UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Julie Leininger Pycior
At present there is a standoff between the Vatican and the organization that represents 80 percent of American nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious/LCWR. The hierarchy likely will break the stalemate right after the noisy election season, and they hold all the power (that is, unless the nuns simply rebel).
Or maybe not? God writes with straight but crooked lines, according to two people often characterized as Catholic activist icons, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.
The dividing line between the Vatican and the nuns does seem rigid. Rome scored the LCWR for “radical feminism” and placed a male prelate in charge of monitoring these 75,000 women (yes, even as the episcopate remains tainted by the pedophilia cover-up scandal). The monitor, Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle, is urging the Catholics in his archdiocese to vote in favor of a resolution, which he promoted, that would overturn a law recognizing gay marriage — this, in line with the Pope, who has stated that same-sex unions “threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”
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