Cleveland priest on "What the Nuns’ Story is Really About"

[rug]

by Alice Popovici on May. 29, 2012

A reader emailed NCR the following article from the parish bulletin of the Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Cleveland, Ohio. We're posting it with the permission of the author, Fr. Doug Koesel:

What the Nuns’ Story is Really About

Many of you have asked me to comment on the recent investigation into the US nuns. Here goes. In short, the Vatican has asked for an investigation into the life of religious women in the United States. There is a concern about orthodoxy, feminism and pastoral practice. The problem with the Vatican approach is that it places the nuns squarely on the side of Jesus and the Vatican on the side of tired old men, making a last gasp to save a crumbling kingdom lost long ago for a variety of reasons.

One might say that this investigation is the direct result of the John Paul II papacy. He was suspicious of the power given to the laity after the Second Vatican Council. He disliked the American Catholic Church. Throughout his papacy he strove to wrest collegial power from episcopal conferences and return it to Rome.

http://ncronline.org/blogs/sisters-under-scrutiny/cleveland-priest-what-nuns%E2%80%99-story-really-about

You learn more about the Church from reading parish bulletins than you do from the Wednesday Papal audiences.

[zeemike]

1. thanks for that Rug

I was unaware of all of that having lost touch with the Catholic church long ago.

[hedgehog]

2. There are a lot of people who have lost faith in the organization,

but not in God. Many of us who are hanging on are working to make the Church what she is meant to be!

[zeemike]

5. Yes meant to be.

But ceased to be a few hundred years after Jesus....it happens with every religon.
But the one thing that the Catholics had going for them was the ritual and they dismantled that recently.

[meow2u3]

3. Modern-day Pharisees is right--those who abuse authority to control women

The Vatican sounded like the Pharisees of the New Testament;—legalistic, paternalistic and orthodox— while “the good sisters” were the ones who were feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, educating the immigrant, and so on. Nuns also learned that Catholics are intuitively smart about their faith. They prefer dialogue over diatribe, freedom of thought over mind control, biblical study over fundamentalism, development of doctrine over isolated mandates.

Christ would be spinning in his grave if he hadn't already come out of it. If Jesus came down to earth today, he'd be highly displeased with the way his vicars on earth are running his Church. He'd tell them off to no end, calling them on their hypocrisy and bully-boy machismo. He'd also probably be sitting in a Vatican jail, too, with Opus Dei playing the role of Caiphas the high priest.

Religious women in the US refuse to be controlled by abusive authority that seeks to control out of fear. They realize that Jesus taught no doctrines, but that the church, over time, developed what Jesus taught in a systematic way. Nuns have always tried to work within the system. This time their prophetic voices may take them out of the system.

Once again, the Vatican has been forgetting that Christ saw women as men's equals, contrary to the thinking of the insecure men in charge.

[pnwmom]

4. Another WOW for the National Catholic Reporter.

I just gave to their recent fund drive -- money well spent.