Quote of the Day (‘America’ Magazine, on Nuns and ‘People on the Margins’)

“Working for meager pay (which they passed on to their communities), women religious have taken the lead in working with people on the margins: not only schoolchildren, but indigent patients in hospitals, the imprisoned in jail cells and the homeless in the inner cities. Not satisfied with works of charity at home, they have labored in fields afar; some have paid with their lives. The martyrdoms in Central and Latin America of Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Maryknoll Sisters; Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun; and in Brazil of Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, testify not simply to the Gospel but to a certain kind of woman. These were the women who wholeheartedly embraced the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar decrees by revisiting the founding documents of their orders and throwing themselves into ministry with the poor, all as the church had asked of them.”—“Current Comment: Praise for Sisters,” America Magazine, May 14, 2012

Gaze at this picture and ask yourself: Do these women really look very radical? Yet a decade after the sexual abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican has taken the full measure of the faithful’s discontent and disillusionment, and come up with an entirely logical source: nuns.

On the editorial page of its May 14 issue, the national Catholic weekly America listed the above accomplishments (in the event--now, we must acknowledge, all too likely--that they escaped the notice of the Holy See), then followed it up with another editorial asking pertinent questions related to the origins of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR)  in the United States.

American Catholics should expect answers to those questions to come in the most tardy of fashions. Normally, I groan whenever I hear the word "patriarchal" coming up every time a church policy on, say, abortion, is disputed--it's as if someone at The New York Times thinks that the mere use of the word should all by itself be enough to dispense with any meaningful inquiry into the moral consequences of modern reproductive alternatives. 

Unfortunately, the church's hierarchy has only itself to blame for the use of this cliche in this particular situation. Women religious who are utterly committed to “people on the margins” now find themselves marginalized by the Vatican. And the most maddening aspect of it is that there's no good, sane reason for it.

Too bad. A wildly funny episode from the first season of the great Seventies sitcom All in the Family had a lawyer advising the bigoted Archie Bunker that his case was hopeless, because "In a court of law, you can't beat a station wagon filled with nuns.” Nowadays, you’d be lucky to find enough nuns to fill a station wagon, but their reputation for probity remains as high as it was 40 years ago—certainly higher, dare I say, than that of most bishops and archbishops, most of whom, it has become dismayingly clear in recent years, owe their positions more to blind adherence to every tenet set down by Rome than to any significant merit of their own.

Three reasons are cited by the Congregation for the assessment of the LCWR: 1) past addresses at their assemblies; 2) "policies of corporate dissent," i.e., dissent from Vatican policies on women's ordination and homosexuality; and 3) "radical feminism." 


But where has the confusion by ordinary Catholics come from--certain nuns' views on these matters, or the hierarchy's continuing problems with the fallout from the abuse scandal--problems, one might add, that extend worldwide? (See, for instance, this Huffington Post piece on potential liability from a case in the U.K.) 

One strongly suspects that longtime churchgoers are less likely to be discombobulated by one of the religious speculating on gays or married priests in the Church than on how various bishops, long stressing that theirs is a "universal" church, could push, with a straight face, the novel legal notion that a priest was not an "employee" of said universal church and that, therefore, the hierarchy should not be held accountable for his crimes.

I wish Pope Benedict XVI would re-read America’s brief catalogue of the exemplary work of American nuns—even commit the words to memory, if possible. Maybe then, he’ll stop scandalizing the faithful and making a joke of his institution by getting off the nuns’ backs.