It is almost instinctively that one reaches, when attempting to explain what is going on today in the Catholic church, for metaphors out of the natural world—storms, earthquakes, seismic shifts—to get at the magnitude of
events.
We search for the terms that explain what we’re experiencing: phenomena beyond the ordinary disturbances we’ve learned to weather one season to the next. Just as seismologists or climatologists begin to put together patterns over time, to construct a mega-image of what is happening, so are we. Another piece of the puzzle has just fallen into place for us with the delivery last week from the Vatican of the “Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.”