They probably feel they have too many nuns, and are looking for any excuse to ease the the pressure caused by so many women thronging to become novices.  That must be it.

When you say “renegade nuns” I had a sudden picture of nuns on motorcycles, riding in packs and wielding steel rulers like knights on horseback.  Fighting crime.

The coffee has not quite penetrated my brain yet.

When you can’t recruit enough religious people of either gender is it really a good time to start picking on the women you do have? 

One can only hope this opens up a few more eyes to how reactionary the Catholic Church has become under Pope Palpatine.  (Not that they were particularly modern before; bad then worse now.)

Those uppity women thinking they’re people.

There they are, out in the community, serving people.  Why aren’t they all garbed up and abusing children, like the priests?  They’re making the men look bad

Seriously, this pisses me off.  I still know and love many nuns.  They are awesome, if elderly, people.  They have doctorates.  They do good works.  They serve the poor, the sick, the mentally and physically handicapped, and they fight politics in Illinois to do it.

They also irritate the correctors like Cardinal George, who doesn’t know how to tell if a woman is a nun, especially if she’s wearing pants.

You ASK, you dumbshit.

This type of investigation isn’t done just for information This is an inquistion—it’s the type of investigation they were forced to perform when the priest sex scandal exploded.  should have seen this coming when the Pope un-excommuniccated Richard Williamson et al.  Those whackadoodles don’t think women should wear pants, much less go to university, since their brains aren’t really accomodated to that.

And women instructing men?  Well that’s just bad.

It’s almost fun to watch—this GOPing of the RCC.  They want to make themselves more and more “pure” and purity to them is simply kowtowing to the hierarchy.  But it makes me sad b/c I know too many people who are involved.  These women deserve RESPECT, not an inquisition.

Vatican II happened the year I was born.  This is the ‘losing’ side finally getting power and trying to undo all the reforms.  But those reforms happened for a reason—the Church had changed (that’s the people) and the clergy and hierarchy are called to serve the Church.  The reforms were to make the Church relevent to people’s lives.

This shit?  Utter nonsense.  I’m 42, and I never knew a pre-Vatican II Church.  The people who did are retirement age and older.  Forcing nuns into wearing habits?  yeah, that’ll shut them up and make them more “respectful”.

Have any of these men actually MET a nun?

I look forward to a day when priests are saying mass to empty buildings.

I tend to agree with Caren-Sun-blocking Creator of Animorphic Pancakes. It is difficult to see what this will accomplish, beyond alienating a bunch of American Catholic nuns.

Well, you must admit that the Vatican investigating nuns is an improvement over the way the Vatican used to investigate alter boys.

“Pope Palpatine.”

Tho Catholic myself, I have to admit that was pretty good.

But seriously, Benedict is sort of a caretaker Pope. He’s old, so he won’t be around much longer. I suspect they needed someone who wouldn’t “Rock the boat”, who would carry on JP II’s more conservative policies, and basically not stir things up. Like I said, he’s old, so it’s not like he’ll leave a long lasting legacy. In a few years, they’ll have to pick a new one, and I’d not be surprised to see them make a radical gesture of picking someone from outside Europe, which would truly be revolutionary. Most likely, it could be someone from Latin America, but possibly Africa or even the USA. I, for one, would LOVE to see an American Pope, and wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen sometime in this century.

When you say “renegade nuns” I had a sudden picture of nuns on motorcycles, riding in packs and wielding steel rulers like knights on horseback.  Fighting crime.

*want*

Rebecca, if you’re an RPG gamer, find yourself a copy of “Renegade Nuns on Wheels”, the roleplaying game where you create combat nuns and seek adventure in a post-apocalyptic America.

Really. It’s an expansion set for “Macho Women With Guns”. Again, really.

EricJG, if they picked an American Pope, it would be someone like Francis Cardinal George, who is a complete waste of carbon—I’ve gone into details before, I can again if Catholic apologistas show up.  Or maybe even Richard Williamson, the newly recommunicated misogynist Holocaust-denier.

After stewing a bit being pissed off for the good clergy I know, I had to start laughing.  The Vatican wants women in habits, bowing and scraping.  They are going to LOSE the strength they have.  Nuns haven’t been abusing children—they report it (of course, simply being women, Francis George feels free to ignore them and oops!  little boys are abused, but how could he KNOW?  She wasn’t wearing a habit).

It’s a fantasy.  They have a fantasy of habited women being servile.  Real nuns are strong women who actually do the work of caring for the community and running the parish.

Go ahead.  Kick the women out.  There’s not one parish that could function without women running it.

The monasteries (nuns don’t call them convents anymore) aren’t emptying out b/c the uppity women are scaring them away!

