This past week the Washington Post (and numerous other sources) reported that the Vatican—following an investigation by the office formerly known as the Inquisition—had ordered what amounted to punishment and possible dissolution of the organization that represents nearly 58,000 American nuns and religious sisters, the vast majority of whom do solid WWJD-type work in education, charity work, health care, social services and ministry.
American nuns struggled to respond Friday to a Vatican crackdown on what it calls “radical feminism” among the women and their purported failure to sufficiently condemn such issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.
Some nuns in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious characterized the disciplinary action announced Wednesday as an “ambush,” but others — including the leadership — said they couldn’t publicly comment on a system that mandates their obedience.
A Vatican investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing 80 percent of Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States, found serious theological errors in statements by members, widespread dissent on the church’s teaching on sexuality and “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” a church report released Wednesday stated.
The church appointed Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle to oversee “reform” of the women’s organization.
“I think we scare them,” Sr. Simone Campbell, a lawyer who serves as the executive director of the lobby said of the church’s male hierarchy.
The Post also noted in a later article that:
The Vatican report didn’t focus on public positions the women took but rather on the private conversations they had at their own meetings and comments they made in private letters to Vatican officials about such issues as how to minister to gays and lesbians.
Some experts said the conflict embodies the gender dynamics of a male-led church.
Gee, ya fucking think?
Sister Joan Chittister, a Dominican nun and former leader of the LCWR, told the National Catholic Reporter that she was “deeply distraught” and that: ”When you set out to reform a people, a group, who have done nothing wrong, you have to have an intention, a motivation that is not only not morally based, but actually immoral.”
The greatest irony? That women religious in the Roman Catholic Church are the ONLY morally uncompromised clergy the Church has left.
Consider: In the same edition of the Washington Post was this article about a priest who has been the head of Northern Virginia diocese’s office responsible for protecting children against sexual abuse. He’s just been placed on “administrative leave” because of…wait for it…allegations he sexually abused children. (Quis custodiet ipsos fucking custodes?) Presumably that priest will go exactly the same way as the vast majority of Catholic priests who’ve been suspected of sexually abusing children—no criminal charges, a move to another parish so they can molest again, or maybe if the allegations are especially heinous, some time off at retreat house for “prayer and contemplation.” There isn’t much of a crackdown on abusive priests’ bosses, either—archbishops who cover up for child molesters often go on to get a cardinal’s hat. In the worst case scenario, if there’s a real public outcry, abuse-condoning bishops might wind up like Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston: given a cushy retirement in Rome, drinking wine and running one of the Vatican’s fanciest churches. If you’re a lifelong, incorrigible pedophile and sexual predator but you also run a hardcore conservative order beloved of Pope John Paul II (and Rick Santorum), some of the faithful within the Church might even put your name up for possible sainthood.
Oh, and you know who else the Church hierarchy is not cracking down on? The anti-Semitic excommunicated ultra-right-wing order whose bishop is a public Holocaust denier. Those priests the Church is actively in dialogue with because Benedict XVI wants to find a way to welcome them back into the fold.
It’s the highest form of hypocrisy for the Church to accusing women religious of “being silent” or overly permissive on moral issues when they uniformly hushed up, permitted or simply ignored the rape and torture of defenseless children, and refused to bring their abusers to justice. After the Cloyne Report produced indisputable evidence that the Church in Ireland had tried to cover up widespread child abuse and thwart criminal investigations, the Vatican’s silence and stonewalling on the issue extended to recalling its ambassador from Ireland. It was so egregious that Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny took to the floor of Parliament to condemn the “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism — the narcissism — that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.” I’d add to that “oppression, corruption, and amorality.”
But while they have relatively few options for fighting the crackdown beyond disbanding and reorganizing the LCWR as an independent group outside the Church’s purview, Sr. Chittister was not pulling any punches when she spoke to the media about the role of women religious and the sickness within the Church hierarchy:
“Because you are attempting to control people for one thing and one thing only — and that is for thinking, for being willing to discuss the issues of the age … If we stop thinking, if we stop demanding the divine right to think, and to see that as a Catholic gift, then we are betraying the church no matter what the powers of the church see as an inconvenient truth in their own times.”
