LCWR Presidential Address

“So Much is in Bud”

Beatrice Eichten, OSF

August 20, 1006

As we come to the closing of this year of Jubilee, we celebrate 50 years as a conference of leaders of women religious in the United States. We honor what is completed and part of our past as a conference. Behind me is a picture of a mature, open rose, symbolizing these fifty years, years of sweetness and thorns, of beauty and growth, a ripeness that gives way to new growth. That new growth is now, and is symbolized by the new bud on the rose. Much is “in bud” today, as we face new realities with their challenges and opportunities.

Jubilee is a time of joy, of mercy and of grace, a time to acknowledge our unfinished, wounded realities. It is a time to ask for forgiveness and to proclaim a renewed commitment to begin again. In Rome, on the first day of jubilee, the ‘holy door’ of St. Peter’s Basilica is opened and is then closed at the end of the jubilee year. We in LCWR have figuratively opened our own ‘holy door’ through regional celebrations of the gift of our lives, lives that are immersed in the Gospel and are lived in the reality of our blessed and broken world.

Today, we stand in a space of wonder and reflection, a foyer between what was and what will be. I want to reflect with you on what we see as we look back through the door of our experience as LCWR – our open, mature rose - and then reflect on some of what we see as we look through the door to peer into the future – the rose bud that carries the mystery and promise of fullness of life.

First, Looking Back!

The beginning of LCWR and its first decades is a fascinating story. Several of the women who lived that story are here in this room, but I wager that many of us here know little of that story. As we look back at our founding years, I am indebted to Mary Daniel Turner, SNDdeN and Lora Ann Quinonez, CDP for their development of this history in their book The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters.[i] The book offers a fascinating read with much more information than I will have time to share today.

Our Birthing

I was surprised to learn that the roots of LCWR come from a request from Pope Pius XII. In 1950, he convened an international gathering of leaders of women and men’s religious congregations. He called for a new, organized collaboration among congregations for the transformation of society after World War II.

His request built on the awakening that had already began in the United States in the late 40’s when women religious became aware of the shortcomings of preparation of their sister teachers. This awareness led to the Sister Formation movement, which encouraged and provided theological and professional preparation for women religious, and also provided ways for congregations to interact and resource each other.

Two years later, in 1952, Pius XII convened another international gathering, this time with only the leaders of women’s religious congregations. He again stressed the theme of collaboration and the need for updating religious life and community works.

That same year, the Congregation for Religious in Rome initiated the first national gathering of religious in the United States, explicitly relating to renewal of American religious. It was held jointly with women and men, though with two separate tracks, one for men and another for women. The liaison’s letter to the chair of the planning committee offered praise as well as a mandate. The religious of the United States, he said, [would] “with our spirit of initiative and our greater freedom in making experiments, [be]… in a position to prove to other countries that modern adaptations can be made on certain aspects of the religious life without sacrificing anything essential.”[ii] The Congregation didn’t know what they were starting!

Four years later, in 1956, Rome asked the same committee of sisters to establish a national conference of religious in the United States. As you have heard, the committee did not think such a conference was needed, since the National Catholic Education Association and the Catholic Hospital Association were already meeting the needs for ministerial relationships. However, Rome persisted, and in the end, the committee’s response was “If the Holy Father wants it…,” they would do it. Consequently, they drafted statutes (with preliminary approval from Rome). They negotiated a parallel committee of men religious, and decided that women would be better served by a separate conference due to the divergent interests and problems of women and the disproportionate ratio of women to men.

When the leaders of congregations of women gathered that year, they also expressed ambivalence about the need for such a conference. Still, after considerable discussion, they decided that, “Rome wishes it and…as obedient children of the church, there should be no hesitancy in forming [the conference].” They decided to experiment with having a conference for one year before making a final decision.

In 1957 that decision was made. The Conference of Major Superiors of Women (hereafter referred to as Conference) was established as an ongoing conference for women religious leaders, with legal status as a church body, and with accountability to Vatican authorities. Its focus during the initial years was on revitalization of religious life, governance, holiness, the health of sisters, inadequacy of salaries, and the decrease in new recruits. Over time, the Conference became an important resource for leaders of religious congregations.

In 1965, Vatican Council II was on the horizon. In an effort to play an active role in mapping directions of anticipated change in the upcoming Council, the Conference undertook a massive population study called the Sisters’ Survey. It developed a data pool of resources for institutional change and provided national and community profiles of beliefs and values of American sisters. It was a formative experience for those completing the survey, as they realized that there was more than one way to think about bedrock issues of faith and commitment in a religious community. The survey showed the radical diversity of women religious and the lack of credibility of the separation between sacred and secular, and between church and world.

