On April 18, it was announced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a representative body of about 80 percent of women religious in the United States, is to undergo a major reform to insure fidelity to Catholic teaching in areas including abortion, euthanasia, women’s ordination and homosexuality.
 

The office of the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (hereinafter “LCWR”) issued a statement saying it was “stunned by the conclusions of the doctrinal assessment of LCWR by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” This strikes a jarring note for all practicing Catholics who hold in their hearts fond memories of members of religious congregations of women in the United States who for centuries have practiced in the fullest sense the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience in community by their work in our hospitals, social service institutions, orphanages and schools.
 

For those of us who came to adulthood in the Catholic culture in the first half of the last century, the good influence of religious women on our lives was profound and lasting and will redound to the glory of God in the world to come.
 

For those of us who grew up in the “old religion,” the decimation of the ranks of the priesthood and religious sisters represents an unmitigated disaster. The number of religious sisters in the United States around 1960 was about 180,000. The present number is 57,000, a catastrophic decline by any measure.
It seems that the priesthood, thank God, has begun to recoup as the numbers of those preparing for the priesthood rises slowly but steadily up toward the former levels. But, alas, one cannot say the same for religious sisters.
 

It is clear, however, that something dreadful has happened to them, and if reforming the LCWR will help to change that, well and good.
 

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith based its doctrinal assessment on an investigation begun in April of 2008 by the Bishop of Toledo, the Most Reverend Leonard Blair. I have known Bishop Blair for many years; he is an astute and conscientious theologian. He had enough kindness and compassion to take pity on me when I was serving on the Roman Rota and took me with him on a tour of European Russia in the early 1990s. I am sure that his assessment was both accurate and pastorally sensitive, and that Bishop Blair would have in mind the good of religious women in the United States.
 

I have reached the point in my life where I no longer have to figure out these complicated issues of ecclesiastical polity. But all of us, keeping in mind what religious sisters meant to the Church before the Second Vatican Council and the precipitous decline where there are only one-third as many sisters now as there were at the beginning of the vaunted renewal of the Church, know that something is amiss.
 

It would be comforting to say to ourselves, “Well, they must have had it coming.” But there is little proof of that. I also regret to have to say that some of the things asserted in the Vatican’s doctrinal assessment are true. This organization of religious women is silent on the Church’s teaching of the right to life and the Church’s biblical view of family life and human sexuality. These subjects are not part of the LCWR’s agenda in any helpful way. And indeed, some of the public statements of this group disagree with or challenge the positions taken by the bishops who are, as the Vatican correctly notes, “the Church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” But the LCWR came into existence in times that were confusing to us all. We cannot take rapidly composed feelings and sentiments as if they were meditated and consciously crafted expressions of faith. Now that times are less confused, we should pray that all of this will in God’s mercy come aright.
 

Could it be that these religious women vowed to the practice of the evangelical councils in and for the Church established by Christ have somehow mistaken the teaching of the Second Vatican Council as did many zealots in lay (and even clerical) life? The purpose of that council was not radical change, but aggiornamento, which means “updating, bringing up to speed, adjusting for the times,” not a wholesale abandonment of the Church’s twin sources of revelation — Scripture and tradition — going back twice a thousand years.
 

For the sake of the tens of thousands of sisters whose memory we venerate in the Church of today, I hope that the religious women addressed by the Vatican’s concern will see this whole affair as an act of divine providence asking them to pause, to think over again what has happened, to examine those points in which they are at variance with the successors of the Apostles, and to bring it about that these sisters are once again clearly in union with the whole Church in all matters of faith and morals.
 

In this Easter season, the pertinent writings of the Fathers and the Mothers of the Church have a theme of dying to one’s old self and patterning our new life of grace on Christ our Redeemer and High Priest. It does not seem to me that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is interested in exchanging fusillades of angry charges and countercharges. Perhaps the sisters themselves will discover that they have been near the brink of losing the faith and in God’s goodness will now find and follow the path, back to the safety we find in Him who rose from the dead and leads us into paradise.
 

I hate to think that so fine a work as that of religious women uniformly displayed between the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council will be just a historical footnote as they pass into oblivion.