The Nuns’ Story?

I predicted that the left would go into a grand mal twit.

Today’s number of Hell’s Bible has the perfect example. 

The New York Times continues to showcase Maureen Dowd, whom I stopped reading a long time ago.  But several people sent me the following.  Normally I wouldn’t bother with the bilious Mo, but this merits attention because of its timing.

Maureen Dowd is whipped up into a froth of tears and spittle over Pope Benedict’s overture to those Anglicans who do not think women merit ordination or that active sodomites should be married or should be bishops. 

Her article, however, is camouflage for her feminist dedication to abortion. 

What is really pissing Mo off about Pope Benedict and the Anglicans is that Rome responded to a request from these Anglicans for a place in the Catholic Church.  These Anglicans.  This move undermines her deeper liberal social agenda: the Catholic Church should be nothing more than an instrument for her liberal goals, not what tradition and the Pope of Rome say.

For her, Anglicans shouldn’t want to be Catholics.  She only has time for people who don’t want to be real Catholics.  Since true Catholics are against abortion, she is against whatever is truly Catholic.  The overture to Anglicans reveals the divide between true Christian values and faux values.

In what follows note how Mo smears Pope Benedict into a Nazi and a denier of the holocaust by association.  He hates women.  He is a misogynist homophobe.  He protects clerical pedophiles (who are, ironically, a deeply weirder type of homosexual).

October 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Nuns’ Story  [Ask yourself at the end: Why is this called "The Nuns’ Story"?]
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
 
Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.
 
Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.  [Men have been protecting her ever since, btw.]
 
Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church.
 
Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.  [Not forbidding.  Just settled.]
 
In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”  [I think she is referring to the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of men and women in the Church and in the world".]
 
Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.
 
The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.
 
Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.” 
 
The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!  [Yah… that’s the Pope, alright.  Really living it up!  Imagine having sunglasses! Or shoes! In Italy!]
 
“It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”  [You would think that the Irish Dowd would remember the Irish Sisters of Mercy.]
 
As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.  [This is really the only point: "welcoming extreme right Anglicans".   This is it.  And so now it all has to be about misogyny and homophobia.  So, you attack the Nazi-loving, holocaust denying Pope of Rome.  She blames him for clerical pedophilia and AIDS in Africa.  When she says "the Church" does bad things, she means "he", Pope Benedict.]
 
“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”
 
The nuns are pushing back a bit, but it’s hard, since the church has decreed that women can’t be adversarial to men. [This is just dopey.] A nun writing in Commonweal as “Sister X” protests, “American women religious are being bullied.”
 
She recalls that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who heads one of the investigations, moved a meeting at the University of Notre Dame off campus to protest a performance of “The Vagina Monologues.” “It is the rare bishop,” Sister X writes, “who has any real understanding of the lives women actually lead.”  [Yah.. because that play really helps.]
 
The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)
 
When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.”  [Actually, I think she didn’t just try to "reconcile", she condoned homosexuals acts.] The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women[How UNJUST to go after Mansour!  How UNJUST to object to abortions!  Imagine objecting to paying for abortions for poor women!  Because that is what they really need isn’t it, state-paid abortions!  That’s what our nuns should really be doing.  Get them out of those habits and convents out there fighting for homosexual marriage and abortion!  This is what young Catholic girls should grow up aspiring to.  Mo Dowd’s idea of Mother Teresa: Sr. Mary Agnes Mansour, making sure that Michigan pays for abortions of poor women!  That’s what women religious should be doing. Why isn’t the Pope applauding them for it?  Instead he is welcoming Christians who would also be against that.  He must be a Nazi-loving, holocaust denying, pedophile-protecting, Africa-hating, misogynistic homophobe.]
 
Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Toledo and one of Bishop Blair’s flock, got a resolution passed commending nuns for their humble service and sacrifice. “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said. “Maybe people do things differently there. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will intervene.”

The address of Hell’s Gate is 620 8th Ave.

Is the Pope of Rome the only figure who can be so maligned without the world rising up in protest?  You can accuse a Pope of anything, no matter how false or stupid. She doesn’t care.  Nor does the Times.

