Posted on 11/02/2009 6:58:51 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Where is Tom Hanks when you need him? Something sinister is happening in the Catholic Church, at least according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. And the way she writes about it, it reads like the beginning of a treatment for a Dan Brown extravaganza. Her plot, you see, is just that absurd.
Dowd was convinced that Catholic religious sisters were unhappy when she was in the fifth grade, and she remains adamant. She writes: “Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are.”
I can’t speak for “the formidable Sister Hiltruda” Dowd had in grade school, but Dowd needs to meet some of the sisters I’ve been talking to lately, all over the country. Young women are willingly devoting their lives to the Church, with veils and all, in places like Birmingham, Ala., Alma, Mich., Nashville, Tenn., Washington, D.C., and New York City. It’s becoming common that orthodox orders report waiting lists, as they see themselves filled to capacity with young postulants and their overjoyed older sisters.
“In all that we are and all that we do, by living in union with the Lord, striving to manifest His grace, we imperceptibly are changed,” is how a blog post by a sister of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George put it. (Yes, a blog post — there are blogging sisters in 2009. Readers can follow even the lives of cloistered nuns on sites like www.monialesop.org. When Dowd writes that the Vatican is “hoping to herd [sisters] back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence,” it is clear she does not have these cyber sisters bookmarked.)
These young women are only human, so you know they have their struggles with faith and obedience. But there are a lot of happy women behind convent walls. They have answered a Heavenly call. Their submission is not to any man, in Rome or anywhere else, but to the will of the Creator. It’s otherworldly, so it doesn’t fit as well on op-ed pages.
As Dowd complained, the Vatican is currently conducting investigations of women’s religious orders in the United States. Is this, as Dowd accuses, because the men in Rome are upset with “nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays”?
Actually, it’s because, despite a renewal that is going on among women religious in orders that have focused like a laser on what their vocation is all about — a calling in this world that is beyond this world — many orders that once were the backbones of so many schools and other service institutions are literally dying. They are not recruiting, and they’ve long lost their charisms. And, as Ann Carey, author of Sisters in Crisis, has explained: “Many sisters no longer work in apostolates related to the Church and no longer live or pray in community, and sometimes sisters even openly dissent from Church teaching on matters such as women’s ordination, homosexuality, centrality of the Eucharist, and the hierarchical nature of the Church.”
A Dominican sister in Chicago was recently pictured in the Chicago Tribune standing outside an abortion clinic, where she volunteers as an escort for women who enter to obtain abortions. She belongs to a group of sisters who advocate legal abortion. In case you are confused: This is not Catholic.
The Catholic Church hasn’t been isolated from the chaos that the sexual revolution wrought. It warned, but that didn’t keep it immune. Yet now, after decades of spirited dissent and too much shameful sin in the headlines, if you look around, what you’ll see is countercultural faith. There’s a rebirth: A “new evangelization” is what they’re calling it in Rome.
“Religious community is the visible manifestation of the communion which is the foundation of the Church,” the once Cardinal Ratzinger has written. When some of those communities are so blatantly representing values inimical to the Church, intervention is called for.
The Vatican has taken action because there are ships off course. And the waters are rough; our culture can’t afford to have so many lost at sea. The fog has come because of surrender to the cultural chaos. Maureen Dowd’s answers involve more of the same — confusing faith with politically correct fluff. The answer is in what John Paul II biographer George Weigel recommended in the wake of the Nineties scandals: Have the courage to be Catholic. Know what that means. Go back to basics. Teach, and live what you teach. Maureen Dowd would have the Church remake itself in the image of the conventional — exactly what some dying religious orders have tried to do, and that has been the cause of their collapse. The Benedict whom Maureen Dowd scorns speaks a different language than the New York Times typically does. But it’s a liberating one — much more liberating than the tired and angry gender politics that offers little hope to the anxious men and women of our time.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.
Dowd must be a HUGE Palin fan...a woman who has beaten the men in her own party, entirely on her own...
I think her feet make the rest of her look small.
Ms. Dowd is consistent. She never really does her homework as a so called journalist and this is probably the real reason why she was in so much trouble with the Nuns 60 years ago.
Didn’t notice her feet but she must weigh all of 100#. And no she wasn’t attractive, just tiny.
Rules.
Mo should take the veil.
I don’t think she’s handling celibacy well!
Mo is the only second class citizen roun heah ;-)
I’m just here for the CZJ pics. Rules is rules!
Ooooh. Now *that* is bad. Almost made me feel sorry for MoDo if she reads this thread.
Short version: MoDo and Michael Douglas were an item for a while. Douglas dumped her for CZJ , whom he later married.
"Because I'm an unlovable bitter old man-hating shrew" pales in comparison to taking vows.
"I have heard of your writings, too. God has given you one face and you make yourself another, You jig, you amble, you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Get thee to a nunnery, go, and quickly, too! Farewell!"
Leni
We know where sinister things are slithring around maureen Shroud...And it’s right where *you* are, at the Red Rag Hag! (formerly known as the Old Grey Lady...till all the perverted freak traitorss like you infested it.)
Outstanding quote. Correct and spot on!
Michael Douglas briefly dated Mo Dowd, but then dumped her (probably as soon as he sobered up) for CZ Jones. He then married CZJ, leaving MoDo the embittered spinster shrew that she probably already was.
Like the Bishop or priest from the Hunchback of Notre Dam!
Not to a hag with a body like hers! She has that Hilary type physique especially where she sits. Michael Douglas, even as big a wastrel drunk as he ever was was still sober enough to know better.
(After a few drinks...) “How much and are you clean!”
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