UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
by Phyllis Zagano on Apr. 25, 2012 Just Catholic
What’s left to say? By now the whole world has heard the Vatican is going to take care of those uppity, radical feminist nuns.
Except they’re not that uppity. They’re not radical feminists. For Pete’s sake, they’re not even nuns.
Which is where the problem begins. In the sixth century, a bishop named Caesarius of Arles endowed a monastery for his sister to run, and wrote “A Rule for Virgins.” You know, enclosure and all that. For about 1,000 years, that was pretty much the only choice for women who wanted to consecrate their lives to God.
While a few women were also ordained as deacons, any vocation for women soon got stuffed behind fortified walls. Over the centuries, new women’s vocations broke through here and there — the Beguines, Catherine of Siena — until Mary Ward and others brought defunct diaconal ministries to the alleys and byways of Europe. Eventually, the church recognized this new vocation, now called apostolic, or active religious life — “sisters” — as opposed to cloistered, or contemplative, nuns. …
Great theater here. Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle with Bishop Thomas J. Paproki of Springfield, Ill., and Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, are the men in black. One of Sartain’s five older sisters belongs to the conservative Nashville Domincans. Paprocki, an amateur ice hockey goalie, once blamed priestly pederasty on the devil. And Blair, secretary to the archbishop of Detroit around the time of Agnes Mary Mansour, was in it from the start.
In fact Blair, together with now-Archbishop Charles J. Brown, the new apostolic nuncio to Ireland, prepared the recommendations to the voting members of CDF.
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