Sister Joan Chittister: News Flash to Catholic Leaders--How about Trying Gospel Instead of Law for a Change?

With her usual stellar commentary, Sister Joan Chittister looks at Catholic officials' current attack on the Girl Scouts (!) in her latest NCR piece, and finds the reliance of said church officials on the law to be self-defeating.  She suggests that they try gospel, instead, for a change.

Her conclusion: 

The pope wants a smaller, purer church, we're told. Apparently that's what they wanted after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, as well. And they got it. They lost half of Europe. They are now losing large segments of South America. The Irish Church is listing. Only 5 percent of infants born in Europe are now baptized. And the United States, once the largest church-going country in the world, in the light of the sex abuse scandal, is teetering, as well. 

From where I stand, it seems that law isn't working. 

Maybe the Vatican needs to go back to the approach of the loving John XXIII or the patient Paul VI. 

Maybe we ought to try the Gospel again, the one that understands people who lift their work animals out of a ditch on the sabbath, or get caught in adultery, or are shunned because of their leprosy, or decide that circumcision is only one culture's sign of commitment, not theirs, or are the wrong sex, as was the Woman at the Well, to preach the Word of God. Let's try again the one that doesn't use investigations or intimidation or silencing or excommunications for the sake of control rather than make compassion the mark of the church. As they have, for instance, with bishops caught between two different sets of law -- civil law and canon law -- in the sex abuse scandal. 

The results cannot possibly be worse than the ones we're getting. But one thing's clear. I know my own problem now: I was a Girl Scout.

And this is why Joan Chittister has long been and remains a lightning rod for the Catholic right: she preaches the gospel.  When religious women proclaim the gospel better and more effectively than do the men who claim to stand uniquely in the place of Christ in church and world, then said men are in serious trouble.

If they expect anyone to believe their claims about whom and what they represent.  And about how only a human being equipped with a penis is uniquely endowed with what it takes to stand in front of the Catholic community and proclaim the gospel to the community as a priest symbolizing Christ to the community.