Maureen Dowd is rather like a bilious female Julian of Eclanum.  Incapable of countering Augustine’s sharp theological retorts led Julian to call the saint a Manichean and the son of a drunken woman.  But even this comparison is beyond Dowd, so let’s move along.

Ask yourselves a question.  Can anyone who resorts to her despicable comments really be interested in any authentic religious … anything?

Dowd writes about religion as if she really cares about it.  But she doesn’t.  This is camouflage.  If she can write these manifest lies, whatever Catholicism Maureen Dowd once had wound up with a forceps shoved through its skull a long time ago.

Back to the question.  She uses a cute title, "The Nuns’ Story".  We can dispatch the nuns thing quickly: What are the liberal sisters doing that is so great?  If they are so wonderful, why are their orders dying off and the traditional groups rapidly growing?   Tell us, Mo, why, if the liberal nuns are so great, are they so quickly and conspicuously dying off?  Why do they have no vocations

Dowd holds up as a religious paradigm Mansour’s campaign for state-paid abortions.

No, this is not the Nuns’ Story.  This is about Ratzinger, Pope Benedict.  This is about abortion and other sacraments of the left.  Card. Ratzinger, she says, is the one who persecuted the fabulous abortion providing Sr. Mansour.  Pope Benedict is Catholic. 

Dowd’s loogie hocking smear of Pope Benedict was sparked by his acting like a Pope. He welcomed traditional Anglicans asking for a home. 

And remember: this week this is why Benedict is bad.  Next week it will be something else.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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58 Comments

  1. Fr.Z wrote: “Ask yourselves a question. Can anyone who resorts to her despicable comments really be interesting in any authentic religious … anything?”

    A definitive NO to that question.
    You hit the bulls-eye on this one. Thanks.

  2. ginamdurso says:

    Let’s ask a good, holy Catholic nun if she feels that she is a “second class citizen.” I highly doubt it. However, in the same breath, she may say, “second class citizens on earth and first class citizens in Heaven!” Long life to the Pope.

  3. Tim Ferguson says:

    More and more, I’m having the feeling that this latest move of our dear Holy Father is a true watershed moment. This is one of those things that, fifty years from now, commentators will be looking back and saying, “This is when things changed.” [Do I hear and “Amen!”?]

    Up until now, the left has maintained the myth of inevitable liberal progress™: the myth that women’s ordination, the acceptance of homosexual activity as good, the acceptance by the Church of artificial means of birth control, the whole project of groups like the NCR, Call to Action, We Are the Church. All of this change has been seen as a foregone conclusion, we just have to wait until it happens.

    “It probably won’t happen under JPII.” “It probably won’t happen under Pope Benedict, but he’s old, so it’s understandable that he isn’t ‘with the times’ yet.” “It might not happen in my lifetime.” “It might not happen for awhile yet.” All of these phrases have been repeated countless times by Boomer clergy and Church activists to cheer up their hapless partisans, or to deflate the arguments of their oppponents.

    They took a punch to the gut when John Paul was elected, but they were still young enough to believe that they and their ideals would outlive the “Polish Dark Ages” (though they certainly did not expect him to live as long as he did or accomplish as much as he did). They tolerated the election of Benedict because of his age, not expecting him to do too much. Summorum Pontificum was another gut-punch, but as long as the myth of inevitable liberal progress™ could be clung to, then even a few Latin Masses, in small, out-of-the-way chapels for a small crowd of aging (in their minds) disaffected nostalgics wouldn’t rock the boat.

    But now, I’m finding the venom and bile is really rising strongly. I think it’s dawning on the left that the myth of inevitable liberal progress™ is a phantom. It just may possibly be true that women’s ordination is not going to happen. Not just “not in this pontificate” or even “not in my lifetime,” but ever. Everything else up to this point – Humanae vitae, Ordinatio sacerdotalis John Paul’s election, Benedict’s election, the appointment of bishops like Bruskewicz, Burke, Finn, Dolan, Cordileone, Ranjith, Canizares Llovera, ad infinitum – all these things have been seen as bumps into the road to inevitable liberal progress, but for whatever reason, this is not the same.

