The hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church knows no limits. Fortunately, Newsweek has a pretty hard hitting story that looks at the Vatican's witch hunt against American nuns - even as the Vatican has coddled and covered up for priests for sexually molest children and youths. The moral disconnect at the Vatican is indeed mind numbing. As is the anti-woman mindset that has persisted for centuries. And in my view, both issues are affront to both common decency not to mention intellectual consistency. Sadly, the Church leadership continues to show little inclination to reform itself and the "good old boy system" that helped sexual abuse thrive world wide. Unless and until the media ruthlessly exposes the moral rot in Rome, I see little chance for the Church to change. With enough bad and/or salacious press, just maybe things will be forced to change. The other irony is that the Vatican is claiming that it has no control over Church operations in the USA in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, yet this inquisition argues otherwise. Here are some story highlights:*
Earlier this month, in something of a surprise, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix was excommunicated for approving a first-trimester abortion last year at that hospital to save the life of a critically ill patient. “An unborn child is not a disease,” said Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Phoenix diocese. “While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother’s life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child.” The irony here is thick: it has taken years, sometimes decades, to bring sex-abusing priests to justice, but this observant sister, Margaret McBride, was excommunicated in a matter of months for making a compassionate and impossible decision for one of her parishioners.
*
This decisive action against one nun in one ethically murky case comes as an “apostolic visitation,” or investigation, of all of America’s 60,000 religious sisters is underway. . . . Anxious observers and commentators worry that, as a result of the inquiry, nuns will be forced to take steps backward—into the head coverings and habits, for example, that were made optional after the Second Vatican Council in 1965. They worry further that sisters who have worked more or less independently for decades will have their independence curtailed: the church has been known to remove teachers from their posts, for example, for teaching an insufficiently orthodox theology. With dioceses still hurting for cash due to settlements from the sex-abuse crisis, they worry that with the number of sisters dwindling in the West, real estate that has belonged to a religious community for generations will be sold or reappropriated by the diocese.
*
Between now and Christmas, 100 communities of American nuns will receive on-site visits from Vatican envoys; most of the 420 communities of American women have already filled out comprehensive questionnaires about their membership, their living arrangements, their mission, and their finances.
*
Not two days after the publication in this magazine of “A Woman’s Place is in the Church,” which argued that the hierarchy in Rome needs to embrace modernity and include women at all levels of church management and decision making, I received an e-mail from a nun. “I just had to make this addition even though speaking up during this time of Visitation has its risks,” she wrote. The apostolic visit, “punitive by definition, demonstrates…that male church leaders are seeking to keep modernity at bay, keep women in a secondary place…It is so true that if women had any influence at all in our Church, the Church would be so much more whole and healthy.”
*
[I]n our world, blind submission to authority is not a virtue but a vice. Just as modernity doesn’t want to accommodate insular groups of men who live behind guarded walls and make decisions that affect the domestic lives of half a billion people, it will also eventually reject what amounts to a kind of patriarchal apartheid, in which female clerics are given no voice in the power structure and yet are expected to submit to it.
*
For more than a thousand years, becoming a nun was the best—and often the only—way for a young woman to get an education and to earn a modicum of independence. In the modern West, though, women have other options. In the United States, the number of religious sisters has shrunk by two thirds since 1965, to 59,600. (Worldwide, the collapse is not as dramatic: the number of sisters has dwindled by just one third over the same period, to 750,000.) And while sisters still outnumber priests across the globe, women’s desire to become nuns is plummeting. . . . It’s no wonder, really. When men have all the power, and they “investigate” women who seem to disrespect their authority, why not become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a stay-at-home mom, and submit to God without the authoritarian meddling?
Not two days after the publication in this magazine of “A Woman’s Place is in the Church,” which argued that the hierarchy in Rome needs to embrace modernity and include women at all levels of church management and decision making, I received an e-mail from a nun. “I just had to make this addition even though speaking up during this time of Visitation has its risks,” she wrote. The apostolic visit, “punitive by definition, demonstrates…that male church leaders are seeking to keep modernity at bay, keep women in a secondary place…It is so true that if women had any influence at all in our Church, the Church would be so much more whole and healthy.”
*
[I]n our world, blind submission to authority is not a virtue but a vice. Just as modernity doesn’t want to accommodate insular groups of men who live behind guarded walls and make decisions that affect the domestic lives of half a billion people, it will also eventually reject what amounts to a kind of patriarchal apartheid, in which female clerics are given no voice in the power structure and yet are expected to submit to it.
*
For more than a thousand years, becoming a nun was the best—and often the only—way for a young woman to get an education and to earn a modicum of independence. In the modern West, though, women have other options. In the United States, the number of religious sisters has shrunk by two thirds since 1965, to 59,600. (Worldwide, the collapse is not as dramatic: the number of sisters has dwindled by just one third over the same period, to 750,000.) And while sisters still outnumber priests across the globe, women’s desire to become nuns is plummeting. . . . It’s no wonder, really. When men have all the power, and they “investigate” women who seem to disrespect their authority, why not become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a stay-at-home mom, and submit to God without the authoritarian meddling?
No comments:
Post a Comment