The Nun Revolt: Why Benedict's Own "War On Women" Has Backfired.

Update re: Nuns On The Bus

DES MOINES, Iowa (The Blaze/AP) — A group of Roman Catholic nuns who have come under fire aren’t quieting down. In fact, they’re doing quite the opposite, as they began a nine-state bus tour on Monday protesting proposed federal budget cute. The women said they weren’t trying to flout recent Vatican criticisms of socially active nuns but felt called to show how Republican policies are affecting low-income families.

The most frequent method in disposing of strong-willed or inconvenient women has been to send them to a convent: "Get thee to a nunnery" was a phrase that voiced exasperation and contempt for the "uppity" or unmarriagable female. Indeed, the restrictions of the confines of a prison with the inmates subservient to the dictates of a distant male hierarchy. 

It was this image of total subservience that permeated western civilization's psyche*, so ideas of leadership, authority or initiative were always relegated to the absurd. Mother Theresa aside, nuns have had exceptionally few chances to make a difference.





The New American Nun and "Radical Feminist Doctrines"

As with all Catholic controversies these days, Pope Benedict XVI is at the center: from condoms to corruption, "Papa Ratzi" has had a direct hand, especially in the realm of Church doctrine. Before becoming pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was, after all, the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, rooting out heresies and advocating strict adherence to policy. So it comes as no surprise that Benedict disapproves of actions by nuns that the Church deems "inappropriate."

And America's nuns have been "inappropriate" for years:

[The latest, yet-unpublished] report approved by Pope Benedict XVI, claims that vast majority of American nuns are pushing “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” But rather than preaching against Church doctrine, the sisters are often just staying silent on the church’s pet issues of abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and the ordination of women. Their silence is interpreted as endorsement so by not speaking out against such evils, the report says the sisters are effectively showing their approval.,

Deja vu: the same image crisis occurred with librarians decades ago as "book people" started exhibiting a very liberal streak - e.g. the fallout from carrying Heather Has Two Mommies was the image of the meek, quiet, benign little woman. Overnight, they turned into "radical feminists." Now, like their librarian counterparts, nuns actively participating in social issues are painted as "commie pinko" rabble-rousers, as this tweet from an associate of NOM (National Organization for Marriage) can attest:




Because those "radical feminist themes" are actually akin to the dreaded themes of "social justice" feared by today's Christian Right. The "silence" on gay issues and the rumblings of women in the clergy along with the Vatican's own "war on women" threaten to undermine two misogynistic millenniums determined to keep women in their place: both the Leadership Conference of Women Religious LCWR) and the National Coalition of American nuns have veered away from the issues of abortion and homosexuality in favor of taking overt action against issues like cuts in government programs for the poor and disenfranchised.

And then there's Sister Margaret Farley:

Coming as it does in the wake of the rebukedelivered last month to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the censure of Sister Farley’s book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, is enough to make one wonder if there are doctrinal risks taken simply by being Catholic while female.

The Vatican has now censured Sister Margaret Farley and threatens dire consequences to the LCWR if it does not clean up its act: within the next five years it is instructed to formulate new rules and regulations - even a stricter dress code - to conform with what the Vatican deems "appropriate." In other words, American nuns have to shut up and go back to the 15th century where they belong.

The LCWR, needless to say, is not taking this lying down and will soon come up with a strategy to counter the Vatican's demands: a "nun war" may be looming.

Instead of nuns on buses, we may yet see nuns on tanks.


*Of course the image of the tough-as-nails teaching nun will always veer to the absurd as well: the most humorous novel to ever touch upon the subject of nuns - John Powers' Last Catholic In America - exploded the myth of the quiet, acquiescent nun and portrayed her as a bully taking out her frustrations on every male ever created:


[Sister] Boom Boom Bernardine liked to grab guys by the ears and bang their heads against the wall whenever they annoyed her. Fortunately for Boom Boom, most of the kids at St. Bastion Grammar School weren't too bright to begin with, so if there was any brain damage, it was years before anyone realized it. At the peak of her career, Boom Boom Bernadine got over-zealous and ripped an arm muscle while bashing some head against a banister. Never again were her hands to crunch a set of earlobes. The arm muscle refused to heal. For Boom Boom Bernadine, banging heads against walls was what being a nun was all about. She left the school, never to be seen or heard from again, though there are some graduates of St. Bastion's who still hear her name whenever they brush their hair or other wise touch their heads.

"Vatileaks" Article Its #1 on OpEdNews FOR THE MONTH OF MAY!!

Even though you've read it here, help spread the word by clicking HERE and send the page view numbers through the roof! This article is the ONLY one on the "Vatileaks" scandal featuring past cover-ups and bringing to light the fact that Benedict KNOWS ALL. 