    The myth is dead (though it never truly had life, and certainly never brought life). The Holy Spirit is not directing the Church down the path that the liberals have assumed with a stronger faith (for many of them) then their belief in the Holy Spirit Himself. This will be a huge moment of crisis for many of them, and they will need our prayers. But our prayers must also be prayers of thanksgiving, for this Pope of Christian Unity, who has, as Peter is wont to do, strengthened the brethren, and made the teachings of the Church evermore clear.

  4. wmeyer says:

    …and the libs continue to assert the Church enabled pedophilia.

    The scandal was not due to pedophiles, whose victims would have been pre-adolescent, and more evenly split between the sexes. The scandal was due to predatory homosexuals–Maureens’ friends–who should never have been ordained.

    It remains another scandal that the liberal media has gone essentially unchallenged and unpunished for so evilly mischaracterizing the story, then and now.

  5. I think if you look at any opposition of the visitation of the Nun’s, you see this sort of view.

    The Nun’s, at least the older ones in this country, are a source of PRIDE for many “liberal” Catholics. I know in the area to which I just moved, one church was run by 2 sisters who fit the mold above, and the other is run by a lay woman. The problems in both parishes are similar and for the same reasons. I don’t want to get into that, but as soon as the sisters left, which was recently, and change began people screamed. Their allegiance wasn’t to anything more than the sisters and their views, and not the church or its teachings.

    Once you convince people that what is important is something OTHER than what the truth is, you become the controller of the truth. If MD and others have been convinced of something other than the truth it is a lie.

    I am not saying that we should give her a break, but I think that it will take a lot of time, and a lot of “PURGING” of this type of mentality from people as the “Reform of the reform” occurs. People first have to realize some of the things they have always liked about the faith really aren’t the faith. Only then can they understand and accept the truth.

  6. Seraphic Spouse says:

    Weird how the story begins with a nice priest protecting the writer from a mean, wrathful nun. The irony.

    I would like to know what a group of women mostly in their seventies know about MOST WOMEN when they cannot attract even a reasonable number of women to their way of life. The erstatz feminism of contemporary nunnism turned me off the religious life, and I am relieved that traditional married life is still an option, since traditional married life didn’t seem to be one until I was too old.

    Christian unity should be about UNITY, not just Catholics becoming Protestants, or ecumenical services where we all hold hands and sing and dance to “We are marching in the light of God” accompanied by bongo drums. Sneering at a group of Anglicans who were cruelly shoved to the margins by their “progressive” brethren is NOT by any stretch of the imagination a Christian welcome. The Traditional Anglican Communion and Forward in Faith approached the Holy See, and the Holy See is welcoming them. WHAT is all the horror about?

  7. Seraphic Spouse says:

    Whooops, I mean “the traditional RELIGIOUS life didn’t seem to be an option” until I was too old. Sorry. Carried away.

  8. MrTipsNZ says:

    Of course, someone’s “power base” is being shown up for the pillars of sand it stands on. Curse that Benedict XVI and his revolutionary ideal of sticking to unity and truth!

    Looks like Maureen Dowd’s stock is going the way of her newspaper’s – down the commode.

  9. beez says:

    I sent this to Mr. Clark Hoyt, Public Editor at the NY Times

    Mr. Hoyt:

    I am positively OUTRAGED that the New York Times would publish the ad hominem attack against the Holy Father and leader of more than 1 billion Catholics of the world, written by Maureen Dowd under the auspices of “opinion journalism.” Not only is Miss Dowd’s article rife with errors (the Church’s teaching of clerical celibacy is discipline, not dogma – it is only enforced for priests of the Latin Rite, not the Eastern Rites; and for bishops in all rites, a discipline that will continue in the Apostolic Constitution concerning the Anglican Ordinariates). Additionally, her insinuation that the Holy Father his somehow a Nazi who managed to elude capture is an old trope that has simply gotten tiresome. How can you let this so-called “journalist” continue to appear in print? I have read more credible (and factual) research papers from Middle School students!

