Three main topics are at stake: women's ordination, salvation outside the Catholic Church, and homosexuality.
In 2001, LCWR was instructed by the CDF - then helmed by the current pope, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger - to report on the promulgation of the above doctrines in their orders and provinces. No report has been forthcoming, so the CDF has decreed an apostolic visitation as necessary.
How does this apply to Kenai and Alaska at large?
Sr. Joyce Ross, a Sister of Mercy, Sr. Charlotte Davenport, a Sister of St. Joseph of Peace and Chancellor of the Archdiocese, and any number of the Adrian Dominican Sisters who serve the Archdiocese of Anchorage are all members of the 100+ orders that LCWR represents. As has already been noted on this blog, Sr. Joyce's involvement with liturgical abuse in Kenai demonstrates a prejudice against the Church's teaching on women's ordination; hence, this apostolic visitation may have a direct effect upon the frequency and character of the liturgical abuse described here.
For more on the particular type of theology that LCWR espouses, here are excerpts from the keynote address of their 2008 annual assembly:
Human thought and love, we are learning, are not something injected into the universe from without, but are the flowering, the concentration, in us of deeply cosmic energies. Matter, zesty with energy, evolves to life, then to consciousness, then to spirit.
Folks, claiming that matter evolves into spirit is heresy. Here's what the catechism has to say on the creation of the soul:
The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not 'produced' by the parents - and also that it is immortal; it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection (CCC 366).
Please pray for the Pope, Cardinal Levada, and all the members of the LWCR.
in reality, the comment of human thought and love coming forth from a "flowering, a concentration of deeply cosmic forces" is all to reminisent of gnostic religious ideas. One person's mystical experience which they then try to impart to the rest of us, disconnected from revealed Truth has been around for many centuries. This trend does not infect just this group of religious, however.
ReplyDeleteA most interesting interpretation of the "sense of the faith" that the Church teaches us is a gift to the faithful with baptism. We gain a sense of the Truth which helps us to "sense" that what we hear is authentic as well as not in line with Truth. Of course, we are responsable for taking our "sense" and investigating with documents of the Church and faithful teachers what our "senses" are picking up on. This teaching was given a "communal twist" here in Soldotna, with the idea that insights into the Truth come to us through our community developing a communal sense of what is truth and then developing communal behaviors as Mass that reflect what our community believes. We do this as a body of believers and thus confirm each other in our sense of the truth. If we could actually have an open discussion with our priests we might actually be able to get clarification of what was meant by this sermon on the "sense of the faith", but since they move about, never in one place more than a week at a time, it is impossible to get a real sense of what was being said here. Yet my "sense" was certainly on alert that this was too far into the genre of "truth is developed, (led, flowered, given birth) by the cosmic forces" that drive us as a community. So truth would fall into what we birth here in our community. It would be interesting to just have rational discussions about these things.