UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Christopher Brauchlie
Get thee to a nunnery. — Shakespeare’s Hamlet
The Lord works in mysterious ways. So does the Catholic Church and it is probably as confusing for the nuns as it is for the casual observer. On the one hand, nuns are in bad odor in the Vatican and are being investigated by a bunch of men. On the other hand, the Vatican seems to view them as correctional institutions when such institutions are needed. Although the events described occurred some time ago, the conviction of Bishop Robert W. Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph on one misdemeanor count and the resulting schism in the diocese brings it to mind again.
In April the Vatican began cracking down on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization representing about 80 percent of the nuns in the United States. The Vatican’s “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an organization comprising only men, said that LCWR has focused its efforts on serving the poor and disenfranchised, while remaining virtually silent on issues the church considers great societal evils: abortion and same-sex marriage.” One of the leaders of the move to investigate the LCWR was Cardinal Bernard Law who had actually spent some time with one group of nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy of Alma following his resignation in disgrace as Archbishop of Boston.
Cardinal Law was Archbishop of Boston from 1984 to 2002 during which time many priests engaged in inappropriate conduct with children. The archbishop was aware of many instances of the conduct and said that when a priest was accused of a sexual offense it was his practice to consult with psychiatrists, clinicians and therapists in residential treatment centers to determine whether the priests accused of sexually abusing children should return to the pulpit. Reporting the criminal conduct of priests to the civil authorities was not something that occurred to Archbishop Law. In reporting on the sex abuse scandal the Massachusetts attorney general said that “the Archdiocese has shown an institutional reluctance to adequately address the problem and, in fact, made choices that allowed the abuse to continue.” The Attorney General observed that since priests were not required to report sexual abuse until 2002 (when the law that required reporting was enacted), Cardinal Law had broken no laws.
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