at the so-called Return of the Rottweiler.

The Catholic Thing's Stephen P. White takes a look at the Bad Religion of the LCWR, taking as his launching point the statement made by the scheduled speaker for the 2012 gathering of the LCWR that Jesus "did not die."  Naturally, that statement is rather problematic for a Christian.