Do Dioceses Profess c 603 Hermits Who do not Believe in c 603 Vocations?

[[Sister Laurel, do dioceses profess hermits under c 603 who don't believe in c 603? How about people who attack c 603 every chance they get and then request to become a diocesan hermit? I know you will see these are rhetorical questions. I am aware of a situation where someone who seems never to have had a good thing to say about can. 603 is requesting to be made a can. 603 hermit. How can this be?? Will her diocese profess her? I am just so outraged by the whole situation I don't even know what to ask you. I do think I know now why this "hermit" insists on remaining anonymous!!! 

She has waffled back and forth on c 603 for years I think, and how it is a distortion of the tried and true way to be a hermit, and now how it is tainted by some canonical hermit in California she doesn't care for at all (yes, that's you I think) and says the canon may not have been the will of God in the first place. The words that come to mind for me are jealous and hypocrite!! And now she is claiming because it has only been 10 weeks since she applied for canonical approval and she has heard almost nothing from her diocese, they are disrespecting her and care nothing about her vocation and she is trash-talking the "temporal Church" for their priorities (or lack thereof!!). 

I wonder if they have discovered her videos or blogs and are giving them a close look. She vlogged recently that they should be doing that with your blog. Well, if it should be done to you it should be done to her! Far from not taking her seriously, they may be taking her more seriously than she really wants! I read your post,"On Intervening in Cases of Fraud." It sounds like you have dealt with something like this before. If I knew who this person really is I would call or write her diocese myself because they need to know there are big concerns with professing her. God only knows the damage she has left in her wake in the past and then moved on from by using "anonymity" to protect her from being exposed.!! Oh, one question though I have assumed the answer: are you the canonical hermit in California joyful/christian/hermit trash-talks so routinely?]]

Thanks for your comments. Please know that I understand what you are feeling and have felt some of the same impulses myself. In general, I have only heard of a diocese professing someone who does not believe they truly have a c 603 vocation once, and no one who believes c 603 itself is some sort of mistake or ill-conceived merely human creation. How could a diocese do this without risking an invalid profession and/or consecration and a possible scandal for the faithful? Ordinarily, unless one has some ulterior motive, one petitions for admission to profession and consecration because one truly believes in one's heart of hearts that God is calling them to this vocation and one has found it to be their personal path to human wholeness and holiness!! Dioceses assume this is the reason one is petitioning and may be very surprised when they find it is not so.

Even so, given a candidate's long history of denigrating the canon, it is not a good idea to profess them simply because they claim they want to do what the bishop accepts is the normative way for hermits to go these days!! Since there are both canonical and non-canonical hermits today and since most will not be made canonical, neither does the argument about wanting "unity" carry much weight, especially when the one making this argument does not want anything to do with the "temporal Church", and does not attend church or receive the sacraments otherwise. Canon 603 is not obligatory. it is one option among several for some hermits. the basic question that should be asked is, if one cannot take on the ordinary rights and obligations of a lay Catholic, why should one be admitted to the additional rights and obligations of a canonical hermit? Many of us deal with chronic illness and disability including that from chronic pain; we still find ways to participate regularly in the Church's sacramental life.

For instance, if one wants to be a hermit and believes c 603 is not divinely inspired, one can become (or remain) a non-canonical (lay) hermit. (Apparently, the person you are writing about seems to have said recently that if the diocese decides to profess her, she will agree the canon is inspired and willed by God! Until then the question of the canon's divinely inspired character is an open question for her.) But, this kind of nonsense aside, to pursue profession under c 603 is a serious matter (the profession itself is an act of worship) and if one does not truly feel called to this, then it can become a serious act of dishonesty or fraud which then obligates others to act on their knowledge to prevent the situation from rising to the level of scandal. In the blog piece you referred to I said the following and still believe it completely: 

[[. . . I need to say that any person with genuine knowledge directly impacting the nature and quality (and this can include even the validity) of a public profession has not just the right but the obligation to share that knowledge in an appropriate way. Moreover, bishops and others involved in overseeing such vocations have the obligation to hear and seriously consider these concerns. Public professions involve ecclesial vocations which affect the entire Church. They are also public acts of worship and if there is actual deception or fraud at their heart, such an act of worship can become a serious scandal and that can rise to the level of sacrilege. It can also invalidate the profession being made -- one source of the scandal involved. When we are dealing with Canon 603 professions where the total number of solitary canonical hermits are, relatively speaking, so very few, and the vocation is both rare and even more rarely understood --- and also because dioceses are cautious in dealing with the implementation of C 603 anyway --- serious scandal can affect the credibility of the entire vocation. When this happens, genuine vocations to C 603 life are likely to be further prevented from being professed by the Church --- a kind of functional suppression of the solitary consecrated eremitical vocation.]] On Intervening in Cases of Fraud

