The Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns

In her typical wonderful way, Maureen Dowd has a column in today's New York Times that excoriates the Catholic Church hierarchy for its anti-women mindset and willingness to open its arms to Anglicans driven by bigotry and animus towards gays. Like many of the other anti-gay Christian denominations, the Roman Catholic Church is increasingly defined by who it dislikes and wants to make subservient as opposed to actual adherence to the Gospel message. Leading the charge is God’s Rottweiler, Pope Benedict XVI who typically looks like he has severe constipation or hemorrhoids. His latest targets for repression are American nuns, some of whom have the audacity to not see themselves as inferior beings. From my days as a Catholic, I still recall nuns that intellectually excelled priests by light years, yet they were always relegated to subordinate status even as the Church dug through the bottom of the barrel as it struggled to find more priests. Here are highlights from Maureen's column:

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In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.” Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy.

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The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence. Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

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The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!

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As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer. “Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”

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When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women.

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Frankly, I wonder if the Roman Catholic Church would not be a far better institution if nuns - as opposed to pompous, patriarchal, bitter old queens in dresses - were in charge. Many nuns seem to have a better grasp on reality and the real world than most priests.