I’ve just learned via RNS that the NUNS ON THE BUS are back!
Nuns really get around these days. They are also being summoned to Rome for chats. But I digress.
Nuns on the bus will ride to political conventions
(RNS) Disturbed by the language of exclusion that has characterized much of the 2016 electoral campaign, Sister Simone Campbell and a band of Catholic nuns[So… band of nuns? Is that the collective noun? I’ll bet we could find a better one.] will again board her bus to promote a vision of a more inclusive America. [“Language of exclusion”?]
The activist nun and 18 other sisters will begin their trip on July 11 in Janesville, Wis., hometown of House Speaker and Republican leader Paul Ryan, a fellow Catholic whose conservative policies Campbell has regularly criticized.
The bus tour, the latest in a series of election-year trips organized by Campbell’s Washington-based lobby, Network, will eventually travel to 13 states, making stops at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in mid-July and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia later in the month.
[…]Though she has not specifically billed the upcoming tour as a protest against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has been lambasted for stereotyping Muslims, Hispanics and other groups, Campbell has in the past called out politicians by name for neglecting the poor and disadvantaged.
I look forward to the reports.
Maybe I’ll make a field trip the Janesville for the event.
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[So… band of nuns? Is that the collective noun? I’ll bet we could find a better one.]
Convent ? Order ? Cloister ?
So… band of nuns? Is that the collective noun? I’ll bet we could find a better one.
I’d suggest a “wimple of nuns,” but I doubt any of the Nuns on the Bus wears one.
A meddling of nuns.
These kinds of things always make me think of and empathize with St. John and St. James asking the Lord if they can call fire down from heaven.
Even Saints have a limit of stupidity they endure before losing their composure and becoming exasperated.
Well “Sister” Campbell, while you worry about Muslims being excluded, 9 Italian families are burying their dead; slaughtered by the same hateful, demonic ideology you would no doubt have us “include”. I guess my crowd once again gets EXCLUDED from any worry by good old lefty, new age,Celtic Katholics such as yourself. I had a belly full of your so-called “enlightened” attitudes while I struggled to grow up on the SW Side of the city of Chicago. Your liberal values never included my crowd, us dirty dagoes. So I am not surprised that less than a week after Italians (and others) are slaughtered in Bangladesh, your main worry is about Muslims getting their feelings hurt.
[So… band of nuns? Is that the collective noun? I’ll bet we could find a better one.]
How about a Shrill of Religious Sisters?
Coven? But that might be too close to the truth.
With apologies to Sir Paul McCartney: “Nuns on the run, nuns on the run…”
And we know what they are running from, too.
I like the term band of nuns.
I see a band of women with precision haircuts dressed in pantsuits of tastefully muted tones (with appropriately “color season” accessory accents) banging away on their drums and shaking their tambourines. Maybe a kazoo or two….
Oxford says: a “superfluidity” of nuns
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/what-do-you-call-a-group-of
[Spiffy! The OED!]
Why not just ‘a bus of nuns’ and leave it at that. Seems to describe the present situation. Of course I blame Rosalind Russell for the whole thing. Back in 1967 or 1968 as Reverend Mother she took her convent and students on a bus to a rally. The nuns came back ready to embrace quite a different habit. Monkey see…monkey do.
A REAL Pope would throw the sisters UNDER the bus…but I digress.
A “Nest o’ Nuns“?
A Benedictine Sister from the parish convent taught parochial school second-graders like me in the 1950’s. One day she told me (seven years old) that she did not find my behavior at the day’s morning Mass to be “edifying”. I had no idea what that meant, but I was pleased that she thought I did. I looked it up and never forgot the Sister’s admonition…almost sixty years later.
As a specific collective for Benedictine nuns, I’d choose “Benediction of Benedictines”.
Whatever the dictionary says I think a ‘hillary of nuns’ (boom, boom) works. I don’t expect there’ll be any protests any Democrats who back partial birth and any other form of abortion/infanticide.
Bus? That’s a big vehicle.
Their numbers are dwindling.
It could be a Prius of nuns.
