Nuns' fight with Vatican highlights Catholicism's global struggle

[seabeyond]

he charges ranged from promoting “radical feminism” to espousing religious teachings out of step with the Catholic Church. Now, six weeks after many American nuns said they were blindsided by a bruising Vatican assessment, a key nuns' leadership group is meeting to decide how to respond.

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It's a fight that pits church men and against church women, and it could have broader implications for the global church. One side is pushing the nuns to fight back against a church that they think has lost its way. The other is championing the Vatican against a group of aging nuns whom they say are on the verge of extinction unless they reform. The powerful Vatican office, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, launched an investigation for several years. It issued a report in April charging that America's nuns had largely gone rogue, warning that the American nuns could be a negative global influence on the church.

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The Vatican report said that at an annual gathering of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, guest speakers who preached "radical feminism" went unchallenged. The report also alleged sins of omission, saying the nuns were too focused heavily on social justice and not enough on opposing abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage. Many nuns have publicly chafed at the report. "For myself, the shock made me numb at first, and then I was profoundly sad that my life as a woman religious and my commitment to serving the poor would be so denigrated by the leadership of our church," says Sister Simone Campbell, who heads NETWORK, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. "All we do is work for love."

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While leadership conference nuns viewed the evolving role of women to give them more of a social justice focus, Cummings says that "Vatican officials, and many Catholics, too, see those changes as startling and disturbing. “What’s happening here with the doctrinal assessment is just the latest, and will have the most lasting effects, of a Vatican attempt to reassert the power they traditionally held over women’s religious life," Cummings says. "Power that they lost a lot of over the last 50 years.”

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/30/nuns-fight-with-vatican-highlights-catholicisms-global-struggle/?hpt=hp_c2

_________________

do it... sistahs.

[Fresh_Start]

1. Love this quote

"Pope Benedict XVI, a theologian by training, was the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for decades before he was elevated to papacy. In interviews conducted while he held that earlier post, he spoke often about growing the church by pruning - becoming smaller but more devout before expanding."

We can only hope that the rightwing elements of the church prune themselves out of existence.

[seabeyond]

3. the catholic church in calif anyway, was the mellow religion. lol. i wasnt catholic

i am not any religion, but most all my friends were catholics. it was a different religion then. i dont know if it was three decades ago, or the area i was living.

[Fresh_Start]

5. I'm in a liberal area outside San Francisco

but our local Catholic church is not mellow at all.
There are however 'better' Catholic churches in the surrounding towns.

[seabeyond]

8. i have been thinking about your post

and maybe that is more what it has to do. the person who runs the church puts the flavor on it. so you have some that are more restrictive, and others that are more accepting.

[Fresh_Start]

9. totally agree

we used to have a welcoming loving priest.
Now we have a 'vatican' approved one.

[patrice]

2. In a People's History of the U.S., Zinn relates a fascinating story about slavery that parallels

the sisters' situation a little:

Can't remember the names, but it was some leaders of the colonists who wrote to RC church authorities in Europe to inquire as to the moral acceptability of slavery and the response letter related a review of the question by somekind of church committee that said the same thing that the church says today about the ordination of women, TTE: Slavery is morally acceptable because no RC authority had ever said otherwise. Period.

I read about the ordination of women for a while a few years ago and could find no justification other than, TTE: There should be no women priests because there have never been any women priests.

[seabeyond]

4. interesting. and i have heard that.... thanks.

i live in a very red panhandle of texas. i live on the only street with dems. they are dots, all up the street. the two houses where gay women live. two different homes bought by single calif women. and the home housing 5 or 6 or more, nuns. then us. such a hoot. i love my nuns.

[patrice]

6. One of my best teacher friends back when, whose classroom was nextdoor to mine, a history teacher,

was a Lesbian ex-nun, who used to say that the basic deal is the 10 Commandments and all of the other do -s and don't -s are just Jewish social law.

As far as what makes a Catholic a Catholic, Catholic dogma, it's all in the Nicene Creed. I keep asking around for the dogma on sexual orientation, female ordination, and birth control and the other issues (that our bishop here has tried to deny the likes of Kathleen Sebelius Communion on) and as yet no one has produced it.

Here's a kind of independent source on Catholic issues, The National Catholic Reporter http://ncronline.org/ https://www.facebook.com/NCRonline located here in Kansas City, I have heard their speakers at conferences and they are Liberals on Social and Economic Justice. They were about the ONLY source on the story about the Pope's survey that he sent out to all of the women's religious orders a few years ago, to which most of them responded, TTE: "If you want to know something about us, read our Charter (the cannonical document that makes them religious orders in the first place)." I think they did eventually go ahead and comply with the pope's demand for information though.

NCR has also been following the story about the pope and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

[seabeyond]

7. i really do hate seeing this happen to the catholic religion

i saw the article, how pro life is pro life enough. lol. i will check it out tomorrow.

a poster today gave me this site.

http://www.dignityusa.org/content/misogyny-and-homophobia

it was an interesting twist on it that i had not thought of before that makes perfect sense. and i love the point that homosexuality (men on men) is talked about in the bible, but not gay women. i perused about half of it. but i want to finish reading that in the morning, too.

[patrice]

10. Thanks for that link I will share it. I'm a risen Catholic. Don't attend anymore. I still love

most of what I learned from them, still love the Mass, but I'm a member of the church with no walls now. My orientation on the things that religion conventionally addresses is from The Bhagavad Gita, which sub-sums an awefull lot really and comes much closer to being universal than what calls itself the Catholic Church these days.

[eridani]

11. Garry Wills on the church bullying of nuns

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/24/bullying-nuns/

The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility.

Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in “the social Gospel” (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist). Nuns were quick to respond to the AIDS crisis, and to the spiritual needs of gay people—which earned them an earlier rebuke from Rome. They were active in the civil rights movement. They ran soup kitchens.

<snip>

Last week, following an assessment by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle has taken control of the Conference, writing new laws for it, supplanting its leadership, and banning “political” activity (which is what Rome calls social work). Women are not capable, in the Vatican’s mind, of governing others or even themselves. Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?

It is typical of the pope’s sense of priorities that, at the very time when he is quashing an independent spirit in the church’s women, he is negotiating a welcome back to priests who left the church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These men, with their own dissident bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, formed the Society of Saint Pius X—the Pius whose Secretariat of State had a monsignor (Umberto Benigni) who promoted the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Pope Benedict has already lifted the excommunication of four bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X, including that of Richard Williamson, who is a holocaust denier. Now a return of the whole body is being negotiated.