Marking 200 For OpEdNews: The Best of Times (Sex With Ducks), The Worst of Times (The Deaver Fetus)

I'm tired. If you want to feel the frenetic pace my writing life has been like, just click on this old Leroy Anderson tune of a typewriter and read along. It will set a light tone to some very heavy subjects (hey, that's my style!).* 

Marking 200? No, I'm not 200 years old, although sometimes I feel like it. And tabulating how much I've submitted to OpEdNews for the last 3 years makes me feel older: it's certainly not a prodigious output by any means, but my perspective is queer: it's not how much I put out, but how much I am able to fit in. In between things, that is: no, not a sob story, but one that compels me to relay it to OpEdNews readers because they've been a part of my life.

For the last 5 years, I've been a caregiver to a loved one who is terminally ill (liver cancer) and life has gone from week-to-week, to day-to-day. Now, it's kind of hour-to-hour. It's also cooking, cleaning, errands, hospital visits, prescription refills, doling out meds, travel planning, kitty care, and fending off labels like "angel" and "saint" (curses on the love life - saints and angels don't get laid.). Not that I'm complaining, but ...o.k., I'm complaining. Because amidst all of this I'm compelled to communicate to people news and views about the realms of religion and politics ... and everything in between.

Yeah, it's an addiction: first thing in the morning I scan google alerts (at least a dozen "men of the cloth" are arrested for various crimes each day), devour rss feeds, answer comments on the blog, and plan the new ministry. I eventually come up for coffee (not air), then I have a breakfast consisting of religious and political hypocrisies, then I uncover them, rant on them and laugh at them. (I have to laugh at them: I take to heart Mark Twain's dictum: "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.") The rest of the day alternates between something mundane like changing the sheets and writing about the latest malapropisms of Michele Bachmann or the newest pronouncements of Benedict XVI.

Occasionally, I indulge myself with the luxury of our view of the ocean and the realization that I live in the most beautiful and compassionate place on earth (San Francisco).

IT'S ALL PERSPECTIVE

Times are getting bleaker and there's w-a-a-ay too much to rant about: atrocities like The Deaver Fetus and David Kato's murder in Uganda infest my laptop screen like giant termites, making it harder to laugh. The viciousness of today's Christof*scism, the blatant bigotry of people like Bryan Fischer and the eviscerating evangelism of Lou Engle propose a future too dreadful to imagine. Turning them on their ears becomes less fun, hence more difficult to write about.

Oh, occasionally Pat Robertson comes up with a hoot, a statement so self-righteously inane that it wipes the brain clean of all seriousness,* but writing about senile musings is too easy and breezy: the psyche just starts to relax when up comes a horror worthy of Halloween: suddenly there is too little time to write about LGBT issues, Islamoph*bia or even Ann Coulter(geist). 

Then there's the outright ruthlessness of the newly invigorated Republican Party: I hope I don't drown in that tsunami of vengeance! It overwhelms humanity! Don't get me started.

BACK TO THE POINT

OpEdNews has been a godsend for writers like me: the chance to get a word in edgewise is coupled with an association of some of the brightest minds we have today. And knowing that some people out there are actually reading my rants helps me contend with all that's happening to me and to the rest of the world. So now I'm up to 200 articles (150,000 words. 300,000 page views). I may flag a bit in the future, but I'll never kick the addiction of writing about the Right Wing's religious world of hypocrisy or things like ...Sex with Ducks. 

*Sorry if you're too young to know what a typewriter sounds like

** The article that has garnered me the most page views is, ironically, the one about Pat Robertson's remarks about Haiti titled The Senility Defense: Pat Robertson's Trial In The Court Of Public Opinion. 

The Marquis de Sade Never Had It So Good: Phelps Is Making A Hell On Earth

Get Ready for Four Times The Hate... And Four Times The Pain!

The inmates of that asylum called Westboro Baptist Church have announced that since they have won the battle of  free speech, they will "quadruple" their assault on America and its evil ways. 


The irony about their methods of "love" in trying to save us from damnation is that they've created a hell on earth.

They are not alone, however. Far from it: there exist people and groups who are doing their best to make life hell for the rest of us. Whether we feel the lash of theocracy, are stretched on the rack by their corporate sponsors, or are placed in the embrace of the iron maiden of endless proselytizing, they will enjoy our pain and tell us that they are doing it because they "love" us. 

But perhaps the worst of all tortures is enduring their horrendously righteous arrogance, shutting off the rest of the world's philosophies from our existence, for no one is as virtuously good, as sublimely compassionate, yet as stupendously humble as they. 

In other words, in a hell on earth, the righteously arrogant will enjoy themselves immensely. 

The Marquis De Sade never had it so good.

Trying To Go Forward While You're Going Backward: German Theologians Trash Benedict Big Time!

Take a good look at a group of German theologians hanging themselves: 

(Berlin) University theologians in Germany have called on the Catholic Church to abandon the vow of celibacy for priests, open up the clergy for women and accept gays couples.

