The Vatican has launched an inquisition enquiry into American nuns. These uppity women are getting out of control and actually helping people.
Sister Kathy Stein, of the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondelet, is executive director of Thomas House, a shelter for homeless families in Garden Grove in Orange County, California.
Thomas House, with its 16 apartments in a secure compound, its language and parenting classes, its food bank and its activities for children, is a secular organisation with no formal link to the Church.
Sister Kathy has never worn a habit, and moved out of the convent long ago to live among the people she serves.
But she says the Church need have no worry about the way she meets her religious calling.
“I would see it as a reason for hope that our message of love and respect and concern for people is expanding beyond the walls of a Catholic institution… that we are able to bring God’s word to people by who we are and how we minister to them,” she said.
Sister Mary says the Vatican hierarchy inhabits a very different world, and could not expect to impose its own idea of religious life on the culture inhabited by American nuns.
“The culture encourages everyone to be very tolerant and open-minded,” she said.
“To imagine that a dictum sent by somebody we don’t know who lives very far away would take hold in this culture, to imagine that, is really a stretch.”
Could this be the same distance that allows a man who will never worry about his life being endangered or altered through pregnancy to decide that a women never has any right to an abortion even to save her life?
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