    I, and many other Catholics, will be expecting an immediate apology from this audacious woman, published prominently in the Times, for her lies, distortions and completely false characterizations of millions of faithful, orthodox Catholics who, although Miss Dowd can’t understand it because she lacks the intellectual honesty to open open-minded, actually care about AIDS, Abortion and Homosexuality because we believe that people who engage in premarital and extramarital sex, procure, perform and encourage abortion, and live openly homosexual lives put their immortal souls in danger and we actually WANT them to live a happy life with God in the future!

    Although Miss Dowd would like to condemn herself and billions of other human beings to the fiery pits of Hell because she thinks that having fun in this brief life is worth eternal suffering, we Catholics and faithful Christians of all stripes don’t agree and we will not be pressured by those who are being manipulated by sin to condone activity that puts people in danger. Miss Dowd and her continued attacks on Orthodox Christianity is akin to a woman giving a child a loaded gun and then telling me, when I try to take it away, that I am anti-child!

  10. Clinton says:

    The likes of Srs. Gramick, Mansour, Chittister et. al. have taken their thriving, faithful orders and run them into the ground. As we
    see, they have no vocations, no future. What young woman in her right mind would join them? And yet they look about them at
    the desolation they have created and call it good.

    The New York Times has gone from being the ‘Gray Lady’, ‘America’s Newspaper’, to Hell’s Fishwrapper. Its readership is evaporating,
    its stock price tumbling, its reputation for integrity in tatters after several scandals involving reporters that plagiarized or even
    invented stories while editors twiddled their thumbs. ( I recall one Pulitzer that had to be declined because of that). Its once-formidable
    reputation for objectivity has given way to proudly embracing its role as newsletter for the DNC. It’s too early to call the NYT dying,
    but it shows all the vitality of a beached whale. And its staff and owners and editors look about them at the desolation they have
    brought to the Gray Lady and call it good.

    The future means nothing to either group because they know that both they and their organizations won’t be there for it.

  11. Leonius says:

    Blessed shall you be when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake. Be glad in that day and rejoice; for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For according to these things did their fathers to the prophets. Luke 6:22-23

  12. Melody says:

    The thing that frustrates me most is that well-meaning ordinary non-Catholics frequently believe this tripe after being fed it so often.
    Even reversing the misconceptions among my own friends takes some time and they are usually quite surprised to hear ordinary facts. Since we are all college students, one thing that really enlightened them is that he was a professor, since they had been taught that the Church is anti-intellectual.

  13. Dauphin says:

    As a generation of “progressives” dies off, their anguished cries are only bound to grow louder, their rhetoric more vitriolic.

  14. Magpie says:

    This article, concerning the nature of the abuse, deserves a wider readership – it’s from lifesitenews:

    GENEVA, September 29, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in the US and abroad was a matter of homosexuals preying on adolescent boys, not one of pedophilia, said the Vatican’s representative at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland. It is “more correct,” said Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males, than pedophilia, in relation to the scandals.
    Link: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/sep/09092910.html

  15. Londiniensis says:

    If Father Montgomery hadn’t intervened, Sister Hiltruda might have beaten some sense into Maureen Dowd, who might then have grown up to be a half-decent human being … Did Father Montgomery ever wonder about the consequences of his act of misplaced kindness and his undermining of a teacher’s auhtority? Or is the whole thing a wholly fabricated touch of colour to lead in to a rather shoddy article?

  16. mpm says:

    Maureen Dowd is a known entity:

    Shortly after she won her Pulitzer, the free weekly alternative paper, New York Press printed an article that analyzed Dowd’s columns and concluded that Dowd appears to do little reporting and tends to “dumb down” her subject matter by viewing it through the lens of pop culture. A 2002 article in The Weekly Standard, explored Dowd’s alleged narcissism and tendency to reduce “political phenomena … to caricatures of the personalities involved.”

    In 2003, Dowd was accused by James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal, of being intentionally misleading—inserting ellipses, for instance, to change a quotation’s intended meaning. This resulted in a new common word “dowdification” to accurately quote but only enough to change the original meaning of the statement.
    [Wikipedia]

    The art world thinks the purpose of art is to produce a visceral reaction in people. I suppose Dowd thinks of herself as an artist.

    Howdy-dowdy.