As a result, the Conference began to focus its assemblies on new theological concepts and models to facilitate institutional renewal. They established a Canon Law Committee to seek feedback on the proposed revision of canon law, assuming Rome would welcome and incorporate the views of American sisters in the new code. The document, which was approved by 95% of its members in 1968, became an important resource for future congregational general chapters.

As we all know, during the 60’s and 70’s, women religious underwent much change and growth, and claimed a new identity and presence in American society. The changes generated conflict internally and externally over questions on the nature of religious life and the legitimate expression of its values.

Some of these conflicts were within the Conference itself as some members saw religious life as primarily concerned with things of the Spirit in the world, while other members saw religious life as concerned with things of the spirit and not of the world. These latter members saw the changes as secular and worldly (that is political and social) and therefore not desirable. This internal conflict led to the formation of the Consortium Perfectae Caritatis (CPC) in 1970-71. In 1995, over the objections of and attempted negotiation by Conference leadership and certain church officials, this group received Vatican recognition as the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR).

Other conflicts were outside the bounds of the Conference itself but involved its leadership. Rome, which had been very laudatory of American religious in the 50s, expressed increasing displeasure with the Conference and with American religious life in general. Some of these conflicts were about the nature of religious life, but increasingly they were about tensions over the proper relationship with ecclesiastical authority. In this period, Conference leadership was ever faithful and involved in respectful, honest and direct dialog over differences of interpretation and experience.

In 1969, at its meeting in Atlanta, the Conference undertook a thorough self-study[iii], leading to new statutes and a new title, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). Reorganization of the Conference emphasized participation in decision-making, a shift from matters concerning ‘superiors and subjects’ to the ‘development of creative and responsive leadership,’ and to ‘those forms of service consonant with the evolving Gospel mission of women religious in the world through the Church’. It expanded the scope of collaboration to include ‘all groups concerned with the needs of contemporary society’, and it asserted the intent of the Conference to use its potential ‘for effecting constructive attitudinal and structural change’[iv].

In October 1971, the new bylaws and the new name were presented to the Congregation for Religious for approval. The Conference had not thought to consult Rome before approving its new bylaws, leading to some consternation and negotiation with the Vatican over the shift from language of “dependence” to language citing “relationship” with Rome.[v] The bylaws were eventually approved in 1972 with additions of language that assured that the Conference had due regard for the authority of the Holy See and of the bishops and that it would relate directly to the Congregation for Religious.

However, the name change to Leadership Conference of Women Religious was more problematic. A name carries a mind-set. Rome voiced strong objection to the word ‘leadership’ in the title, seeing it as arrogant and secular, and as implying that Americans rather than the Vatican were leaders of religious communities of women. After two years of conversation, in 1974, the Vatican assented to the name on condition that the new title be followed by the sentence, ‘This title is to be interpreted as “ the Conference of Leaders of Congregations of Women Religious of the United States of America’. The struggle over the name, which reflected the self-identity of American women religious, was an indication of future Vatican responses to American initiatives.

The women who mentored, struggled and shaped the living reality of the LCWR that still serves us today could well have expressed a statement by Jean Shinoda Bolen in relation to their companions on this journey:

There weren’t many footsteps to follow, or much in the way for foremothers. We became the role models, cheering sections, sounding boards, and green thumb support for each other. Being a woman with longtime good friends is like taking an experiential group seminar in surviving change. We learned through the stories our friends were living and lived our own experiment at the same time.[vi]

Now, 50 years later, we celebrate these legendary founding women and we join in the song that proclaims:

These are the women we come from.

The faith that sustained them

is bred in our bones.

We know where we come from and where we belong

‘Cause these are the women – Survivors each one

They weren’t always easy, but loving and strong

God’s life force inside them is still going on

‘Cause these are the women we come from.[vii]

Where Are We Today?

Our early founding sisters, and all those who ministered in leadership of their congregations and of LCWR from the ‘70s to today have brought us to the foyer where we stand in 2006, between the door opening to the past and the door opening to the future. They moved through open doors – sometimes through doors only slightly ajar – and they knocked on doors that were closed to them. As they moved forward, doors closed behind them as they have closed behind us. There is no going back.