In attempting to take such control of people’s thinking, she said, “You make a mockery of the search for God, of the whole notion of keeping eyes on the signs of the times and of providing the people with the best possible spiritual guidance and presence you can give.
“When I was a child in this town, I was taught that it was a sin to go into a Protestant church. In my lifetime, the church, to its eternal credit, admitted that it was wrong. The scandal and the sin is that it took 400 years to do that.” Chittister said women religious have been trying since Vatican II “to help the church avoid that kind of darkness and control … they have been a gift to the church in their leadership and their love and their continuing fidelity.
“When you set out to reform that kind of witness, remember when it’s over who doomed the church to another 400 years of darkness. It won’t be the people of the church who did it.”
“The greatest irony? That women religious in the Roman Catholic Church are the ONLY morally uncompromised clergy the Church has left.”
Not to knock these particular nuns (who sound pretty awesome), but nuns in general have been responsible for some pretty horrific things like forced adoption
http://illegaladoptionsworldwide.blogspot.com/2011/10/forced-adoption-150000-women-forced-by.html
and even sexual abuse
http://www.snapnetwork.org/female_victims/dozens_allege_nuns.htm
The bit that still gets me about the capital C Catholic Church, is that catholic means all embracing and including a wide variety of things.
Based on that definition alone, it suggests some type of pluralism. Which as it turns out is definitely not the case.
Kate, thanks for making that point. I have respect for any religious person (since I think their lives involve a great amount of sacrifice and hard work), but nuns are not my favorites. My mom can’t stand to be in their presence due to the fact that nuns were always present where she grew up on the Fort Peck reservation. They were the ones punishing children if they spoke their native language, telling the residents that they’d go to hell if they tried to practice the native faith or customs, ect. I realize that most Americans did not get that experience, but it makes me have very little sympathy for people who will align themselves with the Catholic Church. If you are willing to align yourself with the Catholic Church, personally, I would question how progressive you must be in the first place. And if you really are that progressive, then I tend to ask, “what the hell are you doing in the Catholic Church?”
If you are willing to align yourself with the Catholic Church, personally, I would question how progressive you must be in the first place. And if you really are that progressive, then I tend to ask, “what the hell are you doing in the Catholic Church? These are my thoughts too.
@Kate and Drahill: All of that is absolutely true and I wouldn’t ever minimize it (additionally, the Magdalene workhouses in Ireland were notorious for the way nuns abused the young women sent there).
Still, the Vatican isn’t cracking down on nuns for those abuses. It’s persecuting and silencing them for expressing—sometimes in private, even—ideas the church fathers see as “radically feminist”, mostly having to do with things like gender equality and women’s health care or the sisters not being sufficiently gung-ho about the Church’s misogynist position on those issues.
@Rodriguez: Some people who value institutions for emotional and cultural reasons, try to reform them from within rather than simply abandon them. I wouldn’t be able to stay in communion with the Church if I were Catholic, but I know people who do make that choice and try to reform the institution, and I wish them every success at it.
I see the value for those in the RCC to stay inside and work to change it from within. I don’t think those people are progressive in the way that I would define it though. Still, they are progressive relative to their church.
@rodriguez: Well, yeah. Progressive is relative and if you’re Catholic, there’s pretty much nowhere to go but up when it comes to being progressive on women’s issues.
I do think that there’s value in working to improve the institution, and I think that a lot of what progressives within conservative religions do is done in order to better serve and help their co-religionists. In essence, the nuns are often doing for their fellow Catholics what the institutional Church will not do.
From nursing those struck down by cholera in the 19th century to being among the first to accept AIDs patients into their nursing homes in the 20th, women religious in the United States have faithfully served the sick and outcast among us. From the Civil War, where they nursed wounded on both sides, to the Civil Rights Movement, where they marched alongside those seeking justice, to today as they stand for justice for the voiceless. They now require us to stand with them against the misogyny in their own religious tradition. For more information on what they did in the past go to: http://womenandspirit.org/about.html
For their work in the present go to http://www.networklobby.org/
Becky, I understand about reforming institutions from within, which I think is generally a noble goal, by and large. There are very specific reasons why I think attempts to reform the Catholic Church are, by and large, not working.
