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Wineke: Catholic Church Reasserting Control of Nuns Underlies Hypocrisy

By Bill Wineke
Ñhannel 3000
April 24, 2012

http://www.channel3000.com/news/Wineke-Catholic-Church-reasserting-control-of-nuns-underlies-hypocrisy/-/1648/11668002/-/1gqa4gz/-/



Something very strange is going on within the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

Each week brings revelations seemingly more bizarre than those of even the week before.

Last week, the Vatican took over the leadership of American nuns and appointed an archbishop to act, in effect, as a receiver for the group. Archbishop Peter Sartain, of Seattle, now has power to remove the elected leaders of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, approve speakers at the group's conferences, set policy for the group and tell the nuns with whom they might affiliate.

The Vatican announced all this in a press release. That's how the nuns learned about it. The contempt shown the nuns couldn't have been more pronounced if the pope had mooned them in public.

And what were the great sins committed by the nuns, sins so great they deserve this public rebuke and humiliation? It's a little hard to say. It seems the men running the church think the nuns aren't sufficiently publicly fighting abortion and birth control, that the speakers at their conferences may strike the bishops as too radical and that some nuns are feminists.

Read in context, the Vatican document basically says the nuns have had the audacity to disagree with church teachings and they need to be put in their place.

The document doesn't say the nuns have actually done something immoral. It's not as if, say, they had numerous members of their orders who sexually abused children, or had mother superiors who covered those crimes up.

Not to be too subtle about this: The Vatican did not put the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops into receivership.

Well, that was in mid-week. By week's end, we found the bishop of Peoria, Ill., one Bishop Daniel Jenky, in the news for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Speaking at a men's conference, Jenky said "Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social service and health areas. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda now seems intent on following a similar path."

This kind of statement is nothing less than deranged.

Just for the record, the program the president is implementing calls on Catholic sponsored colleges, hospitals and other institutions to offer the same health insurance benefit packages that all other employers are asked to offer. It is a requirement far less rigid than that currently required by law in many states, including Wisconsin.

To date -- and this might change, I hope -- none of Jenky's fellow bishops have raised a word of protest as one of their own issues wild-eyed accusations that might heretofore have been the dominion of kooks.

So what's going on here? Has the church leadership just decided to alienate all moderate Catholics and, instead, build a new church of fanatics?

I doubt it. But the events of the past couple of weeks are so weird that I don't know quite what to think.

 

 

 

 

 




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