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.