The women who shaped the Sister Formation Movement and the beginning years of LCWR, the women who moved through the challenges and gifts of the following decades, and we who join together today in this 2006 Jubilee assembly, qualify for Bolen’s definition of crones –

“…women who let go of what should have been, could have been, might have been.” Women who “silence the whining in [their] heads that will come out of their mouths next.” For she says “Whining make you unable to live in the present, or be good company for anyone – even yourself.” [viii]

We need to live in the present! It is not that we don’t grieve some things – actions taken or not taken and relationships lost or damaged. But rather than whine, we make the commitment to listen, to love, to ponder what is, and to believe and trust that God is here with us in this time and in these circumstances. We recognize who we have been, who we are now and what is happening today. We attend to what is with “an observing eye and a sensitive ear”[ix]. And with new insight, we move forward into change and growth in our new reality.

Looking to the Future

I’d like to spend the rest of my time reflecting on future directions. Like the rose bud, it is dependent on the life that has gone before it while it holds potential and promise of newness and beauty. As we move into the future, we recognize that there are events and realities that both push us and draw us into the future.

I suspect some of us wish it were an easier time to be in leadership of our congregations, but my hunch is that same wish would have been voiced by the women who have gone before us and brought us to this time.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her Letter to a Young Activist reminds us that

“We were made for these times. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised since childhood for this time precisely.”[x]

She goes on to say:

We have a history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially…we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection. Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered – can be restored to life again.[xi]

So what do we see on this plain of engagement? What are the pushes and pulls that present themselves to us as invitation to move into the future? What are the doors that have been opened or closed to us? I invite you to reflect on four that I have identified.

Our First Door is the Door of Identity

Vatican II urged women religious to return to the charism of their founders and foundresses and to consider what they would do if they were alive and acting today. Theologians and leaders of religious congregations took seriously the need for updating and returning to our charisms. With their members, they designed and impelled renewal efforts in congregational governance, as well as in personal growth and development. A key role of LCWR during this time was to be a resource to leaders of congregations as they developed and carried out programs of renewal.

In some ways, renewal was imposed on members as we struggled to move them out of a stable, codified, safe way of living where fidelity to norms guaranteed the authenticity of their lives. Like colonized people[xii], members became accommodating to those in power. Lack of individual choice led many to apathy, passivity, cynicism, and passive aggression. With renewal, members who had previously had minimal personal choices were now expected to take individual responsibility for community living, for engaging in open discussion of differences and conflicts, for personal growth, finances, and ministry. They were expected to move from a developmental stage of living as ‘obedient children’ to a fully mature adult stage of responsibility. The intervening adolescent and young adult stages bubbled up and out as women sought growth and personal development, sometimes in ways that were immature, awkward and confusing.

We recently had a six-week, ‘level 101’ recall of the basics of community living with our Motherhouse community, where the average age is 86. The first topic addressed was choice – that religious community is a voluntary gathering of adults to live a Franciscan way of life, with adult members making choices about prayer and community living. In a small group discussion, an 86-year old sister, after a long pause, said quietly “I don’t think I ever made that choice”. Beyond deciding to enter our community, a decision her parish priest essentially made for her, she had not needed to make any decisions of her own. She followed the rules, was a ‘good sister’ and became a gentle, holy woman. After the changes following Vatican II, she had been faithful to and ‘gone along’ with the prevailing ethic of the group or her community leadership’s desires. In the process of redesigning community living at the Motherhouse, we were asking her and the other sisters to enter into the process of making choices about community life as it would be lived today – a difficult challenge, but one they appreciated.

What is different about who we are today, I believe, is that increasingly there is a hunger among members for a deeper experience of charism, for living their unique personal and communal identity and spirituality in our church and world. As members have done the personal work of coming to an authentic self-identity, they’ve become more aware of the interrelationships and shared vision of other community members. They exercise leadership from within themselves and take responsibility to understand and live their charism ‘out loud’ in their lives and ministry. This hunger and readiness to live our charism, along with our presence among the people has attracted increasing numbers of associates who are drawn to the spiritual energy of authentic holiness.

This internalization of charism offers elected leadership both opportunity and challenge. We have the opportunity to build on the renewed awareness of members, even as we are challenged to trust and facilitate the energy and drive of members and associates. As leaders and members look anew through the lens of charism, we are all called to engage in ways of testing what is valid as norms and parameters for community and ministry change. Ideally, leaders and members make decisions after consultation, allowing the Spirit to work within each woman and among all together.

We have changed. As our identity as mature women religious has developed, we find ourselves clearer about who we are and how we will work to spread the Gospel. I heard someone say “Now that we are so ready to engage and expand our presence and ministry, I wish we had large numbers of women 30 and 40 years old again”. But we don’t. What we have is wisdom and experience, embodied in the women we are today. We have come to a time where we face demographics that can open us to our next door, the Door of Wisdom.

