More News: Pope Francis and the Nuns, Clericalism and Abuse Crisis, Right-Wing Policies and Women's Health, Unbearable Whiteness of Liberal Media

More news: 

Questions from a Ewe has a lot of good questions to ask Pope Francis:

Dear Pope Francis, I’m really confused.

Because I read the very same day in the news 

That pedophile priests are beyond Vatican controls

While the Curia again raked American nuns over the coals. 

With abusive priests they claim their arms only reach the Vatican wall

But with the American nuns, suddenly across the ocean, those same arms can sprawl?

And then she offers the Holy Father some advice:

If you can’t control the priests then you don’t control nuns.  

If you want to control your daughters, please, first control your felonious, abusive sons.

For National Catholic Reporter, Jamie Manson calls on Catholics to face the facts: Pope Francis stands behind the ongoing hierarchical vendetta against American nuns. She concludes,

Like most popes before him, Francis sees the church as a prophetic voice to the outside world but is far less enthusiastic about the prophetic voices that cry out for justice inside the church. As he told the International Union of Superiors General last May, women religious should put themselves "in an attitude of adoration and service" and find their "filial expression in fidelity to the magisterium." It is an "absurd dichotomy," he said, to think "of following Jesus outside of the church, of loving Jesus without loving the church." 

Pope Francis believes women religious should continue to do the work of the church while remaining obedient to the voice of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Women religious, on the other hand, believe their work and their faith demand that they remain radically obedient first and foremost to the voice of God. 

What may appear to be a conflict over feminism, culture wars and conscious evolution is, ultimately, a cosmic struggle over whose voice the sisters choose to follow.

At Enlightened Catholicism, Colleen Baker takes a close look at the warped ecclesiology that underlies the abuse crisis in the Catholic church:

Clerical abuse is part of the clerical tradition because, and here comes the accountability issue, the clerical caste is way way more important to the Institutional Roman Catholic Church than its laity.  This is why the laity and our children always come last when it comes to accountability.  We don't count in the sacramental scheme in which Grace, the fuel to propel us to heaven, is a virtual monopoly of the priesthood. It is on this system that the Church is now founded.  Priests count. Laity pay. 

Robert Reich writes at Salon that right-wing policies are quite literally killing women:

The data tell the story: A study by the Roosevelt Institute shows that U.S. states with high poverty rates have maternal death rates 77 percent higher than states with lower levels of poverty. Women with no health insurance are four times more likely to die during pregnancy or in childbirth than women who are insured.

For The American Prospect, Gabriel Arana asks why the liberal media are so unbearably white:

Nearly 40 percent of the country is non-white and/or Hispanic, but the number of minorities at the outlets included in this article's tally—most of them self-identified as liberal or progressive—hovers around 10 percent. The Washington Monthly can boast 20 percent, but that's because it only has nine staffers in total, two of whom belong to minority groups. Dissent, like the Prospect, has one. Given the broad commitment to diversity in our corner of the publishing world, why is the track record so poor?