Pat Cuneo: So Who's Really Betraying Catholic Church?

By Pat Cuneo
Erie Times-News
April 24, 2012

http://www.goerie.com/article/20120424/OPINION09/304249995/Pat-Cuneo%3A-So-who%27s-really-betraying-Catholic-Church%3F

'Vatican orders crackdown on American nuns," the headline blared in last Wednesday's Washington Post. The group representing most of America's 55,000 Catholic nuns was "not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women's ordination," the story read.

So, Rome named conservative Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain to overhaul the governance and plans of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and its relationship with "certain groups the Vatican finds suspect."

The LCWR does not directly represent the sisters in the Erie region, incidentally.

It's an inside fight, right? It's just a squabble about the uppity nuns' obsession with a "prevalence of certain radical feminist themes (that are) incompatible with the Catholic faith," as Rome pointed out. Religious groups can do whatever they want, right? Absolutely. Yet just how far will this kind of crackdown go before a good chunk of American Catholics, especially American Catholic women, tell Rome to go take a hike. I sense the last straw will be a lot sooner than I ever thought possible.

It turns out that the nuns' advocacy for fairness on issues large and small is the true target. So is their audacity of having an opinion where it isn't welcome. And so it is that Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine scholar, writer, lecturer and recognized as one of the world's most respected moralists, was left "deeply distraught" by the news.

"When you set out to reform a people, a group, who have done nothing wrong, you have to have an intention, a motivation that is not only not morally based, but actually immoral," Chittister said Friday. "If we stop thinking, if we stop demanding the divine right to think, and to see that as a Catholic gift, then we are betraying the church no matter what the powers of the church see as an inconvenient truth in their own times."

The church's effort to further silence discussion, despite its pitiful record of morality toward children and women, may be its right. But it also has a lot to do with why American Catholics are increasingly unwilling to pay attention to their leaders, even when it makes their hearts bleed.

- The blatant efforts by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to politicize the Secret Service scandal as President Obama's fault because it happened under his watch is pathetic. It's funny, too, that many leading Republicans have rushed to the defense of Director Mark Sullivan, who broke into the service under Ronald Reagan and was appointed director by George W. Bush in 2006. The truth is these kinds of issues should never be politicized. The scandal speaks to arrogance, entitlement and incompetence.

- That Mitt Romney has virtually tied Obama in polls already shows how effective the GOP's obstruction tactics in Congress have worked, at least so far. After denying Obama the ability to put many of his policies in place, Obama's foes now chide him for not getting more done. That's after dumping on him one of the worst economies in American history when he took office. The ploy is almost comical in its Snidely Whiplash-like cunning. Still, if Obama's people can't expose this cynical charade, they could be out of a job.

Way back when: One of the most noted local events of the late 19th century was the trip through Erie County of the Liberty Bell in 1893, according to Nelson's "History of Erie County" (1896). It reached Erie at 8 a.m. on April 26, on its way from Philadelphia to the World's Fair in Chicago. "An immense concourse gathered at the (train) depot to greet the relic, including thousands of school children." It left Erie at noon.

Contact: pat.cuneo@timesnews.com