Changing paradigms of religious life: dialogue with hierarchical church may not be the answer for religious congregations. A more organic approach is needed: be faithful to the inner unfolding life as it is rather than as it should be

Catholic New Times, May 21, 2006 by Brenda Peddigrew

It is indeed true that, as Ted Schmidt notes in his article (CNT, April 23) praising the recent Message to Our Bishops from the Canadian Religious Conference, this document is "a brave but faithful initiative." The document is, in fact, so faithful, so careful, even to the edge of placating, that it made me wonder about the true nature of fidelity in a hierarchical church that has steadfastly refused for decade after decade to dialogue with, or show respect for, any thinking other than its own fixed positions.

How long must we try to interact with an institutional paradigm that won't, rather than can't, change?

The Real Charism: Not for Church

While recently researching the lives of several foundresses of women's religious congregations, I realized that these women did not begin their communities for the church. The communities were founded originally out of a profound personal relationship with God experienced by the foundresses whose visions took form in service to the poor and the sick, in education and social service, but they were not, first and foremost, intended for service to the church.

On the contrary, many if not most foundresses were in such conflict with the hierarchical church that some were actually excommunicated, others openly persecuted, their orders suppressed, and others spent a lifetime of conflict with clergy on all rungs of the hierarchical ladder. In one case, Margaret Cusack, foundress of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, had her name removed by the Vatican as foundress of her order because she publicly supported the women's suffragette movement in England.

Has anything changed, really? Will it, with this new and careful initiative of the Canadian Religious Conference? Will the bishops really take this message to Benedict XVI on their ad limina visits and discuss it with any real purpose and energy?

Is it really the best use of our power for good to continue asking for dialogue with an authority who consistently refuses to respond and who continues to use a punishing approach to anyone who differs? If we are to be effective in the ways that our foundresses were and meant us to be, must we not claim our own inner authority and take it back from those who would limit and diminish us at every turn?

Losing Energy for Service

Energy is not unlimited. Much of the energy of individual religious and communities continues to drain away in the pursuit of an unrealistic expectation that the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church will suddenly or even eventually transform itself into an open, listening, dialogic and collegial body. This is even less probable than it was twenty years ago.

In Crucible for Change: Engaging Impasse Though Communal Contemplation and Dialogue (2004), Nancy Sylvester highlights the current condition of the relationship between vowed religious and the Roman Catholic Church. In less public attempts, individual religious women and a few congregations keep pouring energy into how they might continue their profound spiritual commitments and needed services while ensuring that they do not offend whomever the current bishop happens to be. I cannot help but notice how much creative energy that such an effort drains. How limiting and destructive it has been for those who try and try, with so little return, and no reciprocity.

Such efforts make no difference because the old paradigm to which the hierarchy belongs is finished and cannot be recovered. The hierarchical authority, I would posit, is now incapable of sufficient change as a body to even comprehend the language of those whose faithful intention and request for dialogue keeps on repeating itself. The effort to keep expecting the church to hear and respond might actually be a betrayal of the original purpose--those fiery charisms--which birthed the congregations in the first place.

Loss of the Liminal

In its prophetic dimension, religious life has lost its liminal quality, and might not get it back, at least in our lifetime. According to D. O'Murchu in Consecrated Religious Life: the Changing Paradigms (2005), "Liminality is about growth and risk at the cutting edges ... it is about fluidity and flexibility, creativity and courageous abandonment to divine recklessness."

We have been co-opted by church and society, and, while many good works and even some prophetic efforts continue, in general we are as far from those fierce, single-focused visions of the foundresses as we will ever be.

The old paradigm of religious life was "despite its strong emphasis on prayer and devotion ... strongly based on the observance of externalized rules, laws and expectations ... essentially a masculine model in which performance is all important," while the new paradigm "is far more organic and seeks to honor the paradoxical process of evolution as everything goes through the cycle of birth-death-rebirth." (See O'Murchu.) Between those two statements lies a planet of difference, perhaps a difference we might not fully comprehend in our lifetime.

As with all paradigm shifts, the new begins among the old, growing like small shoots hidden among the taller, dying plants. Such is also true in religious life. For some decades now, those who see the folly of continuing to attempt dialogue with hierarchy, and who choose to follow the organic path of trusting what grows from within, no matter how it appears from without, who quietly attune to the essence of religious life rather than the outer show of it, have been among us.