UNITED STATES
CBS Chicago
NEW YORK (CBS) — The Vatican has ordered a crackdown on a group that represents most Catholic nuns in the United States, and the former Bishop of Joliet is coming in to keep the group in line.
As WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya reports, the Vatican says there is serious concern about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group that represents 55,000 American Catholic nuns. …
Bishops Thomas J. Paprocki and Leonard Blair will assist Sartrain in overseeing the group, the New York Times reported. They will have up to five years to revise the group’s rules, and will approve of every speaker brought in for the group’s public programs and replace a handbook that had been used to facilitate discussions on matters that are considered doctrine and should not be challenged, the New York Times reported.
Sartrain has headed the archdiocese in Seattle since 2010. His appointment that year stirred controversy after his diocese ordained a priest who ended up being charged with sex abuse.
The priest, Alejandro Flores, pleaded guilty in September 2010 to sexually abusing a young west suburban boy over a five-year period starting in 2005, when he was a seminarian. The year before, Flores’ ordination had been delayed twice – first when he said he himself had been sexually abused in a Bolivian orphanage as a boy, and again when it was discovered that he had looked at male pornography on a church computer, the Chicago Tribune reported.
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