EricG; Reminder - that’s what they said about John XXIII.

Caren: as you’re in the Chicago area, know that there is a larger plan here, I suspect.  In case you haven’t noticed it, they’re importing nuns - of the penguin variety.  My guess is that once they get here, these imported throwbacks are exposed to “modern” nuns and also want to quickly throw off the veil, especially on a 100 degree heat index Chicago summer day.  SO they need to purge the more “radical” elements and then re-institute the veil on the rest and import nuns from France (the Chicago recent import) and elsewhere.

“EricJG, if they picked an American Pope, it would be someone like Francis Cardinal George, who is a complete waste of carbon—I’ve gone into details before, I can again if Catholic apologistas show up.  “

Actually, we don’t know who they’d pick. Figure Benedict lasts another 5 - 10 years, tops, then they want to go with a much younger, more vigorous guy. I still say there’s a good chance they’ll go with someone from outside Europe. Picking JP II was a major change, the first non-Italian Pope in centuries.

Besides, the Church is near dead in Europe, along with most of the other Christian denominations, whereas most of the growth and vitality are in places like Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia like the Philippines. I think the Vatican chose Benedict because he was “safe”, and because, being in his late 70’s, he won’t be around very long, giving them a few years to pick someone new and fresh probably in the next decade.

This is not at all surprising to anyone who has any knowledge of the Catholic Church. Nuns always have been second-class citizens in the ecclesiastical world. At the parish where I attended Catholic school 35-40 years ago, the two priests lived in a brand-new 4,500 square foot rectory whose furnishings rivaled those of the wealthiest parishoners and were served by two maids, two cooks, and a gardening staff. The 20 or so nuns, by contrast, lived in a spare brick convent that was about 2/3 the size of the rectory, and whose entire ground floor was almost entirely taken up by the school’s music room. While the priests lived like kings, the nuns had to purchase and prepare their own meals and the parish frequently resorted to various “drives” to supply the nuns with food, clothing, and other necessities they simply couldn’t afford on the meager stipend they received. I lost track of parish dealings when I left the area, but I recently learned that the convent closed several years ago because the old nuns were dying off or leaving in droves and no new blood was coming in to replace them. Quelle surprise!

They probably feel they have too many nuns

That’s not necessarily incorrect with respect to what they’re thinking. Nuns and monks are generally an interest group within the church that don’t have any family or church responsibilities binding them, so they’re at liberty to act as an independent interest group which can confront the church hierarchy without the fear of personal consequence to their wealth or their families (since they don’t have any) or their jobs (since they’re not necessarily tied directly to the catholic church, if they have one at all). Priests and laymen have concerns of family, career, and a future in the church that depends directly on whether they’re in the good graces of the church hierarchy. Monks and nuns don’t, and that’s what makes them threatening.

This is part of the effort to essentially roll back Vatican II. It’s like American far-right conservatives and the New Deal.

Rebecca, if you’re an RPG gamer, find yourself a copy of “Renegade Nuns on Wheels”, the roleplaying game where you create combat nuns and seek adventure in a post-apocalyptic America.

Really. It’s an expansion set for “Macho Women With Guns”. Again, really.

I’m not certain whether to be proud of or embarrassed by the fact that I know exactly what you’re talking about, Alkaloid.

I agree with Liz212.  Ever since Vatican II there’s been a consistent effort to “put women in their place,” starting with the “pro-life” movement and slowly snowballing ever since as supporters rise in the Catholic hierarchy.  No doubt they’d love to rein in the laity in general, what with us giving airs like God likes us or something, but I imagine that women getting their due rights must give the Boys In Charge special pains.

I generalize, but what the heck: Nuns in Europe and the US are surprisingly cool, and practically the only sign of spiritual life in the Church of Rome that isn’t hopelessly corrupt. (Even many who live a conservative/traditional religious life—habits, prayer, cloistering—want and expect some day to be priests, and demand that the Church move in the direction of toleration and humanity, you know, the sort of the things the Jesus of the gospels actually pushed for.)

Priests tend to be dicks in my limited experience. Younger ones are actually worse than the old rigid bastards and closet cases.

It is difficult to see what this will accomplish, beyond alienating a bunch of American Catholic nuns.

I think Tyro has the reasons down regarding what this will accomplish: it’s a way of getting rid of an internal dissident group that still commands respect from the laity. It would look bad just to close these American orders down, so instead they’ve decided to harass them, perhaps with a view toward importing more traditional nuns from abroad (per phylosypher).