The Door of Wisdom

Our founders served an immigrant people and built up an impressive system of institutional health, education and social service ministries, staffed by many young religious. With fewer and older members, along with the desire to serve beyond institutions, we needed to transition many of our ministries to committed, educated lay persons. I doubt that the awakening and involvement of the laity would have happened if we still had hundreds of women religious available to run schools and hospitals.

We have gradually moved to individual ministries among the people, often creating new expressions of our traditional ministries. Women religious are involved today in myriad ways of being engaged in local communities, prisons, shelters, and neighborhoods. In my community, we have sisters working in an African American community in Mississippi as foster parents, gardener and youth organizer, sisters accompanying homeless persons in the Mission District of San Francisco, and sisters teaching English as a Second Language to new immigrants. Some ‘retire’ in communities where they worked and serve the home-bound and elders of that city. You could each share multiple stories of ways that the vitality and passion of our members continue to touch the lives of people. We all know we have work to do even as we are fewer in number and older.

If we go beyond fear and anxiety about aging and diminishment, we see that a door that is opening is the door of sharing wisdom. Increasingly freed of ego and the need to be successful, we become unafraid of showing our soul. Indeed, Clarissa Pinkola Estes says:

“…One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.[xiii]

We are more humble and transparent even as we’ve become more attuned to the cries for peace, justice and mercy. We have greater clarity and courage about our mission as women religious who are called to love God in and through the proclaimed mission of our congregations. And so we can choose, as she says, to

“display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both….[these] are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.[xiv]

We can choose to act with hope and love as we address the needs of our world and proclaim that all of life, all of creation is holy. What implications does this have for ministry? For others? Are they looking for such presence?

Another aspect of this Door of Wisdom is a move from hands on/direct ministry to ministries of presence as members’ identity shifts from being a ‘religious worker’ to that of being one with and among people, journeying with them in their joys and sorrows. For our older members, this can be a difficult shift from finding self worth in ‘doing’ to finding it in being ‘sister’. For some of our mid-age members, being “sister’ and focusing on being present can sometimes result in ignoring the need for meaningful ministry combined with contributing to the community’s financial needs.

Another reality is that it seems that the flow of large numbers of young members is closed to us at this time. Our informal survey showed we not only have but are also retaining new members, though not in the large numbers seen in the 1930’s, ‘40’s and ‘50’s. It would be interesting to learn about the identity of the women entering our congregations – ethnicity, geographic location, age…. What might we learn from that?

We know our congregations reach beyond the United States to the needs of people in Africa, India, and Brazil, to name a few. Accompanying the women in these cultures invites us to collaborate with them to support, affirm, and learn from them. How is this changing our understanding and experience of ourselves as women religious serving the church in the world?

Finally, our changing demographics have caused us to question ourselves and to look deeply for the source of passion and hope that gives energy to our journey. We know we cannot do and be who we were in the past. Today, we bring the gift of wisdom to the unfolding questions of life. It is a gift that does not come easily. Wisdom is forged in the experience of struggle and loss, prayer and endurance. It relies on the community of women and men who accompany us with persistence, hope and wit. Can we trust that who we are today is who God wants and needs us to be for the life of the world?

Our Third Door is the Door of Ecclesial Identity

We rejoiced as the Vatican Council defined church as the ‘People of God’, raising the status of laity. Over time, laity began claiming their rights and responsibilities in the church and have been calling for greater accountability and transparency by bishops and religious. Lay movements have grown and strengthened and we see many lay women and men serving as leaders of our sponsored ministries and as ecclesial ministers.

In the face of a radically changing society in the United States, the institutional church, which once was the moral arbiter of faith and morals, found itself increasingly marginalized as people questioned its absolute authority. More lately, the scandal of sexual abuse, particularly among the clergy, has weakened the moral power of the hierarchical church. We are not untouched by this scandal and have made efforts to respond with fidelity and compassion.

Over the years, there has been a dramatic change in our status as women religious in our church and in society. From living in ‘the state of religion’ where we were removed from society and culture, women religious began to be inserted into society and to express American values of pluralism, dialog, fairness and public dissent, values not held dear by the hierarchical church. We are part of our culture and society, living our vocation as vowed consecrated communal women. How does our deepening religious identity as consecrated women provide accompaniment for people in parishes and society as they struggle to make decisions about their faith and their lives?

