UNITED STATES
The New York Times
By FRANCIS X. CLINES MAY 8, 2014
The 57,000 American women who are working among the needy as Catholic nuns received some words of encouragement this week from a German cardinal, dubbed “the pope’s theologian” because of his close friendship with Pope Francis. “I am also considered suspect!” Cardinal Walter Kasper, an outspoken liberal church writer, said at Fordham University on Monday. He was alluding to a Vatican investigation into “the quality of the life” at women’s religious institutes — code for Rome-appointed busybodies probing nuns for feminist influences and traces of heresy.
When the Vatican crackdown on nuns was announced five years ago — in the United States and no other country — it struck many church critics and laymen as a chauvinist overreach from Rome, particularly amid the raging scandal of the male clergy’s raping and abusing children. Progressive orders like the Sisters of St. Joseph, who revolutionized the treatment of imprisoned women in New York, received particular scrutiny.
“Well, it’s all nonsense,” Bob Bennett said at the time, speaking as a lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “They are the jewels, the church’s class act,” Mr. Bennett said of the nuns.
The Vatican, however, is only stiffening its challenge to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — the nuns’ hierarchy — with a new requirement that the sisters’ annual conference agendas and speakers be vetted by a Vatican overseer. Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Vatican bureaucracy on doctrine, accused the sisters this week of resisting mandated reforms and preferring speakers who diverged from church teaching.
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