On July 10, 2020, the national board of LCWR unanimously affirmed a call to place the conference on a five-year journey to address systemic racism and white privilege. The call emerged from an open and honest conversation held among leaders of LCWR and the National Black Sisters’ Conference. This work goes to the heart of remembering “who we are and whose we are,” as Servant of God Thea Bowman, FSPA, said, and to our integrity as a conference of religious leaders. It is spiritual in nature, raising existential questions about LCWR and our identity as US women religious, as followers of the way of Jesus who called us “to love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)
Together we pledge to identify the steps that beckon us on this journey – the profound truth-telling, reconciliation, repentance, and repair needed to effect transformative change. As members of a church deeply implicated in the origin and perpetuation of our nation’s perduring sin of racism, of congregations that have been complicit, and of a conference whose whiteness has been unexamined, we take our part in this national reckoning.
We seek a society free of systemic racism and are resolved to use a racial lens in the development of our ministry and to use our common voice to:
LCWR has spoken publically and consistently on the absolute necessity to dismantle racism and white supremacy.
Reading the signs of the times from our desire to create communion, we, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, affirm the interrelatedness of the justice concerns addressed by the LCWR Call for 2015-2022. We are heartbroken by the myriad ways our one human family and Earth, our common home, suffer from disconnection, indifference, violence, and fear in the face of racism, migration, and climate crisis.
In 2016 the LCWR membership issued a call to recognize racism as a systemic, structural cause underlying and contributing to the multiple situations of injustice identified in the LCWR Call. At the 2016 LCWR assembly, the members amended the 2015 resolution to reflect this awareness. The amended resolution was passed and reads as follows.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) calls upon His Holiness, Pope Francis, to consider deeply how the Church may embody in these times the Christian heart of justice and compassion toward indigenous peoples. We humbly and respectfully ask Pope Francis to lead us in formally repudiating the period of Christian history that used religion to justify political and personal violence against indigenous nations and peoples and their cultural, religious, and territorial identities....
