PENNSYLVANIA
Erie Times-News
Pat Cuneo
‘Vatican orders crackdown on American nuns,” the headline blared in last Wednesday’s Washington Post. The group representing most of America’s 55,000 Catholic nuns was “not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination,” the story read.
So, Rome named conservative Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain to overhaul the governance and plans of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and its relationship with “certain groups the Vatican finds suspect.”
The LCWR does not directly represent the sisters in the Erie region, incidentally.
It’s an inside fight, right? It’s just a squabble about the uppity nuns’ obsession with a “prevalence of certain radical feminist themes (that are) incompatible with the Catholic faith,” as Rome pointed out. Religious groups can do whatever they want, right? Absolutely. Yet just how far will this kind of crackdown go before a good chunk of American Catholics, especially American Catholic women, tell Rome to go take a hike. I sense the last straw will be a lot sooner than I ever thought possible.
It turns out that the nuns’ advocacy for fairness on issues large and small is the true target. So is their audacity of having an opinion where it isn’t welcome. And so it is that Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine scholar, writer, lecturer and recognized as one of the world’s most respected moralists, was left “deeply distraught” by the news.
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