Catholic Bishop Responds to The Nuns’ Story « The Confluence
The Pope has said that he would be satisfied with a smaller but more “pure” church. He would be more than happy to see the nuns leave because they’ve been challenging him and his predecessor or decades.
I would probably leave but I would like to see the nuns stay and fight the good fight. If the Pope ex-communicates them, I think that even more American Catholics will go with them. The Roman Catholic Church is way too powerful in American politics and that needs to change. That’s more likely if the church is in the news every day because they’ve thrown out yet another nun who followed her conscience.
An archbishop in Arizona ex-communicated a nun who is a hospital administrator in that state. She was kicked out in 2009 for approving a life-saving therapeutic abortion for an eleven-year-old girl. Her ex-communication resulted in a lot of bad publicity and, I’m sure, a lot of reflection on what it means to blindly follow RC teachings. She has been welcomed back to the church because of, I think, public pressure. Not a single pedophile priest has been ex-communicated. That outrageous difference in how women and men are treated in the RC Church needs to be on the front page of every newspaper and blog in the country. My hope is that the RC hierarchy will be too busy dealing with the fallout to insert themselves into public health policy.
The LCWR is meeting in August. My guess is that they will not leave the church but will remove themselves from the authority of the Vatican. I’m not sure how that works but, apparently, it’s been done by dissident groups before.
