UNITED STATES
Big Think
Adam Lee on January 27, 2012
In 2009, the Roman Catholic church convened an “apostolic visitation” – a sort of modern-day auto-da-fe – a rare step taken when the Vatican feels that a church-affiliated institution has gone seriously astray. The church officials in charge of the investigation conducted interviews at almost 400 religious institutions throughout the U.S., and this month, they submitted their final report, whose contents as of now are still secret.
What is this pervasive evil within the church that the Vatican is so determined to combat? If you guessed “priests who rape children with the knowledge and complicity of their superiors”, you’re thinking like a normal, decent human being, which of course makes you wrong. No, the real subject of the report is something far worse: the Vatican is worried that its nuns are becoming too feminist!
As this earlier news report says, the all-male Catholic hierarchy is upset that American nuns aren’t hewing sufficiently to the church line on teachings like gay rights and the restriction of the priesthood to men. Cardinal Franc Rode, who launched the apostolic visitation, said that they were displaying a worrisome “feminist spirit”. And those concerns appear to be well-founded, given that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group representing liberal American nuns, is almost ten times larger than the conservative Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious. Some orders have openly refused to cooperate with the inquisition.
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