At the LCWR Assembly: LCWR President-Elect Sister Teresa Maya, CCVI (center) with Sister Angela Szczawinska, CSFN, CWR board chair, and Nicholas Schafer, CWR executive director.
Dear CWR Members and Friends,
Greetings from Chicago! It’s been a busy couple of weeks as teams have been on the road representing CWR at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) Assembly in Orlando, at the J.S. Paluch Vocations Seminar in Chicago, and exploring future CWR conference sites. I present to you an update about some of what is going on throughout the organization.
LCWR Reflection
It was a great honor for me to participate in the recent LCWR Assembly at the beginning of August. I would like to start by thanking all the members of various leadership teams who came by to meet us in the exhibit hall. And thanks to all the communicators for encouraging them to do so! Photos of many such meetings can be found on the CWR Facebook page.
It was a very powerful and moving experience to join with so many in prayer, contemplative dialogue and fellowship. I want to draw your attention to the most captivating address of the assembly, that of then LCWR President (now Past-President) Mary Pellegrino. In her remarks, Mary faces the diminishment narrative of women religious head-on, and offers a language to start building a narrative of communion. If you don’t read anything else from LCWR, you owe it to yourself to read this speech.
Conference 2017
There is still time to register for the 2017 CWR conference One Voice: Charged by the Current / Voix Unies: Courant Puissant, Oct. 3–6 in Niagara Falls, Canada. This conference has an extremely dynamic program, and we welcome both members and non-members to join us for an excellent week. We are also very pleased to welcome our French-speaking colleagues, and will provide French interpretation. I hope to see many of you there!
Members, please stay tuned to your email and the listserv as several items will be sent to you for consideration prior to the business meeting, which will be held Friday, Oct. 6 during the conference.
Cycling with the Sisters is an event that will take place on Monday, Oct. 2. Several CWR members and friends will undertake a 100-mile bike ride from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Niagara Falls, Canada across the Peace Bridge. At each stop along the way, riders will be speaking to raise awareness of the ministries in which sisters are actively engaged around the world. There will be plenty of opportunities to follow the riders via the CWR Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Life Satisfaction Scale for Apostolic Women Religious
Sister Clara Kreis, CDP, PhD., L.P. has created a Life Satisfaction Scale for Apostolic Women Religious to help sisters individually and communally to discern current levels of satisfaction with religious life and healthy ways to move forward. She has reached out to CWR to help spread the word about this valuable tool. The initial study still needs participants (particularly sisters born after 1961) in order to present full, representative and statistically significant outcomes. The study is currently available in Spanish and English and soon will be available in German. If your congregation has not heard about this study, please consider including the call for participants in your next newsletter or email communication. More information can be found at the study web site: www.duq.edu/lssawr.
Thank you
I wish to thank all our members, friends, and colleagues who have welcomed me during my travels this year. As I have said before, there has never been a more important time to tell the stories of these amazing sisters whom we have the honor to serve.
Yours in Christ,
Nick
Nicholas T. Schafer, CFRE
CWR Executive Director
nschafer@c4wr.org