I have written before on the Vatican
war on American nuns but today, The New York Times addressed the subject
brilliantly.
Maureen Dowd wrote “Bishops Play Church Queens as Pawns”
where she end her piece by saying “The pope needs what the rest of us got from
nuns: a good rap across the knuckles” and by Nicholas D. Kristof “We Are All
Nuns” where he asked “Look at the pope and the nuns. Who’s more like Jesus?”
One of the big points both columnists bring out is the total
idiocy of a church going after nuns who do so much good in the world while
remaining silent for so many years about their priests’ sordid pedophilia.
Dowd calls church leaders a bunch of adolescent boys,
blinded by sex. I agree and add that those “boys” are also infatuated with
their own power but not realizing how fundamentally ignorant they are about
normal and natural life on earth among normal and natural humans in whose world
they do not function much less understand.
Kristof writes that the work of nuns is what gives the
church humanity. Church leaders have a lot to learn from nuns in America and
from women in general and yet they maintain that they are “the church’s
authentic teachers of faith and morals” and the nuns are not listening to their
instructions and must be taught, once again, to shut up and obey!
I say that the Catholic Church, because of its leaders, has
lost credibility with its own constituency and can not in all seriousness, try
to impose their incredibly naïve views on the Catholic population.
It appears that the nuns in America are gaining a huge
support network because of the Vatican’s attack on them and this war on
religious women is morphing into a more general attack on women in general by
conservatives in this country who like the pope and his bishops, wants to keep
their paternalistic grip on the weaker but oh, so much more smarter, sex.
