Pope Francis has written a letter to Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder of New Ways Ministry, the subject of a 1999 notification by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and a 2010 statement by the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“I am thinking of your 50 years of ministry, which were 50 years with this ‘style of God,’ 50 years of closeness, of compassion and of tenderness,” Pope Francis wrote on December 10. “You have not been afraid of ‘closeness,’ and in getting close you did it ‘suffering with’ and without condemning anyone, but with the ‘tenderness’ of a sister and a mother. Thank you, Sister Jeannine, for all your closeness, compassion and tenderness.”