The Nun in the World: Religious and the Apostolate

Description

WARNING: Written by a Modernist Vatican II cardinal

Cdl. Suenens's 1963 Apostolic Development of the Religious Woman (English title: The Nun in the World), which Cdl. Spellman implicitly opposed (cf. De Mattei 2013 §V.12; cf. ref:9.221 below), had a drastic influence on the Vatican II fathers' "updating" of religious life. However, even in this book, the Jovinian heresy is not found.

Cardinal Spellman, as he opened the debate on November 10, asserted that, with the introduction of some modifications, the text could be accepted. Spellman denounced the risks of the so-called modernization or “updating” of religious life, in an implicit polemic against Cardinal Suenens who in a book devoted to the Apostolic Development of the Religious Woman (published in English as The Nun in the World),264 had proposed a radical reform of women’s religious life and saw in Vatican Council II the opportunity to carry it out. This reform, for the primate of Belgium, would have to redefine the role of women religious, by giving them an adequate “social training”265 and by making them spiritual directors of lay women.266 To this end it would be necessary to eliminate mercilessly certain “out-of-date” and “redundant” devotions that tended to “make the life of prayer mechanical and to atrophy it,”267 and to transform the “spiritual exercises” of women religious so as “to amend and simplify them, to give their piety a more biblical, liturgical, ecclesiastical and apostolic basis.”268

Suenens seems to be a sort of anti-Soul of the Apostolate, as though prayer has to be minimized to make more time for apostolic activity (Americanism "active virtues" > "passive virtues" heresy).