  17. Subvet says:

    I admit to always being mystified when a lapsed Catholic like Dowd starts her screed against the Church. Don’t like it? LEAVE!! If it’s as bad as you say, it’ll be dying out. If it isn’t, it’ll thrive. If it thrives, start rethinking your opinion. Nobody is forced into belonging to the Church. Get. A. Grip.

    Just my two cents.

  18. mpm says:

    Londiniensis,

    My bet: “wholly fabricated touch of colour to lead in to a rather shoddy article.”

  19. Jack Hughes says:

    to echo subvet, you don’t like da church? leave, Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII did.

  20. Just to “throw some gasoline on the fire”, M.D. has her own ‘fan club’ web site…unreal.
    http://dowdreport.blogspot.com/

  21. You wonder if Dolan will respond in some public or private way, or if he should.

  22. archambt says:

    “If they are so wonderful, why are their orders dying off and the traditional groups rapidly growing? Tell us, Mo, why, if the liberal nuns are so great, are they so quickly and conspicuously dying off? Why do they have no vocations?”

    I agree with all this, except the scientist in me wants to problematize this one sentence: could the traditionalist orders be seeing a larger increase of vocations because there are fewer of them? Therefore, its reasonable to assume that anyone with a traditionalist bent would join one of these orders, whereas the larger number of liberal orders would only see a small increase?

    This doesn’t answer the question-if the larger orders are doing something great, why aren’t they growing at a more acceptable pace, even considering the larger number of them? But we should controlling for some of these other factors, before we start touting statistics.

    End statistics lesson.

    Go Pope!

  23. makreitzer says:

    Liberal nuns are the same ones working to promote the rotten community organizing works supported by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Every Catholic should be spreading the word to boycott the CCHD. There’s a short video on YouTube to help get the word out. Pass it around! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrTEoXs7Ts4

  24. Athelstan says:

    Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber.

    This really is an execrable gloss, even from a pop psychologist like Dowd. Don’t insinuate it, Mo – say it right out loud. If you really mean to say Pope Benedict is a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer, just come right out and *say* it.

    This is a new low even for Dowd.

    And one more thing:

    The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70…

    I notice that Dowd never stops to ask *why* these nuns have an “average age of about 70.”

    It’s the unasked questions that are often most striking.

  25. Athelstan says:

    P.S. Fr. Z says: “If she can write these manifest lies, whatever Catholicism Maureen Dowd once had wound up with a forceps shoved through its skull a long time ago.”

    Ouch.

    That’s going to leave a mark.

  26. Athelstan says:

    Hello wmeyer,

    The scandal was due to predatory homosexuals—Maureens’ friends—who should never have been ordained.

    I’m in general agreement, but we do need to qualify this statement: “The scandal was due to predatory homosexuals — Maureens’ friends — and their allies, protectors and in some cases fellow abusers in the episcopate, who should never have been ordained.”

    Not all absuers were liberals, and clericalism predates Vatican II. But the new illicit sexual moralities that blossomed after the Council and took over so many seminaries made this pattern of behavior systematic and networked in a way it simply had not been before. And most of the time, it was the protected, enabled work of the kinds of clerics and prelates – the Bernardins, Weaklands, Mahoneys, Clarks – Dowd happens to agree with most on her issues.

  27. thereseb says:

    “Up until now, the left has maintained the myth of inevitable liberal progress™: ”

    Yep – now that’s gone the same way as 8 track stereo. Another great 70s product.

  28. Taquoriaan says:

    So according to this woman, just because I love the Church, love Christ (and therefore love what the pope does) and want to become a nun, I am a Nazi-loving, holocaust denying, pedophile-protecting, Africa-hating, misogynistic homophobe?

    What I don’t get is how does she get away with this, isn’t there someone superior to her, be it mother superior or a bishop who can put sanctions in place. I’m OUTRAGED….

    I want to become a nun and I’ve been turned into a stereotype! :-X

  29. Grabski says:

    The liberals are truly amazing. Weren’t there TWO reviews of the situation in US seminaries? So why should the sisters be left without the same care from Rome?

  30. The cleansing of the Temple is not far off.

  31. Seraphic Spouse says:

    Wasn’t there a movie called “The Nun’s Story” starring Audrey Hepburn as a sad nun?