There is an incredible irony in the situation you referred to and this is one of the things that can happen if a diocese entertains this person's petition for profession without learning enough about her attitudes toward c 603. In one instance, we have someone who has written for years and now speaks on videos about how flawed c 603 is and how little Bishops actually know about "real hermits" or hermit life. And yet she is putting herself in the hands of a diocese that may or may not profess her as a canonical hermit. If they do not realize how she feels about c 603 and take that into account, they will look foolish and underscore her complaints about dioceses not knowing the people they profess/consecrate. 

Perhaps this is one reason she is doing this --- because whether she is accepted for profession or dismissed as unsuitable, she can then claim she is a victim of others not understanding her and once again "proving" how very little bishops and dioceses know about or respect "real" eremitical life. (At the same time, she also claims real hermits don't need or want to be respected so complaining now that the diocese is not giving her vocation the regard it deserves is a bit rich and ironic all by itself! If a miniscule 10 weeks of waiting has her feeling disrespected (after all, she is already a hermit living what she believes is her vocation!) one would think she would be reveling in it, given her claims about authentic hermits being completely unseen and treated as "nothing".) In any case, she sets things up so she can also pull out of the process of discernment herself while claiming the canon is problematical and merely a human invention that God disapproves of. Whether the diocese accepts or rejects her petition, it is apt to be a win-win situation for her that leaves chaos in her wake. 

Your own Course of Action:

I want to encourage you to pay attention to your own sense of what you need to do in this situation. At the same time, I would strongly encourage you not to act in anger and generally to follow the other steps I provided in that post. Concerns may be significant or more trivial, so be clear about what these are for you, and that you can articulate them in a cogent way for those who truly need to hear them. Meanwhile, should you decide you need to take action, the person's diocese is readily identifiable from videos she has posted in the last couple of months. It can be verified for you.

Meanwhile, while you must act as you believe is right, I will also consider whether there is any need for me to contact the diocese in this matter. Currently, I don't believe there is; I believe the Diocese will not accept this person for admission to profession, much less to consecration as a c 603 hermit because of a canonical impediment due to a prior marriage. Obviously, there are other reasons as well (including past blogs, the videos, and the inconsistencies these produce regarding this person's vision of eremitical life and attitude toward the canon), but this one impediment is the least complicated most straightforward reason to refuse admission to profession. I also suspect that the decision has already been made, but I don't know this. Thus, I too will continue to pray about the matter and do what I believe is best for the c 603 vocation.

Postscript: Yes, I am the hermit from California this person writes and videos about, though I can rarely recognize myself from what she claims. While California is a big state, so far as I know, it only has two c 603 hermits and only one with a blog.

More Questions on the Dishonesties involved in the Cole Matson Situation

[[Dear Sister, you said something about Brother Christian making profession in a church he was also thumbing his nose at. I wonder if you could say more about that what did you mean? Also though, how is it Brother Christian could live in a monastery for a year and not be known as transgender? Didn't they know about his (her) sex? And if they didn't know about his (her) sex, then how could they not? Why did you want to prescind from the issue of Matson's "transgendered status" in what you wrote to Bishop Stowe? It wasn't as though this was a non-issue, was it?]] 

Thanks for the questions. They are timely because I just read an article on the situation in the National Catholic Register which tended to reignite my anger a bit and exacerbated my sense that there was significant deception involved throughout the process Cole has pursued. It also ties into my comment about making profession in a church in a way that meant he would be living consecrated life in her name while thumbing his nose at her in the same act. You see, profession and especially consecration (which is not a person consecrating themselves to God, but God making a sacred person of the one making perpetual vows), require the candidate be in complete agreement with the Church's theology of consecrated life. 

