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What message are you sending by whom you put in charge?
I tread carefully this week as I am exampling a religious institution. Please know from the outset that I am making no comment on religion or any set of beliefs...this is simply a comment on an aspect of leadership. Are we ok so far? Good.
American nuns of the Roman Catholic Church are making quite a ruckus these days. As Mary Schmich points out in her article in Sunday's Chicago Tribune, the focus of nuns down through the years has been largely social: helping the homeless, ministering in social service agencies, helping in community centers, schools, etc.
These are also the causes that nuns tend to trumpet. This has displeased the Vatican as it would like the organizations of American nuns to be more ideological; to be more vocal on the right to life, the biblical view of family life, human sexuality including homosexuality, etc.
With this edict, the nuns have not complied, as most of them have continued to stress social justice, not Vatican morals.
"The difference is between pastoral and juridical," Schmich quotes an anonymous nun. "Are we, the church, a juridical body? About laws? Or are we doing what Jesus asked us to do, reaching out to marginalized people? Jesus tried to be inclusive. The sisters are more in the inclusivity camp. The bishops are in the exclusivity camp."
Last week, the Vatican issued a report criticizing groups like the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents about 80% of the nuns in the United States.
And then it did one more thing. It sent a man to take charge.
The Vatican dispatched an archbishop to straighten out these women run amok. He's come in to correct their doctrinal errors and set them on the straight and narrow. He's come in to change their emphasis and adjust their narrative.
If you're a nun, how do you take that? What does that choice signal to you? That women can't do a man's job? That these silly, misguided women need a man to straighten them out? How would I, as a nun, not be offended by the very presence of this man?
And they are deeply offended as made clear by Schmich's article.
The Vatican could have chosen a high ranking nun from anywhere in the world to send its message to the American nuns. That it didn't leads me to one of two conclusions: First, it didn't have any high ranking women who had an ideological difference with the American nuns. If that's the case, the Vatican has a real problem. That much solidarity within its ranks can only spell trouble.
The second possibility is it felt the situation needed a man...period. In which case the quiet resistance among the American nuns will be fortified all the more...not intimidated in the least. Their immediate response is one of offense and noncooperation. Whose wouldn't be?
Thus, by choosing a man, even if he was the greatest, most capable man in Rome, the Vatican made its job twice as difficult. And it loses a big PR battle. All this simply because of misguided arrogance. (To choose a leader without considering how that leader might be received and/or how he or she might be perceived is indeed insensitive arrogance.)
Whichever camp you fall into in this tug-of-war of Catholic doctrinal emphasis, most of us can agree that the Vatican's first step missed.
Even by poor symbolic choices we can lose the war before the battle's even begun.
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