Another letter to a woman religious
Dear Betty,
I didn't think I'd need to write. By now, you're probably all LCWR-ed out. The hotel was crawling with media those four days. They all missed the real story.
Just Catholic
Just Catholic is a Catholic perspective on the news -- especially when the church itself becomes the news -- from Phyllis Zagano. If we talk about religion, we must talk about the way we live it. It’s not only relationship with God, it’s relationship with ourselves and with each other.
Invincible ignorance and the bishops
Many years ago, Cardinal John O'Connor told me about "invincible ignorance" -- you can't be blamed for what you're not taught. He said point-blank that the bishops responsible for invincible ignorance are the guilty ones.
Now some of those same bishops and their successors are foundering in a sea of rhetoric, sinking by weights of their own making. They might want to talk about abortion and the rest, but nothing they say is heard.
What are they talking about, anyway?
What would Mary Magdalene do?
Once a pope trashes you, it's pretty much downhill from there. So once Pope Gregory the Great in 591 declared that the "sinful" woman in Luke's Gospel who anointed Jesus' feet was Mary Magdalene, a whole industry developed to discredit her. That's big stuff. I mean, she is the one who announced the Resurrection.
Or have they changed that, too?
Fortnight of words
I'm not sure what the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Fortnight for Freedom accomplished except to send folks to their dictionaries for the definition of "fortnight." This new word from the traditionalist lexicon joins the unpronounceable "consubstantial." I haven't heard "perichoresis" anywhere yet, but it's coming.
Should church be a place where you need flashcards to figure out what's going on?
Can we all get along?
As the stories spin and positions harden, the very real male-female divide in the Catholic church grows and grows. It's bishops v. nuns. As Rodney King asked during the 1992 Los Angeles riots*, "Can we all get along, can we call get along, can we stop making it horrible ... we'll get our justice ... let's try to work it out."
The poison in the stew now is the same as 20** years ago, when Los Angeles erupted into flames, enveloping the lives of real people. Then, media riot coverage incited more riots, thereby inciting more media coverage.
Vatican misses the point again
As leaked documents cast doubt upon the Vatican Bank and the Swiss guards say the butler did it, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith continues playing "Whack-A-Nun." Vatican congregations have scrutinized women religious, put their major leadership organization into receivership and attacked the writings of individual sisters.
So anyway, do they read the newspapers? Don't they get it?
Following the money
You can be sure whenever they say it's not about the money, it's about the money. Those pesky LCWR types always seem to want to give it away. To the poor. Whatever will they think of next?
That's what the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said, isn't it? The women religious of the United States were spending too much time on social issues and not enough on defending doctrine. Just about every reliable media outlet picked it up, reporting that the US Catholic bishops, who have no moral credibility (and therefore no moral authority), can't get their own job done and so are taking the sisters into receivership.
A letter to a woman religious
Dear Betty,
The whole thing is a heartbreak. I can picture the tears you've shed, for your community, for your vocation, for your very life. Please believe me, nothing was wasted.
The noise coming from Rome about American women religious is in large part just that: the blustering of old men, translated into official-looking documents by cassock-clad junior clerics who wistfully wander the Curia's halls dreaming of a more orderly church, where lace is white and lay folk are quiet.
It might sound like an indictment of you, but the world heard it as an indictment of them.
They want a tidy, controlled church.
That's not likely to happen.
The Vatican and the LCWR
What's left to say? By now the whole world has heard the Vatican is going to take care of those uppity, radical feminist nuns.
Except they're not that uppity. They're not radical feminists. For Pete's sake, they're not even nuns.
Obedience to law or to Scripture?
Now it's Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schönborn who's wading in hot water. Seems he and a group of Austrian priests and deacons got a full blast of papal steam on Holy Thursday.
The shrill Roman whistle sounded: No women or married men will be ordained.
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In This Issue
May 24-June 6, 2013
- The paradox of Pope Francis
- Editorial: Questions linger after dynamic sisters' meeting
- [Coming Soon] Name your treasure and pass it on
- [Print Edition Only] Special Section: Family Life
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