  32. Seraphic Spouse says:

    Oh yes, there was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nun's_Story

    Maybe we are supposed to think of Audrey Hepburn in the Belgian Congo torn between being a perfect nun and being herself, etc.

  33. Traductora says:

    Her article, however, is camouflage for her feminist dedication to abortion.

    It’s their sacrament. Everything with these people always goes back to abortion. Kill a baby and you’re one of them, in like Flynn.

  34. Scelata says:

    Not to mention, sometimes the Pope gave Chico DRIED cat food, when he preferred canned!!?#?%?!?!!!!!
    The fiend!

    Seriously I wonder why she didn’t throw that into her kitchen-sink of accusations?

    What a sloppily constructed rant…

    (Save the Liturgy, Save the World)

  35. There is no reconciling with these vile creatures.

    When you find them in leadership positions in your parish, expose them and do your best to drive them out.

  36. Vetdoctor says:

    The nuns are pushing back a bit, but its hard, since the church has decreed that women cant be adversarial to men.

    I’m reading the biography of Mother Anglica. You remember her, the quiet, shy nun who was never adversarial to men ;-)

  37. ssoldie says:

    Embracing ‘modernism at Vatican II’ has brought us so many gifts in the last forty + years, Ah!
    yes the Nuns, go to an ‘Introducing Dr. Wm Coulson’. Then go and read all the books on the wonderful NUN Mother Angelica.

  38. Salvatore_Giuseppe says:

    “Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.”

    I was basically laughing by the end of this paragraph the ad hominem was so bad. Notice how she even manages to make his enforcement of orthodoxy seem like a bad thing.

    I could write whole essays on how wrong every single point of this paragraph is.

  39. tioedong says:

    Dowd doesn’t lament all the idealistic nuns who were forced out of their godless convents, or all the women who never joined because they were told that “we pray only when we feel like it” and often “substitute meditation on a candle in place of the divine office”.

    On the other hand, Dowd is a bitter and lonely lady who followed the feminist movement and is now alone and unloved in her old age. She needs our prayers.

  40. Norah says:

    whatever Catholicism Maureen Dowd once had wound up with a forceps shoved through its skull a long time ago.
    Comment by Fr Z

    The scandal was due to predatory homosexuals—Maureens’ friends—who should never have been ordained.
    Comment by wmeyer

    I know that this vile article has occasioned the above comments but unless they are variafiable I think they should be removed as they could constitute defamation.

  41. archambt says:

    Norah-

    I agree. Not so much that they are defamation, but insofar as they seem *deeply uncharitable*.

    Fighting name calling with name calling never works. Especially when we’re in the right.

  42. trad catholic mom says:

    I was literally speechless after reading the article. I tried repeatedly to post a comment but couldn’t string the words together. I do not understand people like Maureen Dowd.

    I just wanted to say that I loved Tim Ferguson’s comment. It gave me hope for the future of the Church as a whole.

  43. Joker Phinn says:

    ‘Women’s ordination’ began with eleven women who were allowed to attend an Episcopal seminary, who decided on their own that they could be ‘ordained’. It was fraud foisted on the Episcopal Church in 1976, and it’s fraudulent still. ‘Roma locuta est, causa finita est.’
    Let us speak no more of this evil.

    After reading Dowd’s article, the Inquisition doesn’t sound unreasonable any longer. It all makes sense now.

  44. staggering but still standing says:

    I don’t know. It just seems that we’re all being a bit harsh. They’ve all worked so hard. Maybe a vacation would help clear the air for them. Perhaps a bit of white water rafting? We have a real Hell’ Gate here in British Columbia, on the Fraser River. It would probably only take one, no, maybe two, rafts to fit them all in. Not really that expensive if we all chipped in. The only drawback I can think of is trying to get a guide to go into the boats with them. It would be a wonderful news story, because I don’t think anyone has ever tried it before. Probably no insurance coverage though. Darn.

  45. fathermichael says:

    “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said

    It IS another country dumb dumb.

    Fr. Z., thank you for writing your red ink comments. I had wanted to do the exact same when I saw this dribble in the NYTimes.