The primary reason is because the Church itself was set up, from the beginning, to be a top-down type of church. It has that whole rule about how when the Pope speaks on matters of faith, he cannot be wrong. Part of Catholic dogma is blind alliegance to the Pope in matters of faith. To question Papal teachings on morality is heresy and sinful. The second problem is that, in Catholicism, as in many other faiths, there is no line between the theological teachings and social morality. The one informs the other. So under that standard, a lack of ferocity on social or moral issues could actually be taken to be a lack of ferocity towards the underlying moral issues as well.
In reality, the Pope and the highest up members of the Church have no incentive to do what the general populace of Catholics want. As long as one goes to church and puts the envelopes in, they are pleased. And because the theological structure of the Church is set up to stifle dissent, any dissenter can simply be written off as a sinner, a heretic and be excommunicated. It is an institution that, at least in my opinion, is completely designed to be impervious to reform. I just cannot see how, in knowing this, one could in good faith stay in such a faith.
One generation’s heretic is often the next generation’s saint. That’s the evidence of reform, and it is probably as true in the secular world as it is in the RC church.
@Drahill: In reality, the Pope and the highest up members of the Church have no incentive to do what the general populace of Catholics want. As long as one goes to church and puts the envelopes in, they are pleased.
True, but Benedict and most of his hardcore ideologues will not be around in 20 years. It only takes one reform-minded Pope to make changes, as John XXIII did. When Benedict was elected there was a huge skirmish between the hardcores and the progressives and the hardcores won out. But they can’t count on having the majority forever.
And practically speaking, the Church’s continuing inability to fill jobs—their seminaries are practically empty in this country and even emptier in Europe—is ultimately what’s going to force institutional change. That and the fact that those envelopes have been getting scarcer and scarcer thanks to child abuse scandals and general disenchantment. The Church will act to save itself, even if that means having to soften on some issues that they previously refused to soften on.
To question Papal teachings on morality is heresy and sinful. The second problem is that, in Catholicism, as in many other faiths, there is no line between the theological teachings and social morality.
Except that everyone’s already doing exactly that. American and European Catholics simply don’t care anymore about Vatican-approved morality on social issues like divorce, contraception, or even abortion. Practically speaking, that battle was lost a long time ago. Benedict’s made a special crusade of trying to get European Catholics to toe the line and utterly failed. You can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube, and he knows it.
Clearly, if the Church feels the need to send in the Inquisition, they’re feeling threatened. A lot of Catholic progressives I know are biding their time, waiting for Benedict and his generation to die, and preparing for a Vatican III at some point in our lifetimes. I think it will happen. The Catholic Church being what it is, change will not happen quickly, but I think the current crackdown is evidence that today’s ideologically conservative Pope sees it happening in many ways right now.
I don’t see the crackdown as an act of fear, I see it as a purge.
Same thing. You try to purge the people/ideology that opposes you and your ideology. If you didn’t see them as potential obstacle to the success of your ideology, you wouldn’t bother.
I don’t think Ratzinger is acting out of fear; at least, none of his statements suggest it. He seems to want a Church that is comprised of “true believers” as he sees them. I think much of that comes from the fact that for years, he was the Pope’s enforcer for theological “purity.” I don’t think Ratzinger fears American Catholics – they have shown repeatedly that they will, by and large, stay Catholics despite the Pope. And really, what does he have to fear? He has been Pope for almost 7 years now and has been doing exactly what he wants, cracking down on dissenters and expanding the Church’s reach into the Third World with disasterous results. I think he’s most inclined to purge to enforce ideological purity than anything else. If progressive Catholics actually had means to effectively stop him, then I’d say it was fear. But they don’t, at least as far as I can see.
I see parallels of this discussion in terms of leaders and people in leadership positions and what they do and whether it is done in the people’s name in larger communities or even countries.
Sometimes there are difficulties in being able to remove yourself from a particular institution or community. And in that case the option that works is still working to try to change it reformer style.
Whilst I agree with the sentiments expressed by Drahill (especially the ones about why you would stay in a particular branch of faith) I also get why people stay and work.
The world would benefit from a married Catholic priesthood. Celibacy is not for everyone, never was, nor should it be. The entire idea that married men and woman are not as worthy or available to minister is absurd. It’s unbelievable that it still goes on and on and on.