By Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Cardinal Franc Rode, head of the Vatican office overseeing religious orders, said he requested an apostolic visitation of women’s religious orders in the U.S. to help the Sisters and to respond to concerns for their welfare.

“This apostolic visitation hopes to encourage vocations and assure a better future for women religious,” the cardinal said in a statement released Nov. 3 by the Vatican.
Cardinal Rode, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, said his statement was in response to “many news accounts” and inquiries about the visitation, which was announced in January.

He insisted that the apostolic visitation is a response to “concerns expressed by American Catholics — religious, laity, clergy and hierarchy — about the welfare of religious women and consecrated life in general.”

He said his office already had been considering convoking an apostolic visitation when he attended a symposium on religious life at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass. in 2008. “The multitude and complexity” of the problems and challenges facing U.S. religious were made clear by speakers at the symposium, the cardinal said.

“This helped me understand that such an evaluation of the challenges facing individual religious and their congregations would benefit the Church at large as well as the Sisters and institutes involved.”

Cardinal Rode wrote that he hoped the visitation would be “a realistic and graced opportunity for personal and community introspection as major superiors and Sisters cooperate in this study.”

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