I’m not sure why they go to such extremes, though. Filling the collection plates aside, hasn’t the shift in general been away from addressing the American market? Despite flailing efforts like this, I think the current Church hierarchy has come to terms with the fact that most of the American laity aren’t on board with rolling back Vatican II—if anything, most seem to feel that even more liberalising reforms are needed.

No, Ratzi’s RC Church will go where all dogmatic and conservative patriarchal religions go: to places rife with low literacy rates, crushing poverty, and clan headmen—the developing world. If only Bill Donohue would go there with it (but alas, there aren’t enough television cameras per capita in those places to satisfy that media whore).

But seriously, Benedict is sort of a caretaker Pope. He’s old, so he won’t be around much longer.

As phylosopher pointed out, that’s what they thought about John XXIII, too.  It would be ironic if one “placeholder Pope” completely undid the reforms that another “placeholder Pope” had put in place.

Frankly, at this point I’m fully expecting Pope Benedict to put our an encyclical declaring that it really was the Jews who killed Jesus, so good Catholics have to go back to hating them.  That’s pretty much the only bit of Vatican II he hasn’t undermined at this point (and even that’s debatable considering that he’s re-communicating Holocaust deniers).

My aunt is a nun and is, now that I’m all anti-clerical and shit, probably the only person I know in the entire Catholic hierarchy that I can still stand (hell, admire). She did work helping the poor in the slums of Haiti during the Duvallier years.

Frankly, at this point I’m fully expecting Pope Benedict to put our an encyclical declaring that it really was the Jews who killed Jesus, so good Catholics have to go back to hating them.

I’m sure the only reason Pope Hitler Youth hasn’t done it yet is that they make useful cannon fodder in the fight against the *real* enemy of the Church, which is the Muslim horde.

You think he’s just nostalgic for pre-Vatican II? He’s from the Inquisition. He’s probably nostalgic for the Crusades and medieval times, truth be told.

“Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.” - Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

EricJG:  You do realize that if they appoint a priest from Latin America or Africa, he will make John Paul II look like Ralph Nader, right?

And that’s the opposite of appointing an American pope, right?

Oh, never mind.

I feel ambivalent towards these nuns. I admire their work and their drive to make the RCC realize it’s 2009. At the same time, they seem quite naive about the nature of the organization itself. Past attempts at “changing the church from within” have been partial at best and counterproductive at worst. Even if it’s not their intention, these nuns prolong the life of the organization described by damnedyankee at 12:03 PM. I want the RCC gone, vanished, disappeared for good (or at least small and poor enough so as to be completely irrelevant). That will bring pain to these nuns and the people they help, but that’s a small price to pay for the huge relief derived from getting rid of such a backwards, odious, obscurantist organization.

Eh- the more of them that walk, the better for the world at large. 

  The Catholic Church is fukt, and it prefers to get worse, rather than better.

  They need all the women and a good half the men to walk.  Not that that will fix the church, but it will give those people a chance of controlling their own lives instead of being owned by a pathological liar who claims to be talking for god.

I’m not sure how an African pope would be an improvement.  Most Africans are extremely socially conservative.  An African pope’s stance on women and gays would make your eyes bleed.

Doesn’t Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith = the Inquisition?

And isn’t that the outfit Pope Razti ran before his promotion?

Just sayin’.

Nuns in Europe and the US are surprisingly cool

Sounds like monks and priests = Boy Scouts; nuns = Girl Scouts.

When you say “renegade nuns” I had a sudden picture of nuns on motorcycles, riding in packs and wielding steel rulers like knights on horseback.  Fighting crime.

To use a bit of 4chan parlance… FUND IT!

it’s a way of getting rid of an internal dissident group that still commands respect from the laity.

My favorite halloween costume is a nun’s habit. Not a ‘naughty nun’, just a reg’lar habit. It’s a great costume for several reasons: 1) shapeless and comfy; 2) should be worn with comfortable shoes; 3) inspires other drivers to yield to me in ways that are inconceivable when I’m in other dress. People really do think they’ll get extra points to get into heaven by letting a Ford-driving nun merge onto the bridge in front of them.

This story reminds me of that old joke: What’s black and white and black and white and black and white? A nun falling down stairs.

Only now, she’s being kicked down them stairs.

The Church’s first motto on an investigation is the same as the IRS’s “Grab the books.”  Do you have any clue as to what the nuns’ income just from hospitals is?  Add in the investments that pay no taxes and they are richer than the Mormon’s wildest dreams.  Hell, I’d audit them to.

is Ratzinger/Benedict actually any different from JP2 in any significant way?  my impression was that their policies and outlook were more or less the same, just JP2 had better PR for some reason.

>> It is difficult to see what this will accomplish, beyond alienating a bunch of American Catholic nuns.

