Long history of male church hierarchy dissing nuns

[eridani]

Last edited Fri May 18, 2012, 04:49 AM - Edit history (1)

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/11471-nuns-on-the-frontier

In 1886, four Texas priests demanded that Bishop John C. Néraz replace a superior, Mother St. Andrew Feltin, saying that she had “spread gossip” and warned her sisters “to beware of priests.”

Bishop Néraz threatened the sisterhood with disbandment and removed Mother St. Andrew from office. He hounded her for years, disciplined other nuns she had befriended, suspended her right to the sacraments, warned other bishops not to grant her sanctuary, undercut her efforts to enter a California convent and even urged her deportation to Europe. Finally, Mother St. Andrew laid aside her religious clothing, returned to secular dress and cared for her widowed brother’s children.

Six years after Bishop Néraz died, Mother St. Andrew petitioned her congregation for readmission. Donning her habit, she renewed her vows amid a warm welcome from sisters who understood too well what she had suffered.

Then as now, not all priests and bishops treated sisters badly, though the priests who reached out to nuns in a spirit of appreciation, friendship and equality could not alter the church’s institutional commitment to gender discrimination. And, as now, some bishops, dismissive of the laity, underestimated the loyalty secular Catholics felt for their nuns.

In the case of Mother St. Andrew, tenacity and spirituality triumphed over arrogance and misogyny. The Vatican would do well to bear this history in mind as it thinks through the consequences of its unjust attack on American sisters.

[rug]

1. The Congregation that Mother St. Andrew belonged to is the Sisters of Divine Providence.

http://www.cdptexas.org/texas1866.html

Here's more on her.

"But God called Mother St. Andrew from the mountain peak of success to the abyss of brokenness. Two especially painful happenings changed her life radically: the defection of a group of Sisters who fell prey to the lure of false promises; and the even deeper hurt, her own rejection by Church officials in a case of false accusation and misrepresentation of facts which concluded in her expulsion from office and her departure from the Congregation. In a final act of expulsion, the Bishop ordered Congregational documents and letters burned, an act symbolic of stripping Mother St. Andrew even of her existence within the Congregation.

"Now in exile, from the depths of a desolate soul, she wrote: 'It is not a little thing for a person of my age to be evicted from her home that I had established by the sweat of my brow, and in spite of the fact that they wished to charge me with all sorts of ignominies, the good God, my witness and my good Father, knows my works and He will recompense me for them in His time. This is the hope which sustains my heart in these tribulations. …you know that every good work passes through suffering.' To a friend also in pain, 'Let us go up to Calvary and there we will find consolation.'”

http://www.cdptexas.org/movementsofprov8.html

Here's a recent article on the Sisters of Divine Providence after the current Vatican investigation began

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/vatican-inquiries-into-sisters-causing-trepidation-348037/

"HYPOCRITE, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he depises." - The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

[longship]

2. To bad the muns didn't have Kathleen Freeman

(from Blues Bros. fame)