Gosh, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for one of those community meetings:
"Sister Clara, you'll be running choir practice. Sister Isabella, you'll be working in the garden. And Sister Dymphna - you'll be taming the bull we just bought."
I'm sure she would come clean up anyway if she were appealed to (any saint would, and I guess she did get sent to clean up the Incarnation monastery, which initially did not welcome her. They would perhaps have had nice sheets (and hams, due to a bull that mitigated the primitive rule), for nuns of upper class origins, but I think not a bull of the animal kind).
I will ask San Pedro Regalado, a Franciscan whom I found just now when looking up patrons of bullfighters (I think he is more like the patron of a bull... very Franciscan)
Sounds like there’s a need for forensic accountants to get involved, because I have suspicions that in addition to not paying the bills, money was going missing (quite possibly the exact same money).
Weren’t cloistered contemplative communities excluded from the Apostolic Visitation to US institutes of women religious a while back? Why was that? If there was an assumption that they were beyond the reach of evil interference, the Arlington and Burgos stories contradict that notion.
Are major superiors responding to these sorrowful events by stepping up their oversight?
Under the general Catholic principle of subsidiary, a religious order's local, national or regional management should have detected and corrected these problems long before they became spread all over the Internet.
Which points to a very modern problem. Once you let people have even limited Internet access, all manner of dangerous interactions are possible, even if they are physically cloistered. In 1962, the isolated nuns in an English convent had no idea of the progress of the Cuban missile crisis. And they were not an enclosed order. Nowadays a enclosed nun can read about sedevacantism and every wacky notion in the dictionary without leaving her cell. She can have intimate chats with her father confessor.
Plainly some serious thinking is needed about how modern religious preserve the spirit of the cloister as well as the legal letter of enclosure. And still not infantilise them with demeaning restrictions.
From 'A Man For All Seasons':
"For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales!"
One might say to these religious sisters with a vow of poverty, "But for silk sheets!"
“But for bulls!”
Gosh, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for one of those community meetings:
"Sister Clara, you'll be running choir practice. Sister Isabella, you'll be working in the garden. And Sister Dymphna - you'll be taming the bull we just bought."
They may have had more success taming the bull if they had allowed him to sleep on the silk sheets.
Sounds like they need St. Teresa of Avila to come in and clean up shop.
They need Clare of Assisi and St. Francis to remind them of their vows to follow Lady Poverty.
Not St. Teresa's problem, unfortunately. They were Franciscans, not Carmelites.
I'm sure she would come clean up anyway if she were appealed to (any saint would, and I guess she did get sent to clean up the Incarnation monastery, which initially did not welcome her. They would perhaps have had nice sheets (and hams, due to a bull that mitigated the primitive rule), for nuns of upper class origins, but I think not a bull of the animal kind).
I will ask San Pedro Regalado, a Franciscan whom I found just now when looking up patrons of bullfighters (I think he is more like the patron of a bull... very Franciscan)
https://www.europapress.es/castilla-y-leon/noticia-conoce-san-pedro-regalado-patron-toreros-20150513123900.html
Perhaps the fake bishop is behind the extravagances.
Maybe some of them, but others predate him.
It is a sin to not pay your bills.
The bull of excommunication.
Sounds like there’s a need for forensic accountants to get involved, because I have suspicions that in addition to not paying the bills, money was going missing (quite possibly the exact same money).
Poor Clares indeed…
Weren’t cloistered contemplative communities excluded from the Apostolic Visitation to US institutes of women religious a while back? Why was that? If there was an assumption that they were beyond the reach of evil interference, the Arlington and Burgos stories contradict that notion.
Are major superiors responding to these sorrowful events by stepping up their oversight?
Under the general Catholic principle of subsidiary, a religious order's local, national or regional management should have detected and corrected these problems long before they became spread all over the Internet.
Which points to a very modern problem. Once you let people have even limited Internet access, all manner of dangerous interactions are possible, even if they are physically cloistered. In 1962, the isolated nuns in an English convent had no idea of the progress of the Cuban missile crisis. And they were not an enclosed order. Nowadays a enclosed nun can read about sedevacantism and every wacky notion in the dictionary without leaving her cell. She can have intimate chats with her father confessor.
Plainly some serious thinking is needed about how modern religious preserve the spirit of the cloister as well as the legal letter of enclosure. And still not infantilise them with demeaning restrictions.
I know of a situation where the superior mainlines online conspiracy theories, and has decided as a result that she has the gift of prophecy.
Well, we now know what they did with th vow of poverty. I can't wait to see what they did with the vow of chastity.