On Mother's Day, a Look at the Bishops' Attack on American Nuns (and now Girl Scouts!)

Cardinal's Couture

And speaking of mothers, who, like the little girl with the little curl, when they're good, can be very good, but when they're bad, can be horrid:

In a recent posting at his blog site, Richard Rohr speaks truth about the Vatican attack on American nuns, and how it proceeds from one of the "two remaining large systems in the world that are totally patriarchal in their style and in their leadership"--one being the Communist system.  The other being comprised of men who dress like mother in order to assert their absolute power to behave like tyrannical father.

Mothers behaving very, very badly, that is to say, as they attack women who frequently behave like real mothers in holy mother church.  And now, glory be to God, Girl Scouts (!), while Deacon Jim Pauwels, to his eternal shame, swots away manfully at the Commonweal blog site to defend the bad fathers in drag who are now choosing to beat up on an organization for little girls, and seeks to argue that "there's there there" in the ugly behavior of the men in dresses going after the Girl Scouts.  

Because, don't you know, the Girl Scouts are being exposed to views from which they need to be protected.  And the men in dresses demanding absolute paternal rights are self-evidently the ones to do the protecting of the little girls threatened by imaginary bugbears.

God defend us from today's defensores fidei.  A stupider, more callow and maleficent lot of bishops and bishop-apologists I don't imagine the Catholic church has seen in many a moon.  As Nicholas Beaudrot says in a piece at Donkeylicious to which Andrew Sullivan links today, as the men who rule the churches in the U.S. increasingly equate the Christian brand with homophobia and unreflective "pro-life" rhetoric, and as the millennial generation tunes that rhetoric out (with good reason), what's going to be left for the Christian brand in the U.S.?

Beaudrot writes, 

Like Burger King and Axe Body Spray, you may wake up one day and find that the overwhelming majority of the public has simply tuned out everything you have to say. Now, it's always possible that the leaders of the major American churches may want it this way. But for those who don't, the window of opportunity where people might be willing to consider a more relevant form of modern Christianity is closing.

And he's absolutely correct.

P.S. One point I like in Rohr's statement: he acknowledges that religious women have been very capable of engaging in their own matriarchal lording it over lay Catholics.  And that needs to be said.  Though I defend and will stand in solidarity with American religious women as the Vatican and American political right unfairly attack them, I'm not blind to the shortcomings of some religious women about which readers have continued to post good statements here. 

As I've said here in the past, I was in grad school, after all, with many nuns who had cushy jobs at Catholic institutions waiting for them the moment they obtained their theology degrees, whose graduate education was entirely paid for by their communities, and who never displayed the slightest sensitivity to the struggles that many of their lay classmates had to go through in order to obtain a theological education and then to find and keep a job in a Catholic institution after graduation.  

And who have not lifted a finger, even as they have risen to high positions in groups like the Catholic Theological Society of America, ever to assist Steve and me, to help open doors that the fathers in dresses slammed shut for us.  Who claim to deplore what has been done to us but who, in fact, have in several cases blamed us for not being "political" as we played the game as gay men in the Catholic academy.

As if we ourselves put our necks into the guillotine and asked that the blade please be lowered.  As if the problem is not the Catholic system itself, with its guillotine beside the altar. And the men in dresses chopping off heads with the guillotine as they profess to stand uniquely in the place of Christ in the church.

As I've said before, another grad school classmate whom we considered a good friend, who is a nun and who has since attained office in CTSA, began actively to shun us after we stopped playing the Catholic-academy closet game, and informed us that we'd now have to find community with the gays--not in the Catholic church.  (She's not the only one who has done this, however: a lay graduate of our theology school who became president of CTSA, and who was formerly a friend, has treated us as if we are invisible when we've gone to that group's meetings after the closet games stopped.  Homophobia runs deep in Catholic institutional circles, and it's as much of a problem, in many ways, among liberal Catholics with power in the media and academy as among the hierarchy.)

A huge part of the problem in the American Catholic church has been the willing complicity of far too many empty liberals, including many religious women, who know better and have had the power to do better--but who wouldn't do better--in defending and turning a blind eye to the outrageously imperious behavior of the men in dresses ruling the church.

And now their own necks are in the guillotine as a result.  We might have avoided this outcome if we had--all of us, lay and religious, gay and straight--stood together in solidarity a long time ago against the evil claims to absolute power of the men in drag.

Thanks to Jim McCrea for emailing the Richard Rohr blog piece to me and others, and to Contemplative Catholic as well for posting it as his blog site Friday.