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  What the Catholic Church Needs: a Few Good Nuns
Make Them Ceos of Their Parishes

By Margaret Carlson
LA Times [Los Angeles CA]
April 14, 2005

It was great to feel Catholic again last week as the pope was buried with all the church's ancient splendor: the flowing robes, the stately miters, the Gregorian chants.

I was taken back to High Mass at Good Shepherd in Camp Hill, Pa. It was our place of worship — and with its music, costumes and liturgy, our concert hall and our theater as well.

Add the Knights of Columbus, bingo and Mother Marita Joseph running the grade school, and that was Catholic parish life in the '60s.

It was a wonderful way to grow up.

But I was jolted out of my nostalgia when I saw Cardinal Bernard Law among the red-robed princes of the church. How did it happen that Law landed such an exalted and cushy job as archpriest of the patriarchal Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome?

For the evil he covered up as archbishop of Boston, Law should have been banished to the nave of a cold, dark chapel, on his knees, doing penance, for the rest of his days. Isn't that the way of the church?

It was for my devout grandmother. Because she had divorced my alcoholic grandfather and remarried, she was denied the sacraments for the rest of her life. Yet Law, who clearly chose to ignore the sexual abuse of boys by priests under his rule, was given the singular honor of being the only U.S. cardinal to say a Mass of mourning for the pope. But he personifies why many Catholics in the U.S. hope the next pope will be a departure from the one who coddled pedophiles.

Even as Pope John Paul II healed rifts with other religions, he ignored the splits within his own, especially the one with the American church. He ignored the people in the pews who wanted priests who hurt children to be punished in favor of a hierarchy that didn't.

Those Catholics who spoke out against the pope's blind spot were labeled malcontents and accused of using the scandal to push a liberal agenda. Last week, the Associated Press found that 82% of U.S. Catholics want more attention paid to the problem of predatory priests. A majority also wants priests to be able to marry and women to be allowed to join the priesthood.

Those changes would take a miracle. The next pope, elected by John Paul's ideological brothers, is going to be a lot like him, hoping the problem with the priests fades away on its own.

One of the cardinals on the short list of papal candidates, Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, summed up in 2002 the prevailing view among the College of Cardinals: that the church is being persecuted by the U.S. media.

The telegenic Rodriguez, who pals around with U2's Bono, flies a plane and speaks eight languages, said that media criticism of the church reminded him "of Nero and Diocletian and, more recently, of Stalin and Hitler."

Only one prominent cardinal, Godfried Daneels of Belgium, even whispers about granting women larger roles in the church.

But I have a way to get women involved in the church at a level that better reflects their standing in society at large and doesn't require an encyclical reinterpreting doctrine: Make nuns responsible for the whole parish, not just the school. Let the priests keep their sacramental power and their perks. The priests can be chairmen of the board, but let the nuns be the CEOs.

Mother Marita Joseph was a second-class citizen. She ran Good Shepherd School. What she didn't run were the priests, and they would have been better off if she had.

As Syracuse University history professor Margaret Thompson, who researched 75 religious orders, wrote: "The nuns' power stopped at the rectory door. Not even Mother Superior would dare to call a bishop."

That's one reason so many nuns left the church and one reason errant priests got away with their crimes for so long. An all-male power structure employed the worst tactics of its secular counterparts: silencing victims, covering up crimes, shifting bad priests around like fungible account executives.

If former priest John Geoghan had Mother Marita Joseph watching him, he would have been booted out of the first Massachusetts parish he served in — and not shuttled to as many as five others, racking up more than 130 complaints of sexual abuse along the way.

Why would the church want to elevate women? For starters, to attract more young people to be priests and nuns, revive the parish schools and fill the pews emptied over the last decade.

There aren't many worshipers like my grandmother left. She dropped her weekly gift in the collection basket and meekly stayed behind while the rest of the family took communion. The American church knows people like her are a vanishing breed. It just doesn't know what to do about it. I know a few good nuns who could help.

 
 

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