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Bully For The Press, But Boo For Benedict: Why Peggy Noonan and Benedict's Defenders Are Wrong

Timothy Shriver's Washington Post article, Can the pope restore the purity of Catholicism? is a wonderful and insightful piece - except for the title. It assumes that Catholicism has had "purity" for a long time. It hasn't. Catholicism has always been too complex for "purity" of any sort. Ever since the official acceptance of Christianity by Rome (313 CE), The Church has been a curious mixture of conflicting doctrines, artistic beauty, money, immense power, sincere faith and corruption. And perhaps in no other person are those qualities more evident than in pope Benedict XVI. To this man, change in the Church is anathema: Pious XII was his inspiration and John XXIII his enemy. 

That is why his supporters in the latest news about the on-going scandal of sexual abuse have a tough time convincing people that he is not culpable. Take Peggy Noonan of the  Wall Street Journal:

Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it. The press forced the church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers...Without this pressure...the church would most likely have continued to do what it has done for half a century, which is look away, hush up, pay off and transfer.

I agree wholeheartedly. Then why would Noonan come up with this statement:

The most reliable commentary on Pope Benedict's role in the scandals came from John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, who argues that once Benedict came to fully understand the scope of the crisis, in 2003, he made the church's first real progress toward coming to grips with it.

"Fully understand the scope of the crisis." The PRESS made Ratzinger understand. No one else did. Sheer conjecture but still valid: IF the press had not capitalized on the scandal, would Ratzinger have continued the old game of "pass the pedaphile priest"??

Come on, Peggy, Ratzinger knew about the abuse long before 2003; he had resources at his command to find out minute details about every priest in the Catholic Church. A hint of heresy never got past him and neither did a hint of sexual abuse. It's sheer idiocy to think that he knew nothing. And with that knowledge he doth sinned in doing nothing.

And there are Catholic leaders - like Bill Donohue of The Catholic League - think that the press is evil, comparing the "persecution" of Catholicism to anti-Semitism!  His own lame response to the scandal:

wikipedia:

On March 30, 2010, Donohue appeared on CNN's Larry King Live as part of a panel discussing sexual abuse of children by priests. Donohue blamed the decades-old problem on gay priests, claiming they could not be considered pedophiles because most of the offenses involved "post-pubescent" boys (defined in the interview as boys 12-years-old or older) and were thus "homosexual" acts.

Holy twisted reasoning!!

The Catholic Church (indeed, American Christianity as a whole) is infamous for not admitting culpability in past misdeeds. If Pious XII had admitted that he could have spoken out during the Holocaust would he still be (fast-tracked) on the road to canonization? If the Vatican would have voiced regret for its role in the Crusades and the expulsion of Moors from Spain and Portugal, would the radical Muslim world have as much animosity for Christianity as it does today?

As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, the media has forced the Catholic Church to admit to heinous acts against children: the Duplessis Orphan scandal in Canada and the Magdalene Laundry scandal in Ireland. In both cases, nuns were the perpetrators of torture, slavery, sexual abuse and even homicide over a period of decades. And the Church did more than simply cover up the bodies and place them in unmarked graves.

So the widespread cover-up of sexual abuse in the priesthood is not really surprising. And the abuse was around far longer than Joseph Ratzinger's time on earth. To think that he had nothing to do with it because he (re)acted after the media blew the whistle is polite wishful thinking. As head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was, in effect, the Church's spin doctor: he was charged to protect the image of the Church as well as its doctrine from heresy. 

And there were times when he acted rather viciously.

Hans Kung was a trusted friend of Joseph Ratzinger in the late 60s. He even helped Ratzinger obtain a professorship at a university in Tubingen, Germany, where Kung was professor of theology. Later, Kung was stripped of his authority to teach theology by (then) Cardinal Ratzinger who was head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The official reason: Kung denied the infalability of the pope. Another reason (according to conspiracy theorists): Kung was too close to John Paul I during his controversial tenure (30 days) and even more controversial death. Kung has since reiterated his criticism of the papacy and in particular of Benedict:

"Joseph Ratzinger has stood still because as a Bavarian Catholic in the Hellenistic tradition, interpreted in Roman terms, he wanted to stand still."

Timothy Shriver of The Washington Post put the scandal and its nuances quite well:

What's needed is a conversion of the bishops and the pope himself. That's right: It's time for the pope and the bishops to convert their culture to one that is centered on loving God from the depths of their souls and to leading a church that is as much mother as father, as much pastoral as theological, as much spiritual as doctrinal. It is time for them to listen to the deep and authentic witness of the people of faith, to trust the spirit that blows where it will, to abandon their defensiveness of their positions and trust only the gospel, and not their edifice of control. Conversion is a total experience -- letting go of the old and putting on the new.

That is something Benedict will never do. And there is no defense of a man who will not progress for the spiritual good of his flock. Benedict is not a shepherd. He is merely an old sentinel who stands guarding an old abusive system.