Thursday, May 15, 2014

Eugene Kennedy on What Gets the Men Running the Catholic Church Really Het Up: Hint — Not War, Poverty, and Plagues, but Uppity N-U-N-S




A quote for the day from Eugene Cullen Kennedy writing in the National Catholic Reporter:


You might think that a world bearing the stigmata of war, poverty, plagues, and immeasurable, uncomforted suffering might trouble a high religious leader, but what upsets Cardinal Müller? Why, the speakers these women religious invite to their annual assemblies; the failure to have counterpoint views when the women are, as he intimates, preaching heresy; and, specifically, their bestowing their 2014 Outstanding Leadership Award to a Fordham theologian, Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, who (and you can't make this up) was "criticized by the Bishops of the United States because of the gravity of the doctrinal errors in that theologian's writings." Müller seems unaware of how fully and professionally Johnson defended her work while some of the bishops most critical of her got indigestion from trying to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As he concludes,

It is time for Francis to give up the random phone calls and the many other things that have endeared him to us. The LCWR matter is a severe test of whether his ideal of a church that is a servant can really prevail over those whose ideal is to rule by domination, to control by humiliation and, as they continue to lord it over people, to implement the techniques and drives that lie beneath the still-unresolved sex abuse scandal.

I think he's exactly right about this. 

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