UNITED STATES
Channel 3000
By Bill Wineke
Special to Channel 3000
Something very strange is going on within the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
Each week brings revelations seemingly more bizarre than those of even the week before.
Last week, the Vatican took over the leadership of American nuns and appointed an archbishop to act, in effect, as a receiver for the group. Archbishop Peter Sartain, of Seattle, now has power to remove the elected leaders of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, approve speakers at the group’s conferences, set policy for the group and tell the nuns with whom they might affiliate.
The Vatican announced all this in a press release. That’s how the nuns learned about it. The contempt shown the nuns couldn’t have been more pronounced if the pope had mooned them in public. …
The document doesn’t say the nuns have actually done something immoral. It’s not as if, say, they had numerous members of their orders who sexually abused children, or had mother superiors who covered those crimes up.
Not to be too subtle about this: The Vatican did not put the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops into receivership.
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