For decades American nuns were often the unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, plaanting schools and hospitals and keeping the parishes humming. Without the sisters the American Catholic Church would be at death’s door,
You would think Rome would celebrate the celebrate their contribution. Instead the Vatican has decided to investigate them. A coterie of male septuagarian prelates in the Curia have launched a full-scale inquiry into the life style of American nuns.
What seems to have upset the Vatican is the nuns’ failure to promote three teachings: that all priests must be male; that gay people are intrinsically disordered; and that the Roman Church has the best way of getting to heaven.
A nun frm Rome and a priest from the Curia are now running around to convents in the United States trying to discover how nuns are shaping up on these three points. One nun, a theology professor at Berkley, urged her fellow-nuns not to cooperate with the investigators, saying they should be treated as “uninvited guests who shouldbe received in the parlour, not given the run of the house.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if America’s nuns quietly rejected all three propositions: an all male priesthood, the depravity of gay people, and salvation is best achieved in the Roman Church?
Wouldn”t that make for a more inclusive and healthier church?
What do you think?
Gay people are not intrinsically disordered. Homosexual *acts* are intrinsically disordered. Please get that straight!
If they reject Catholic teaching, then they shouldn’t be Catholic nuns. Pretty simple. The Catholic Church is under no obligation to accommodate them.
Inclusivity should not come at the expense of Truth. Truth is the most important thing. You cannot love, you cannot do good without Truth.
Neil: “You would think Rome would celebrate the celebrate their contribution.”
That would go directly against one of the main points of catholicism – namely misogyny.
“Instead the Vatican has decided to investigate them.”
That sounds about right… The RCC is such a vile institution – they might as well keep at it as they don’t seem to want to change.
SUZANNE: “Inclusivity should not come at the expense of Truth. Truth is the most important thing. You cannot love, you cannot do good without Truth.”
The RCC wouldn’t know “truth” if it came out and bit benny on the ass!
Suzanne,
The Absolute Truth that you espouse has no currency in the 21st century. The Catholic Church has partial truth as do mnay other religious institutions. The old shibboleth that there is no salvation outside the Roman Church has been justly condemned and discarded.
Neil
The Catholic Church never claimed to know ALL the Truth. But she is the appointed guardian of the Truth, and those Truths that she does know and preach, she cannot reject.
The Catholic Church has not discarded the notion that there is no salvation outside the Church. Please read the Catechism.
What she does teach is that while there are people who may not formally be members, they can attain salvation mysteriously…but that salvation always passes through the Church.
The Truth always has currency. You can’t argue with reality.
You may not LIKE what the Catholic Church says, but the Church has every right to preach it and to discipline those members who go astray.
And those who don’t like it can lump it.
SUZANNE: “You can’t argue with reality.”
And YOU can’t recognize it!
****
Thank you thank you… I’ll be here all week…
I apologise for being off-topic, but for those interested in reading my new book Why Canada must end I have put the entire book online at the website (click on my name above).
“…[the church] is the appointed guardian of the Truth…”
SELF-appointed. Get that straight! And as such, has absolutely no credibility in the real world.
Joe: *applause*
What I think might happen — and I’ll be happy to back them up on it — is that maybe American nuns will bitch slap the “investigators” back into the Inquisition where they belong, and leave in droves to start their own church — one with more relevance to today’s Catholics. My entire family will follow them!
Suzanne,
You seem to think my eternal salvation means that I must subscribe totally to the cogitations of a coterie of male celibate septuagarians holed up in Rome. It doesn’t.
Of course I give due consideration to I am sure you are aware the Church itself teaches that a Christian;s ultimate guide is an informed conscience. I have informed myself that the current teaching on male celibacy is merely technical, that the arguments against femal ordination are not persuasive and the teaching on the Church being the only means of salvation is not even taught any more.
You can wave around a TRUTH banner and tell people who don’t measure up that they are now outside the fold. Wave on. No one, and certainly not me, is paying the least attention.
Jesus said I am the Way, THE TRUTH, and the Life. The way Jesus has about Him is a compassionate way for everyone. Which alone leads to ultimate truth. “Be Compassionate as my Father is Compassionate”. Which leads to the fullness of life. The question the Nun’s need to place before the Church’s truth, is simply “Is it Compassionate”.
Suzanne:
I can not agree with you. Even the Catholic Church must grow and evolve. That does not mean it goes against truth. If you read Corinthians 1 13 it speaks there about love which includes and does not exclude. I see religion as a place where faith reigns and no one is above the other.
Each of us has a place in creation and that makes a whole. God wants your talents and creativity and uses it to fulfill his plan.
I do not feel qualified to judge because I realise if I judge I will be judged.
Women have important things to say and so do men.I am very wary of old men in dresses telling us they are the only ones knowing the whole truth
For the rest, I agree with most things that have been said..
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if America’s nuns quietly rejected all three propositions: an all male priesthood, the depravity of gay people, and salvation is best achieved in the Roman Church?”
Many of them have sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly rejected all three propositions for years. The only thing this witch hunt will produce is even more of a movement toward non-canonical communities than we have already. The problem is not the nuns, but canon law which has subjugated the nuns for so long.