Because if you’re concerned about the declining number of women entering holy orders to be nuns within the Catholic Church in the United States, that’s the perfect time to unleash the orthodoxy hounds against various women’s orders.
The Vatican has launched a doctrinal investigation into the leadership of Catholic sisters in the United States, reportedly because they have not sufficiently promoted the Vatican line on homosexuality and other issues.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an association that gathers the leaders of most of the country’s women’s congregations, said it was informed of the “doctrinal assessment” in a letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s orthodoxy watchdog.
[…] The National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper, said the Vatican ordered up the probe because the sisters had not addressed problems raised by the Vatican in 2001 about their promotion of church teaching on homosexuality, salvation and the priesthood, which the Vatican says is reserved for men.
The newspaper cited a letter from the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Levada, to the conference saying the Vatican had concluded that the problems raised in 2001 remain based on the “tenor and the doctrinal content” of speeches given at the conference’s annual meetings.
Because this will certainly inspire more women to become nuns and sisters.
The conference said it was confident going into the investigation, saying it believed it had been faithful to its mission of serving leaders of women’s orders “as they seek to further the mission of Christ in today’s world.”
Sadly, “the mission of Christ in today’s world” seems to be less important to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith than that you spend sufficient time and earnest effort condemning gays and kowtowing to the male hierarchy of the Church. Until those goals have been achieved, all that claptrap about feeding the poor and clothing the naked and comforting the afflicted will just have to wait.
Things would be much simpler if they had just kept the name Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Pope Prada is busy trying to set the church back to the time just before Vatican II and undo all the good will that Pope JP II built up around the world. It’s like he’s the George II of the Catholics.