We religious have shifted from being ‘obedient daughters’ and a religious work force to being adult educated women with a mature identity who believe we have something to say about our Church, its teaching and its practice. This shift has strained our relationship with the hierarchical church, where we experience the pain of often being invisible, relegated to third class status, and absent at the table of decision.

Within this context of church, we need to engage in dialog, not in a reactionary way that can lead to judgment, defensiveness and oppression, but in relationships characterized by honest, thoughtful conversations that emerge from study and understanding of theology and spirituality. We are challenged to keep open the door of dialog with the hierarchical Church, as we continue to “claim responsibility for determining [our] own identity and the meaning of religious life.”[xv] We need to speak our truth with love, something that is not always easy to do so!

Our dialogic engagement with the Church happens at all levels. At the member level, rather than pick and choose liturgies and parishes, we need to engage in local parishes and interact with pastors and parishioners in sustained relationships. Our elected leaders need to continue to interact with their local bishops on matters relating to ministry, application of church teachings and norms, and policies governing sisters working in church ministries. As a Conference, we have made the commitment to stay at the table with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and with Vatican officials.

Lora Ann Quinonez and Mary Daniel Turner said it this way:

For American sisters holiness is undeniably and increasingly connected with the concrete circumstances of history and with their inalienable responsibility to help direct its course. Integrally a part of the church’s mission, American sisters will continue to seek their identity and their rightful place in both church and world as participants in that mission (the wellspring of their life).[xvi]

I believe we could affirm this same reality for ourselves in this Jubilee year 2006. We must keep the door of ecclesial identity wide open.

Our Fourth Door is The Door of World Relationships

Our lives are lived among the people, those in parishes, institutions and civic communities, serving especially those who are poor, excluded, and marginated. We are invited to live the Gospel of love, peace and justice in new ways as the needs of people and society change. As part of the world community, we are very aware of political and economic realities that create increasing interdependence in our global community. Today, our world is one whole: when one part hurts, we all know and feel it. Who of us is not watching with anguish and concern as the Middle East conflict escalates and expands? We struggle with the role of our government as ‘superpower’ and ‘dictator of democracy’ and join with a growing number of thoughtful people in our Church and society who give voice to the need for compassion, mercy and justice.

As a conference and as member congregations, we have committed to peacemaking, to voicing our belief that God loves all persons equally and totally, and that we are all sisters and brothers. We have engaged in actions and conversations that promote non-violence and healing. We join together with like-minded people, trusting the hypothesis that “when a critical number of people change how they think and behave, the culture will also, and a new era begins.”[xvii] In the face of so much violence and pessimism in our world today, surely this deeply grounded faith can help us move through doors of hope in our global community.

There are other doors we can and need to explore. I will just briefly mention two, the door of reconfiguration and the door of ecospirituality.

Ø As congregations come together in new ways, the challenge is to let reconfiguration lead to transformation, to doing something new that sparks energy and opens out anew to mission, and to avoid the risk of ending up with being a bigger version of the old. How can we come together as religious women on a broader scale to create unified efforts to proclaim the Spirit of God alive and active in our world?

Ø We are increasingly aware of being part of the larger, evolving cosmos, whose eco-systems are in danger from its human inhabitants. The richness of eco-spirituality rests in seeing and proclaiming the indwelling love of God in the “fragile creatureliness of the other”[xviii]: our neighbor, our sisters and brothers and all the creatures and forces of nature. How can our awareness and united action help to address the wounds of our Mother Earth?

In Conclusion

We stand in the foyer of today, holding our mature rose and its bud. Here in the present, we live with all the questions that swirl around us. Who are we? Why are we? Who will we be? What if?

We are familiar with the advice of Rainer Maria Rilke, who urges us to:

…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.[xix]

Our foremothers lived their questions into some answers. We, today, live our questions in the hope of living into answers.

We are the mature rose and we are the bud. The beauty, wisdom, experience of our religious life and presence is very real, as is the potential of who we are to become. Trusting in our faithful God, we hold the rose with faith and love and hope. I close with the words of the poet Denise Levertov, and with her say “So much is in bud – how could we tire of hope?”

The poem is titled Beginners.

Beginners

‘From too much love of living, Hope and desire set free Even the weariest river Winds somewhere to the sea –‘

But we have only begun to love the earth.

We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope? - so much is in bud.

How can desire fail? - we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to envision

how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.

Surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot drag, in the silt, all that is innocent? Not yet, not yet – there is too much broken that must be mended.

Too much hurt we have done to each other that cannot be forgiven.

We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture,

So much is in bud.

Denise Levertov, Selected Poems , New Directions Books, 2002