Just days after the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI has ordered an apostolic visitation of all non-contemplative women’s religious orders in the United States, a notorious Catholic dissenter, known for her promotion of goddess-worship and “eco-spirituality,” is scheduled to speak at the Miami Archdiocese’s Saint Thomas University.
Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis, O.P will be presenting a lecture, “Cosmology, Faith, & Sustainability,” at Saint Thomas, on 24 February.
Many lay Catholics have documented Sister Miriam’s dissent from official Catholic doctrine. Sister Miriam is an active proponent of so-called “eco-spirituality,” a quasi-pantheistic religious movement recently chronicled in some detail in Sarah McFarland Taylor’s book Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology. Taylor, an Episcopallian sympathetic to the eco-spiritual movement, has chronicled this heterodox belief system, and her exposition features Sister Miriam MacGillis and the community she co-founded, Genesis Farm. Pioneered by dissenter Fr. Thomas Berry, eco-spirituality seeks to counteract a perceived hyper-anthropocentrism (man-centeredness) of the traditional Judeo-Christian creation narrative. According to “Christian” eco-spiritualists, all of creation forms a cosmic unity, and man (male and female) is not at its pinnacle. The entire universe is the “body of God,” and eco-spiritual religious sisters’ worship routine is permeated with non-Catholic religious rites which invoke God and the Earth under various feminist invocations, and otherwise mimic Catholic sacraments and devotions like the Eucharist and the Stations of the Cross, with their distinctly Christian content completely extirpated and replaced with devotions to Mother Earth.
Sister Miriam, who does not wear a religious habit, has been affiliated with Call to Action, long-considered the “mother” of dissenting Catholic organizations. Call to Action endorses divorce and remarriage, homosexualism, abortion, contraception, the complete democratization of the Catholic church’s, hierarchy and doctrine, and moral and theological relativism. The Vatican has censured Call to Action, and its members have been excommunicated in at least one US Catholic diocese.
The website of Sister Miriam’s Genesis Farm features virtually no mention of Jesus Christ or Christianity, and its Links page features the website of the pro-abortion Women’s Environment & Development Organization.
Sister Miriam’s upcoming lecture is featured on the website of Saint Thomas University, and is also advertised in the latest pastoral bulletin issued by the Miami Archdiocese to all it’s priests.
Saint Thomas University and the Miami Archdiocese are not new to scandal and wide-spread theological dissent, both of which have been chronicled in some detail by popular Catholic columnist Matt Abbott. Saint Thomas University, along with Miami’s Catholic Barry University, is listed as “Gay-Friendly” in a directory published by the Conference of Catholic Lesbians; the same organization lists two of the Miami Archdiocese’s parishes, Saint Anthony and Saint Maurice, as “gay-friendly”.
In 2007, LifeSiteNews reported Barry University’s awarding of a theology award to another notorious goddess-worshipping feminist Dominican nun. That award was also advertised by the Miami Archdiocese in a pastoral bulletin.
Further Reading:
“US Dominican nun brings the ‘New Cosmology’ to New Zealand”
