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The Church Goes to Battle — Against Nuns

Posted May 26th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

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.“)

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File under: Christianity, feminism | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Apostolic Visitation, Bishop Thomas Olmsted, child abuse, excommunication, Mary Hunt, nuns, Pope, rape, Roman Catholic Church, Sister Margaret McBride | 3 Comments
  1. Bruce Saunders says:
    May 26, 2010 at 4:36 pm

    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?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 26, 2010 at 7:01 pm

      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.

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    May 27, 2010 at 7:42 pm

    “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!

Impressive: Sinead O’Connor Takes on the Pope

Posted April 24th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Now here’s a call for Pope Benedict to resign that I can believe in, unlike that by Christopher Hitchens (see my earlier post, 4/18).

Singer Sinead O’Connor can hardly be accused of jumping on the bandwagon.  She was herself incarcerated in one of the Irish church’s infamous Magdalene asylums — forced-labor homes for “fallen” teenage girls.  And she was way ahead of the suddenly current pedophilia scandal when she protested Church silence on child abuse by tearing up a photo of the then-pope, John Paul II, on Saturday Night Live back in 1992 .  Yes, nearly twenty years ago.

The Sinead O’Connor who appeared last night on the Rachel Maddow show seemed like another woman that that gorgeous, sleek, pop icon.  “Dowdy” some reports said, disapprovingly — I mean, how can you possibly pay attention to a woman who doesn’t even bother to tart herself up for the camera?   In fact O’Connor was not dowdy;  she was real.  And what she said was far more forceful because of that reality.

She went further than she did in her Op-Ed for the Washington Post three weeks ago, written after Benedict’s pastoral letter of apology for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests in Ireland.  “To many people in my homeland,” she wrote in the WaPo, “the pope’s letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country.”

“The only thing that I think would make anyone happy,” she told Maddow, “which would honor not only the victims but the Holy Spirit who these people claim to be representing, would be for him to actually admit that there was an orchestrated cover-up and get out of office, and let us have a church which is run by people who actually believe in God.”

Then she called for the pope and the whole hierarchy not just to resign, but to be tried in open court on criminal charges of child abuse and conspiracy to conceal child abuse.   And she did it in the name of the Holy Ghost, with the ghosts of all those abused children forced into silence behind her.

Impressive.  And far more effective than all the Hitchens rantings in the world.   Her clear, calm passion and determination would have me, if I were Ratzinger/Benedict, shaking in my little red booties.

See the whole interview here.

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File under: Christianity | Tagged: Tags: Catholic Church, child abuse, Christpher Hitchens, Ireland, Magdalene asylums, pedophilia, Pope, Rachel Maddow, Sinead O'Connor | 1 Comment
  1. Jennifer Reed says:
    May 10, 2010 at 3:00 pm

    I met Fatima’s son Hamid at Harborview early April. Went to the library today and will devour ‘After the Prophet.’ Although I devoured Hamid already, in a hospital. When will women ever learn?

    Oh, I took meeting minutes for occupational therapay from MSNBC. That was when Sinead appeared on Rachel’s show. Typed them up to see if I could still type and take dictation. Sinead said she is indeed a person of faith and she loves the holy spirit, which is sometimes being held hostage by the clergymen.

    I got used to Rachel and have some of her podcasts since she was on Air America radio years and years ago. Rachel is stellar all around. I liked the look of Sinead as well. Eyeliner?

    Sometimes you don’t need to leave a light on (from the song Troy). But it doesn’t hurt with the lights out.

Is Christopher Hitchens Running for Pope?

Posted April 18th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

“New atheists” Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are having a ball with the pedophile priest scandal — it seems to prove everything they’ve ever said about the evils of religion.

It’s disturbing enough that anyone at all is having a ball with this ghastly issue, though maybe that’s inevitable when the Hitchens-Dawkins style of atheism has all the hallmarks of being a religion of its own.  But worse is that their call for the Pope to resign smacks more than a little of… well, to be kind, disingenuousness.  To be less kind, hypocrisy.

If you don’t believe in medicine, you’re hardly going to call for a better doctor.  If H and D really believe all they say about the evils of religion, then there’s no way they could imagine that a change of Pope could make any difference, especially when nobody in the upper reaches of Churchly hierarchy seems capable of plain human feeling — capable, that is, of expressing pure unadulterated outrage that such things have been done under the guise (literally) of priestly robes.

I don’t question H and D’s outrage,  but while most of us are watching this unfold with horror, they can barely contain their glee.

I wish I could feel that glee, but I’m with Nick Kristof on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times, talking about “the other Catholic church.”  This is the “grass-roots church” of nuns and priests working with the poor, the sick, and the needy both in the States and worldwide.  “Their magnificence,” writes Kristof, “lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness.”

Maybe H and D could learn just a bit from that selflessness.   They’ve leapt on the bandwagon of scandal with no apparent purpose other than self-promotion.

Or maybe Hitchens is running for Pope?

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File under: agnosticism, atheism, Christianity | Tagged: Tags: atheism, Catholic Church, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Kristof, pedophilia, Pope, Richard Dawkins | 1 Comment
  1. lavrans says:
    April 27, 2010 at 10:19 pm

    Makes me think about the Catholic priests who used to come in and help us at Chicken Soup Brigade. CSB, as an AIDS charity, was filled with a lot of the alternative community. Yet Catholic Community Services used the same space for their meals on wheels, and there was a lot of crossover of help. We would regularly get Catholic groups- from adults to teenagers to nuns-in-training.

    One of my most amusing memories was Valentines day, when someone hired “Leather Santa” to come and people got their pictures taken sitting on his lap. Leather Santa was a very fit young man in leather boots, leather G-string with a whip and a Santa cap. Meanwhile a group of travelling nuns show up to help in the warehouse just as one of the priests was getting his picture taken. There was a certain amount of blushing, but also a lot of laughing.

    I can sympathize with the skepticism of religion, but not the heart of it. It’s too easy to mistake the bureaucracy of religion as its foundation.

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