Nuns are standing up to the Vatican [View all]

WASHINGTON — The leader of a group of US Catholic nuns on Saturday rejected condemnation from a Vatican report that said it defied Church doctrine.

"We haven't violated any teaching," Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby, told AFP, insisting the group would not stop "caring for the least among us on the margins of society."

Network was singled out for supporting women's health rights in a Vatican report this week condemning the main US association of Catholic nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR).

The three-year inquiry by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees Roman Catholic doctrine, criticized the LCWR for taking liberal stances on contraception, homosexuality and female priests.