Lavinia Byrne leaves order after Vatican investigation

By Simon Caldwell
A RELIOIOUS SISTI k and prolific author. journalist and broadcaster announced this week that she was to leave her order in protest at her treatment by the Vatican.
Sr Lavinia Byrne, a member of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary since she joined in 1964 at the age of 17, has submitted a request to be dispensed from her vows and to leave her community. A columnist for The Tablet and the author of seven religious books, she said the move was prompted by the efforts of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to "suppress discussion" on the role of women in the Church.
Sr Lavinia's decision also comes in the wake of a request made two years ago by the CM:, which is headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, for a public declaration of her belief in Htftlillliae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical prohibiting the use of artificial birth control, and in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, a statement by Pope John Paul 11, issued three years ago, which restricted priestly ordination only to men on the grounds that the Pope did not have the authority to
alter the tradition of the Church in this area.
Neither of the documents have been declared ex cathedra, the papal stamp of infallibility. Sr Lavinia said each have been the subject of retrospective attempts to claim infallibility when pressing questions over the role of women in the Church in her view, remained unresolved.
A supporter of women's ordination, she insisted she does not disagree with Huttuntae Vitae but views artificial birth control as a nonissue for her because it does not affect her personally. She said her real grievance was over the conduct of the CDF. She said: "The point, as I see it, is that with an ageing pope, the balance of power is being transferred from the place where it really belongs to the bureaucratic institutions of the Catholic Church.
"A Church that tries to make people sign up to party documents, particularly those which are not at the core of belief, is one which is shooting itself in the foot."
She added that she intended to stay a "happy and loyal Catholic" for life and would not have had a problem if she had been simply asked to declare her belief in the Creed.
Sr Lavinia came under the scrutiny of the CDF after the publication in 1994 of her book Women at the Altar, in which she remarks that the advent of the Pill meant immense and irreversible changes in the world. She protested that she was merely making an observation. She took her decision to leave the IBVM, however, when she was in New York during the Christmas period and read in a newspaper that three million Catholics in the city had attended Mass on Christmas Day. "I wondered how many of them practised what the Church teaches on birth control," she told The Catholic Herald. "I suppose they have $5m in the collections on Sunday. The Vatican is going to think twice before it starts naming and shaming them." Sr Lavinia said she was also angry at the treatment of women as "servants" by some parishes and at the treatment of some nuns and religious sisters by the Church — in particular, the American Sr Jeanne Grammick, who was suspended last year by the CDF from working with gays and lesbians pending a clarification of her beliefs on homosexual intercourse.
"One of the problems with the Roman structures is that the CDF will not deal directly with any individual sister," she said.
"Instead they choose to go through the hierarchy of a community, writing only to the general superior of that Order and expecting her to apply sanctions in their name. "This means that a legitimate chain of trust within the community is broken and that the rightful and necessary administration of the Church becomes a faceless bureaucracy condemning individuals without hearing their story or point of view." Sr Lavinia presently works at the Cambridge Theological Federation, training Anglican, Methodist and United Reformed Church students as ministers, and prepares Catholic women students for active ministry in the Church. She says she now hopes to lecture. broadcast and write "without constantly feeling that my integrity is being called into question". She is not the only highprofile Catholic to resign In protest at the activities of the Vatican. In September 1998, Fr John Wijngaards, former vicar general of the Mill Hill Missionaries, left the priesthood over Church teaching on women priests, homosexuality and artificial birth control.
He was particularly aggrieved by a molu proprio by the Pope that year called Ad Tuendam Fidem, which consolidated traditional Church teaching, and by its commentary by Cardinal Ratzinger.