> I think Tyro has the reasons down regarding what this will accomplish: it’s a way of getting rid of an internal dissident group that still commands respect from the laity. It would look bad just to close these American orders down, so instead they’ve decided to harass them, perhaps with a view toward importing more traditional nuns from abroad (per phylosypher).

This.

The Vatican is such backwards, douchebag, political organization. Rapists and pedos in the flock are a-okay, but the Vatican simply /must/ take a stand against those uppity women and the confused men who support them. Otherwise, when people think ‘RCC’, they might think of that neat nun they met, instead of the pedophile priest scandal.

So the male priests systematically abuse male and female children both physically and sexually for several decades, and they decide to go after the nuns instead.  Typical.

I am so happy I could scream! Am I the only one who sees Joey the Rat as another Sarah Palin, the gifts who keep on giving? Just as Palin is indicative of the implosion of the Republican party, Joey the Rat is indicative of the incredible irrelevance of the RCC. The more he and his henchmen try to rein in the various sisterhoods and the laity, the more believers they will lose.

Tyro, don’t forget what’s happening to the Jesuit order. For centuries they were the intellectual light of the RCC, and in the last thirty years, have been systematically replaced by Opus Dei, an anti laity, anti intellectual, anti equality group. This started with JPII, and has accelerated under J the Rat. It isn’t only the nuns, folks. All dissident voices are being manipulated and being disposed of. What these fools don’t realize is that this will end any legitimacy the RCC ever had, and they will become just like the fundies, a joke that educated people will simply sidestep…  which many already do.

Dan2108, I think naïveté is the wrong idea about the nuns’ reticence to see the truth. It’s like the Germans who couldn’t believe that people were being thrown into ovens. The idea is so large and so out of context in a supposedly civilized society, that Germans couldn’t see it until they had their noses rubbed right in it after the war. Likewise, after years of commitment, nuns can’t be expected to just wake up one day and say to themselves: this is all a lie, these men hold us in contempt, our work is of no value to the male hierarchy. I am only a lay person, and it took me years to finally admit to myself that the RCC is just a corrupt bureaucracy that cares for nothing but its own existence, regardless of belief or nonbelief.

So anyway, just to make the point more strongly, decades from now most of us will be thanking J the Rat for the way he destroyed the RCC with his retrograde, anti-laity policies.

And the neighborhood really hasn’t changed demographic-wise: but it switched from active Catholics to lapsed Catholics.
hp on 07/05 at 11:01 AM

That’s one part of it.  In the white flight, newest minority replaced them pattern, the newbies don’t have the cash.  Hence the church doesn’t support the school and vice versa.  So, the RCC follows the cash out to the burbs, which unfortunately are seeing some growth in RCC parishes.

Tyro, don’t forget what’s happening to the Jesuit order. For centuries they were the intellectual light of the RCC, and in the last thirty years, have been systematically replaced by Opus Dei, an anti laity, anti intellectual, anti equality group. This started with JPII, and has accelerated under J the Rat. It isn’t only the nuns, folks. All dissident voices are being manipulated and being disposed of. What these fools don’t realize is that this will end any legitimacy the RCC ever had, and they will become just like the fundies, a joke that educated people will simply sidestep… which many already do.

LCforevah on 07/06 at 12:47 PM

It will be very interesting to see what happens to the Jesuit universities.  Loyola, Marquette, etc.  ANy thoughts?  Ar emost controlled, like Notre Dame, by a secular board of trustees?

phylosopher, I don’t know enough about the inner workings of Jesuit uni’s to extrapolate their futures. But look at what happened at Notre Dame in regards to Obama. Thirty years ago, accusing the sitting President of something or other and trying to cancel his invitation to speak would have been considered déclassé. It was, ill-bred fundie behavior, not traditional RCC demeanor, which should have been more urbane.

As to secular boards of trustees, how many of the individual members are RC? Without knowing this, we wouldn’t be able to determine how many of them would be subject to undue influence from the Vatican.

This may seem OT, but it’s an oblique reference to the undue influence factor. Cokie Robert’s mother, Lindy Boggs, had at one time been ambassador to the Holy See, from 1997 to 2001. Anyone care to speculate how well she served US interests versus RCC interests? My doubts are a matter of perception—sorry I just don’t trust roman catholics, having been one myself as a child, and having to hear adults around me profess beliefs that were blatantly anti democratic. I therefore attach the same perceptions and reservations to a prominent RCC family like the Boggs.

Which takes us back to Joey the Rat’s own behavior preferring Opus Dei to the more intellectual Jesuits, harassing nuns, impuning Islam, etc.