Its darn weird, but modern Catholicism appears to be committed to ripping itself apart. Last April, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – (yep, that’s the Inquisition, still alive and kicking but with a different name) – issued an assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
..nuns were too “silent on the right to life from conception to natural death” and didn’t promote “Church teaching” of reproductive health issues.
Now just to be 100% clear, apparently these nuns have been doing vile things such as human rights and social work (shudders, oh the horror) and have not focused on truly holy things such as interfering in the private bedroom lives of people.
Does this relate to just a few bad nun’s? Nope, apparently it is almost all of them, the conference in question represents 80% of the 57,000 US nuns. I know I know, you are simply quivering in utter fear at the thought of elderly 70 year old ladies going rogue and doing dark dreadful deeds such as helping the homeless and poor.
So which truly righteous cleric is driving this crackdown on these vile evil nuns, why its Cardinal Law no less …
Three respected Catholic publications are reporting that Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the controversial former Boston archbishop, played a key role in the Vatican’s decision to tighten its grip on the largest association of Catholic nuns in the United States.
Now least anybody has forgotten, Mr Law (yep, I’m skipping over the made-up title), this truly Catholic man was the one in Boston whom the state attorney general severely criticised and ended up skipping town and running off to the Vatican after it had been shown that he had actively participated in the cover-up of child molestation. So now we have the chap who has clearly demonstrated himself to be clueless regarding basic human decency and morality is the driving force behind the Inquisition’s nun crackdown because they did hideous things such as helping the poor – why am I not surprised.
So where are we now, well a 2008 Pew forum on religion and public life study determined that nearly a third of Americans were brought up Catholic, but that “less than one in four remained so” – yep, folks are voting with their feet. But even more startling:
“Roughly 10% of American adults, or 22.5 million, are former Catholics. That would qualify lapsed Catholics as the second-largest single US denomination, behind Catholics, at 54.8 million, and just ahead of the Southern Baptist Convention’s 15.1 million members.”
In addition, a study conducted by the center for applied research in the apostolate at Georgetown University indicates that “42.7 million Catholics, or two-thirds of US Catholics, are not going to mass.” Only some 33% attend regularly. Another approximately 33% attend occasionally, and the rest never go, Catholic advocacy groups report. And the only reason the percentage of Catholics in the US population still hovers around 25%, Pew notes, is because of a steady stream of Latino immigrants.
One can only wonder if they are ever baffled about the reason so many are leaving. Picture in your mind several Bishops sitting around fretting about the PR damage done by the long running saga of child abuse, when suddenly one pipes up with , “Hey I know, lets have a crackdown on all those vile US nuns for helping the poor“. What can I say except, “well done chaps, I have no need to debunk your silly beliefs, you are doing a fine job of that yourselves“.