Oxford says: a “superfluidity” of nuns
Actually, a superfluity, though your version has interesting aspects, too. Perhaps they flow from the bus? Or being a superfluidity, cannot be contained?
I can’t beat superfluity, although I was going to suggest a “scurry,” the collective for squirrels. If they’re good, tradiional nuns, I’d invent a “scutum,” the Latin for “shield” (a rough analogy to “testudo”).
A band, a band, a merry old band…
Weyerhaeuser, helium 3 nuns.
Good grief gotta watch that speller every minute. Weyerhaeuser, wmeyer, whaaa…
I’m on helium 3 I guess.
How about they get off the bus and go outreach / preach / whatever they want to call it to areas where people are currently marching? Their brand of social justice would do more good there, than in the political ring in which they do not belong in the first place.
I’m fed up with the misdirection of emotions.
LOL
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I realize the grand prize has already been awarded on this one, but still, I’m thinking maybe a “conundrum” . . .
To the tune “Band of Gold”
Now you’re near gone
All that’s left is a band of old
All that’s left of the dream you hold Is a band of old
And the memories of what “Church” could be,
If they’d listened while you hugged a tree. .
You took them from the shelter of a God you found too passe
Spoke of springtime but lost your way,
Crying, “women rule”, went and played the fool. .
Now you fade in the empty convents and face your doom,
Filled with sadness, filled with gloom,
Hoping soon there’ll be new blood coming through that door
Who will listen like they did before,
but you’re nearly gone,
All that’s left is a band of old
All that’s left of your New Age scold
Is a band of old
And the dream of new theology,
Sister Pantsuits, worship of the “me”,
Time to go on
Last that is left is a band of old,
filled with bitterness, in the cold,
riding buses through the countryside
obsolete but they still have their pride. . .
You should definitely go to Janesville, Fr Z. I went to their first Janesville stop. It’s not just because of Paul Ryan that they want to go there, but that was their moment of glory, the biggest tour stop on their initial journey because of all the anti-Scott Walker protesters who drove down there from Madison. These lot are very secular and care nothing about religion except how it can be exploited. The only Catholic attendees there pretty much were those protesting against the “Bus Nuns” (who are not nuns, they are active sisters), me and a friend and one other lady who came independently, all of us with “Stand Up For Religious Freedom” signs.
….a hodge-podge of habitless hussies.
Nuns???? They aren’t nuns. This is what the internet gives for “nun”. A Catholic nun is a woman who lives as a contemplative life in a monastery which is usually cloistered (or enclosed) or semi-cloistered. Her ministry and prayer life is centered within and around the monastery for the good of the world. She professes the perpetual solemn vows living a life according to the evangelical counsels of poverty, celibacy, and obedience.
These women might be called sisters or women religious, but never nuns. Nuns take perpetual solemn vows, sisters only simple vows. I could never imagine a real nun running around the country doing what these women do. I wish people would stop referring to them as such. They are just busybodies, not satisfied to do the work they took their simple vows to do.
I think those who can should point out the difference between nuns and sisters every time we see/hear it.
The “Nuns on a Bus” meme trips easily off the tongue but it is a lie!
While Father John Hardon, S.J. ‘s Modern Catholic Dictionary concurs with Packrraat’s post practically word for word regarding nuns–
. . . he extends his Dictionary’s definition of “Sisters” to also include these same cloistered nuns as well as members of congregations who have professed their simple vows :
So we still might need to separate the Sisters from the Resisters.
:)
We Catholics speak out on behalf of the rights of the unborn– a hot political issues. These sisters are speaking out on behalf of the rights of the poor– another critical political issue. As Catholic Christians, we are supposed to be applying our faith in the world–which includes politics. So… not sure what everyone’s all riled up about. Their approach is creative to bring attention to their message. “Nuns” is a popular identifier. I think they know they are sisters, not nuns– both groups are holy women committed to the Gospel.
I think the term “a pride of nuns” is suitable, in more ways than one.
Knowing that Simone Campbell is anti-Trump makes me think “Make America Great Again”
Nuns with Bad Habits!
From the RNS link:
“Campbell, who is an attorney as well as a member of the Sisters of Social Service religious order…”
This explains a lot.