La Salette Attleboro: The Fallout Spreads...

There has been much fallout since my Blog post exposing the emergence of New Age spirituality at the La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Michael Brown carried the piece at his website Spirit Daily and the Medjugorje Forum initiated a discussion thread. A Catholic woman posed a question for the experts at EWTN which may be found here.

For a little more background on Joyce Rupp from Donna Steichen (the author of Ungodly Rage, a favorite of mine which is published by Ignatius Press), go here. Ms. Steichen, writing about New Age influences upon St. Andrew's Parish in Fort Myers, Florida, notes how:

"...it was the school principal, Sister Elizabeth Dunn, who did most to reveal how deeply alien feminist theology had penetrated into St. Andrew's when, for Christmas in 1994, she gave each school staff member a copy of Sister Joyce Rupp's little book of self-centered feminist mediation, The Star in My Heart: Experiencing Sophia, Inner Wisdom. Rupp's bibliography cites notorious feminist authors from Merlin Stone (When God Was a Woman) through New Age pioneer Jean Houston to Rianne Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade) and Elizabeth Dodson Gray, keynote speaker at the annual Massachusetts WomenChurch meeting a few years ago.

Like many current feminist writers, Rupp personifies the figure of Divine Wisdom in the Old Testament Wisdom books as 'Sophia,' a name used because it is the Greek word for wisdom. Rupp echoes standard feminist rhetoric when she says:. . . it seems evident that Sophia is the feminine face of God. This aspect was eventually lost due to a highly male-dominated culture and a church that was very fearful of the goddess traditions of the past. That feminists seek to make a goddess of Divine Wisdom is ironic, since they have so noticeably failed to acquire even mere human wisdom, for which their need is clearly desperate. Surely some feminist scholars must know that the use of the feminine pronoun in Scriptural references to Wisdom is a matter of grammatical gender; in Hebrew and Greek, all abstract nouns are feminine. Divine Wisdom is not a Person but a perfection of the Holy Trinity, traditionally attributed to the Son because He is the Word of God."

Like most of feminist theology, this exercise is simply a propaganda campaign, exhibiting less intellectual honesty and scholarly objectivity than one might find in a public-relations campaign by the advertising council. The rising tide of feminist spirituality at St. Andrew's crested with an Earth Week observance in late April. All-school events are not routine at St. Andrew's. No services were held during Holy Week, for example, nor after Easter in celebration of the Resurrection. There was no all-school May crowning of the statue of the Blessed Virgin. The school does not assemble for May rosary devotions. Yet the faculty pulled out all the stops for Earth Week, a purely secular media event invented by members of the 1960s counter-culture to draw attention to their environmental concerns. Classroom teachers were urged to implement specific activities for each day of the week, and two major all-school 'prayer services' were scheduled.