My Main Concern:

My main concern has been with Cole's dishonest use of canon 603 as a stopgap when he does not have a true vocation as a hermit. But it now seems the dishonesty goes deeper and the impersonation is more extensive. You ask about Cole going to live at a monastery without being known as a transgendered person. He went to the monastery for training so he could learn to begin a community for artists. He calls this his novitiate but since he never intended to stay there and was not preparing to make vows here, it could not have been a novitiate in the way we ordinarily use the term. More importantly, it turns out that Portsmouth Monastery who vetted Cole in all the normal ways including psych testing and physical reports, reported that as far as they were concerned Cole was a biological male!!! Father Brunner wrote: “Per my previous note, every applicant receives a thorough psychological evaluation from a licensed consultant as well as a detailed and extensive background check from a professional firm used by our lawyer. And of course they must present Baptismal and sacramental records, as well as the results of a physical examination attesting to their health. We are confident this would prevent someone entering our Abbey community who was not genuinely male. We’re not going to comment further except to say Dr. Matson went through the full process and was determined to be a biological male.”

How can this be? The only answer can be that Cole tried to deceive the monastery community and succeeded in doing so. Whenever asked his sex (on any form including psych assessments), he must have replied male. Clearly the monastery was acting in good faith and looking for sound healthy male candidates; they asked Cole to go through the same process, not only to protect themselves, but likely because Cole would get a chance to see what is necessary in creating a community. And despite their hospitality and clear needs and intentions in asking Cole to submit to testing and background checks, Cole was dishonest with them about his transgendered status.  One Benedictine monk said that Cole was an honorable man. I agree Cole has been desperate to become a religious, but in light of the way he came into the Portsmouth community and proposed c 603 to Bishop Stowe, I am no longer clear in my own mind about how honest or honorable he is, and that saddens me immeasurably.

What complicates this is that Bishop Stowe said he wanted Cole to get more training and sent him to a monastic house for this. And Bishop Stowe knew Cole was transgendered and genetically female! While I am sure Bishop Stowe allowed Cole to make his own arrangements, I also believe he probably recommended Cole for the stay. Did he do that without mentioning that Coel was a transitioned FtM trans man? I honestly don't know how to feel about all of this.  What about the others that gave Cole such glowing recommendations? Did they also fail to note his transgendered status?

Why did I prescind from the Issue of transsexuality?

But why did I want to prescind from the transgender issue in my letter to Bishop Stowe except for the connection to Cole's using c 603 as a stopgap to achieve justice in the Church? The answer to that is simple, namely, the important issue for me was the appropriate use of canon 603 for vocations that are both authentic and rare!! Bishop Stowe's comments to the media made it sound as though the canon is not used much and needed wider implementation. The fact of the matter is, however, that c 603 is not used often because the vocation it is designed to recognize and govern in the church is a rare one. People rarely come to the fullness of humanity in the silence of solitude. We are social animals and grow to maturity in our relationships with others. Solitary eremitical life (and all eremitical life, really) is an incredibly poorly known or understood vocation and my sense was that what Cole Matson had done in coming out on Pentecost was to ensure that it would never be better understood and also that it would be even less well appreciated than it has come to be in its 41 years of life in the Church. 

When I wrote Bishop Stowe I pretty much assumed he, like many bishops, did not understand solitary eremitical life or its importance for the faithful. I did not want to do much more than to educate him a bit on what the canon established in law and why that was critically important to the Church's efforts to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world. I wanted Bishop Stowe to gain a sense of the charism of the solitary hermit vocation and thus too, to be able to educate others on all of this. Though this was not uppermost in my mind, I also thought it could be that if Cole were led to embrace this (or at least a non-canonical eremitical) vocation honestly, he might come to the degree of inner healing and maturity he really needed to achieve. I said as much to Bishop Stowe in my first letter. 

However, Cole's healing and the impossibility of that occurring if he was allowed to lie his way to profession, were definitely on my mind. Cole was proposing to embrace eremitical life in order to get professed and I knew that eremitical life could lead to immense healing if Cole really did as he proposed to do, that is, really embraced eremitical life itself. Unfortunately, I did not realize he would mainly be praying in the mornings and then spending both the afternoon and evening at the theatre working. Nor did I realize that Bishop Stowe would be allowing this non-eremitical approach to things. My focus here was as it needed to be because even in the USCCB announcements, the Bishops seemed to be focusing on the transgender issue, not on the authentic use of c 603.  

That's about all I have for now. Please get back to me if you have additional questions!