  46. Steve K. says:

    “I know that this vile article has occasioned the above comments but unless they are variafiable I think they should be removed as they could constitute defamation.”

    Fr.Z –
    “whatever Catholicism Maureen Dowd once had wound up with a forceps shoved through its skull a long time ago.”

    … you understand what that means right? Dowd is an ardent abortion supporter, and guess how babies are killed typically by abortionists? Right, forceps through the skull. Thus also Dowd’s “Catholicism” in light of her lifelong abortion advocacy.

    It’s not name calling, it’s biting satire, somewhat in the vein of “A Modest Proposal.” It has long pedigree and is appropriate. Abortion support is normalized in part through an aversion to consider the wicked, murderous details of what the practice really entails.

  47. Steve K. says:

    That last was addressed to Norah.

  48. Massachusetts Catholic says:

    Father Z, Why don’t you submit your fisking of the Dowd piece to the New York Times as your own op/ed article? Or as a Letter to the Editor? It demands some sort of response to the audience originally exposed to it.

  49. TNCath says:

    We have all heard of the Church being attacked from within. Usually, we think of people like Fathers Richard McBrien, Charles Curran, Andrew Greeley; Archbishop Weakland; Bishops Dozier, Gumbleton, and Gaillot; and Sisters Joan Chittister, Mary Luke Tobin, Teresa Kane, and Maureen Fiedler.

    But, Maureen Dowd, a self-professed “practicing Catholic,” is a good example of evil coming from within the laity.

    The smoke of Satan in the Church has seems to still be alive and smouldering.

  50. Kimberly says:

    In the 70’s I attended an all-girl, Catholic boarding school run by very, very liberal nuns. I understand Sr’s retoric, because, after all, it is all about me, me, me. Sad, but I don’t remember ONE graduate that ever came out of there with thier head screwed on right. The school closed down three years after my graduation. So much for numbers! Believe me, these women are not about being true Catholics, they are about achieving power with thier pride.

  51. Torpedo1 says:

    Not only is the sacrament of Liberal catholics like her abortion, it is, at bottom, sex. They worship it, make all sacrifices for it and do or say anything to promote their idea of it. Ever notice that? All the objections and rantings that she and her crowd shriek about have to do with sex in some form or another. These people aren’t allowed to have it, wah wah, these people can’t have it outside of marriage, boo hoo. The mean Church says we can’t just have it. We have to have a stupid baby along with it. Wah wah. Begin the tantrums of a five year old who doesn’t get their way. They would never object to anything the Church says if it didn’t have to do with sex, and it’s also where they are the most relativistic. When sex is concerned, everything else is out the window. Whenever I read this stuff though, it makes me love the Church and our Holy Father more. Mary, the perfect example of woman, pray for us.

  52. pattif says:

    I seem to recall that the erstwhile Prefect of the CDF, one Cardinal Ratzinger, used to say that, if he didn’t read something like this about himself every couple of weeks or so, he felt he needed to examine his conscience.

  53. pattif: Yes… he did say that. To me – many years ago.

  54. Mark R says:

    You know, if it is so bad, you don’t have to be a nun…you don’t even have to be a Catholic, if it is that bad.

  55. Father J says:

    At the risk of running afoul of anyone’s Catholic sensibilities, I do have to say that I found one exceptionally good and heartening thing in this article, for which I stand and applaud!

    I stand and applaud the use of the umlaut in “über-conservative.”

    Brava, Maureen Dowd!

  56. JoeGarcia says:

    A possible sign of the Apocalypse: MSW, a man whom God has placed in my path that I might better develop longanimity, in the America Magazine blog, taking Maureen Dowd — rather sternly, at that — to task for this piece.

    Wow.

  57. wmeyer says:

    hi, Athelstan,

    I’m in general agreement, but we do need to qualify this statement: “The scandal was due to predatory homosexuals — Maureens’ friends — and their allies, protectors and in some cases fellow abusers in the episcopate, who should never have been ordained.”

    Yes, of course. A much better summation of the real problem. However, the point remains the dishonesty of the media in redefining pedophilia, to avoid admitting that the gays they love to champion were at the core of it.

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