Even as the Catholic Church shields and panders to child rapists masquerading as priests (I use the word “panders” advisedly, since so many of the children are altar boys), it’s gone to battle against its own nuns.
The Apostolic Visitation currently in progress is not a new take on the Annunciation. It’s an investigation of convents and women’s orders in the U.S. inspired by the well-founded suspicion that they’re not all Vatican-kosher. Essentially, it’s a form of Inquisition. And yet another sign of how firmly the Church has its finger on the self-destruct button.
Not so long ago, outrage was restricted to feminist Catholics like Mary Hunt, whose article here pulls no punches. A brief extract:
God knows Catholicism has a gender problem. But the structures of power are so perverse as to be dangerous. More than mandatory celibacy, homosexuality, all-male priesthood, and other reasons floated to explain why so many priests abuse children and why so many bishops cover up for them, the monarchical model of power is, to my mind, the major reason why crimes went unchecked and criminals remained in ministry. In a monarchy, there are no checks and balances against power at the highest levels. There is no way to vote the bums out or force them with threats of removal to run institutions in a transparent, indeed legal, way.
Now the outrage is spreading within the Church itself. Earlier this year, the bishop bums created a ton more of it by censuring the dozens of leaders of women’s Catholic orders (representing tens of thousands of nuns) who signed a letter to Congress supporting the health-care bill. And then news broke of a critically ill pregnant mother of four told by her doctors in a Catholic hospital in Phoenix that the only way to save her life was to terminate her 11-week pregnancy. Sister Margaret McBride, the hospital administrator on duty, convened the Ethics Committee and with the patient’s agreement, approved the procedure. By doing so, she ensured that the woman lived, that four children still had a mother, and that her Church dug itself still deeper into an apparently bottomless moral cesspool.
It excommunicated her.
So here are two faces of Catholicism: on the left, the nun who faced what for her was an agonizing choice (reportedly a strong right-to-life advocate, she indeed opted, though not in any way she expected, for life over death):
And on the right, the bishop, Thomas Olmsted, who ordered both Sister McBride and her patient to be excommunicated, and threatened to remove recognition (and thus funding) of the hospital as a Catholic institution.
The excommunication seems to be up in the air since it was publicized, though Sister McBride has been “reassigned” within the hospital. Maybe she’s swabbing floors as punishment. But what’s needed, as Mary Hunt so cogently advocates, is far more than a clean-up of the Church by women, “as though, being women, they will flap their white veils and make all things new.” What’s needed isn’t women as bishops, or even, as Maureen Dowd argued in the New York Times, a woman as Pope. What’s needed is “a new model of church without a pope or anyone else on top… A democratic, participatory, egalitarian church.”
The irony is that that’s exactly how the church began in the first and second centuries, before power, wealth, and hierarchy took over. Before it incorporated. That’s when the Jesus movement was still about liberation and social justice, Mary Magdalene was still the apostle to the apostles, and the least relevant thing about Jesus’ mother was whether she had an intact hymen.
(Postscript: the day after I posted this, Nick Kristof wrote an op-ed in the NYT with a title I wish I’d thought of: “Sister Margaret’s Choice.“)
Let me add a few morsels to the plates of the lions and lambs on either side of this issue.
For the lions, I would add to Lesley’s and Mary Hunt’s killing bites these documented facts: Bishop Olmsted did refuse Communion to a ten year old child because the child was autistic and could not swallow.
Bishop Olmsted did try to shield his diocese from clerical sex-abuse suits by incorporating local parishes individually (thereby significantly reducing the diocese’s assets).
Bishop Olmsted did send no Roman Catholic Clergy to a recent ecumenical gathering in support of meaningful and humane immigration reform… even though half his diocese is Hispanic and presumably many of these Catholics are illegals.
And Bishop Olmsted has neither publicly criticized nor made any public effort to change the behavior of Maricopa Sheriff Arpaio, a blunt and brutal office holder, who is Roman Catholic.
Now for the lambs’ plate, I put these morsels:
The majority of facts about the event in question are deliberately kept private — for the privacy of the patient, whose identity is unknown.
We do know that the mother was eleven weeks pregnant, was diagnosed with acute pulmonary hypertension and was at risk of dying.
We also know that hospital policy, in accordance with Canon Law, forbade abortion — even to save the mother’s life, but did not disallow orthodox treatment of a potentially fatal condition for the mother even if that treatment risked the fetus’s life or well-being.
We know the hospital ethics committee voted to approve the procedure … but we don’t know what the approved procedure was. D&C? Suction? Drugs? Another procedure?
We know also that Sister McBride voted with the committee majority to proceed.
We know that Sister McBride was informed privately, by letter, that she had incurred automatic excommunication for voting as she had, per canon 1398 of the Code of Canon Law. Presumably others involved also received the same letter or a similar letter citing a different canon.
We know if a direct abortion occurred and Sister McBride is implicated as merely an accomplice, for failing to vote against the procedure in the ethics meeting, by canon 1329 she is automatically excommunicated.
However, if she ‘procured a completed abortion,’ she is automatically excommunicated per canon 1398. For further explanation, see Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (BV 62).
Either way, she is automatically excommunicated by canon law.
We know by his appointment, training and administrative experience Bishop Omsted is a canonist … a person who accepts responsibility for upholding canon law.
We know too that Bishop Olmsted’s public statement was prompted by an incendiary newspaper report that ignited the controversy and the Bishop’s public statement did not mention Sister McBride directly — or any person.
We know that at least one knowledgeable commentator has written that the Bishop wanted to deal with the matter privately, with a desire to protect the reputations and privacy of those involved. His public statement was meant only to acknowledge than an abortion contrary to Canon Law had in fact taken place in a Catholic hospital.
(It is not inconceivable that the sent letter(s) were matters of form and could have been allowed to disappear into files if the situation had not been made public and escalated.)
We know too, if we have read Bishop Olmsted’s ‘columns,’ that he deeply agrees with the Church’s position on the essentiality of all human life. In his piece, “Why We Won’t Remain Silent,” he wrote that when it is lawful to destroy human life, “Those who don’t oppose a culture of deaths may find themselves resorting to death as a solution.” As a church leader who believes in The Gospel of Life,’ Olmsted is willing to stand up every time life is threatened. {words from John Paul II’s encyclical are borrowed here)
What about the Bishop as a person? What about his other beliefs? A person interested in this topic might do well to look into the beliefs of the Jesus Caritas Frtaternity of Priests to which he belongs, and to the writings and morality exhibited in the life of the fraternity’s hero and founder, Charles de Foucauld. A Nazi-minded lot this isn’t.
Whose right then? The lambs or the lions at this table?
You mean the bishop’s complaining that they left him no choice? That’s rich. In fact he should be down on his knees in gratitude to McBride. If the hospital had ingored medical advice and let the patient die, they’d be facing a murder charge now.
“Before it incorporated…. when the Jesus movement was still about liberation and social justice, Mary Magdalene was still the apostle to the apostles,” — I love reading your blog!