Memo to Leadership Conference of Women's Religious*

Memo to the Leadership Conference of Women’s Religious*
*Pope Benedict XVI in his book, Co-Worker of the Truth, Meditations for Every Day of Year, /92

August 19: Christianity is not a philosophical speculation; it is not a construction of the intellect. Christianity is not “our” work, it is a revelation, a message that has been given us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we wish.

Consequently we are not authorized to change Our Father to Our Mother. The symbolism used by Jesus is not reversible. It is based on the Man-God relationship that he came to reveal to us. It is even less permissible to replace Christ by some other persona.

But what radical feminism - even at times that which claims to be based on Christianity - is not willing to accept is this: the exemplary, universal, and unchangeable relationship between Christ and the Father. In fact, I am convinced that what feminism promotes as we know it but an entirely different religion…

August 25: Many people have turned with great confidence to those profane confessors, those “experts of the mind”, that psychologists and psychoanalysts are supposed to be. Yet the most these experts can tell us is how the powers of the mind function; they cannot tell us why or to what end.

But the crisis of many women religious was occasioned precisely by the circumstance that their minds seemed to be working in a vacuum and no longer to have discernible direction. Precisely through these continual analysis it has become very clear that the “soul” does not explain itself by its own powers, that it needs a point of reference outside itself.

This was, as it were, a “scientific” confirmation of Saint Augustine’s passionate outcry: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

This searching and experimenting, in the course of which people have often entrusted themselves to these so-called “experts”, has led to unforeseeable human miseries, in any event, to very great ones for women who have been most affected.

The sociologists who prepared a recent report about women religious in Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada, describe how, in the course of twenty years [1961-1981], all of the communities there initiated every conceivable kind of reform:

Abandonment of religious habit, individual budgets, degrees from secular universities,

Membership in secular professions, massive assistance from “specialists” of every kind.

Yet sisters continued to leave and new ones failed to come. Perhaps, without being fully aware of the reasons, women religious felt a deep unrest at living in a Church in which Christianity is reduced to an ideology of doing, a Church in which there is no longer any place for mystical experience, for that zenith of religious life that has been - and not by chance - the most precious treasure of the Church through centuries of uninterrupted constancy and fullness in the lives of religious, usually women rather than men; in the lives of those extraordinary women whom the Church has honored with title “saint”. and sometimes even “doctor”, not hesitating to offer them as models for all Christians.

George H. Kubeck, In pursuit of the truth, cinops be gone, Sunday, August 26. 2012 On matters relating to abortion and same-sex marriage, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is the guide. Also, when you are involved in public political protests, do not dress as a nun. It’s demeaning.