Okay, that's a joke. Actually, it's the other way around. (You knew that, right?) But friends in the religious community have suggested that turning the tables might not be a bad idea.
The reason for the asperity is set out in this recent New York Times story by Laurie Goodstein about the Vatican's double-barreled review of the bona fides of American women's orders sets out the issues and the complaints very well. The story has drawn more than 400 comments to date, and has pinged around the blogosphere.
Nuns are often the butt of too many bad jokes, but the nuns did more than most to build and sustain the church in the United States, and to promote justice and Vatican II's vision of the ancient church in a modern world. And so investigating women religious is going to draw some sharp reactions.
The first investigation was by Cardinal Franc Rode, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Institutes of Religious Life, which deals with religious orders. As Goodstein writes, in a speech in Massachusetts last year, Cardinal Rodé offered barbed criticism of some American nuns "who have opted for ways that take them outside" the church.
In response Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, professor emerita of New Testament and spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, in California, says the orders should politely decline to copperate with the investigation.
"They think of us as an ecclesiastical work force...Whereas we are religious, we're living the life of total dedication to Christ, and out of that flows a profound concern for the good of all humanity. So our vision of our lives, and their vision of us as a work force, are just not on the same planet."
Sister Janice Farnham, a part-time professor of church history at Boston College, added: "Why are the U.S. sisters being singled out, when women religious in other countries are struggling with many issues about the quality of their lives, in the Church and in their societies?"
The second doctrinal inquiry, of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which covers 95 percent of women's orders, was ordered by the head of the CDF, Cardinal William Levada. According to the Times story, Levada said "an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to 'promote' the church's teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation."
Not a few in the U.S. church welcome the investgation, like the folks at Catholic World News. Jeff Mirius, the head of Trinity Communications, its parent company, said they were "admittedly happy to report that the Vatican's Apostolic Visitation of female religious communities in the United States may actually have some teeth in it." But he added:
"Of course the ultimate question is whether Rome will enforce its conclusions and/or dissolve the orders which resist."
Sounds like the Darth Vader approach.
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The church is made up of humans who are full of sin. That includes our hierarchy. You just want to argue. I am done with you.
Yes, what you say is true. I never claimed that the hierarchy or the humans in the Church are perfect, far from it. I just claimed that the Church was founded by Christ and quoted Jesus doing so. That belief is what the Catholic Church is based on.
I'm sorry that my defense of the Catholic Church offends you.
"Nuns are often the butt of too many bad jokes, but the nuns did more than most to build and sustain the church in the United States, and to promote justice and Vatican II's vision of the ancient church in a modern world. And so investigating women religious is going to draw some sharp reactions."
This is most certainly true. Women religious have been the back bone of the Church in America. The Vatican isn't investigating those builders, most of whom are dead, the rest of which are pretty on in years. It's investigating the women who came after them, who have sown rebellion and discord, who have done much to undo what those noble women who built the Church have done.
As one of those old nuns said one day, "We took in too many women who we shouldn't have when the numbers began to decline, and kept them when we should have thrown them out."
On the bright side, there are several traditional orders who have lots of young women entering, orders such as the Dominican Sisters of Nashville and in Ann Arbor, the Sisters of Life, etc.
Well said, Gerald. And I might add, the sisters who are faithful to the Church's teachings are having to turn applicants away for lack of space. Meanwhile, the dissenting orders are dying. I see this constantly as I travel around to various retreat houses and convents with fellow seminarians.
In the coming decades we will have fewer convents but they will be filled with faithful witnesses to Christ's Church, and then the religious life will begin to flourish again.
... there are several traditional orders who have lots of young women entering, orders such as the Dominican Sisters of Nashville and in Ann Arbor, the Sisters of Life, etc.
Wouldn't it be more correct to say that they have SOME young women entering; "lots" is only in comparison to the major orders, which have nearly no young women entering.
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