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I have thought of this line many times in the last few weeks as the Church has gone through the process of electing the 265th successor to St. Peter. Suddenly, all the grey-haired dissenting Catholic pundits were back in their beloved limelight, stubbornly defending their disastrous tenure as the arbiters of American Church life. Watching them, I thought of my aunt. “Eventually,” I thought, "one of them is going to break down and say, “Hell, we really screwed up, didn’t we?”
How about Richard McBrien saying, “That freakin’ Catholic philosophical tradition may have been oppressive and patriarchal, but damn if it didn’t produce students who were more rigorous in their thought.”
Or how about Andrew Greeley looking up from his latest soft-porn manuscript to shrug, “Humanae Vitae was right. Sex outside of total commitment objectifies women and de-civilizes men.”
But the ones I’m really waiting for are the Joan Chittisters, osb, and the legions of other women who, in one lifetime, devastated the power and tradition of religious communities in the U.S. Certainly, some one of these unhappy women is eventually going to exhale, “Well, that was a mistake.”
Two weeks ago, I spent two days of meetings in a Chicago airport hotel. Waiting at the curb at O’Hare for the Wyndham shuttle, I found myself suddenly surrounded by a flock of overweight, grey-haired women in Walmart clothes and sensible shoes. “Nuns” I knew with certainty.
As we boarded the shuttle, I said to one of the fourteen nuns, “What Congregation are you with, Sister?” The woman was annoyed at me for asking for some reason. I have experienced this cagey coldness before from the secular religious who, I guess, are too busy campaigning for social justice to be nice to strangers on an airport shuttle. The nun murmured back, “Sinsinawa” and then leaned into a conversation with the sister beside her…
churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/2005/05/fighting-hard-for-legacy-of-failure-in.html
How about Richard McBrien saying, “That freakin’ Catholic philosophical tradition may have been oppressive and patriarchal, but damn if it didn’t produce students who were more rigorous in their thought.”
Or how about Andrew Greeley looking up from his latest soft-porn manuscript to shrug, “Humanae Vitae was right. Sex outside of total commitment objectifies women and de-civilizes men.”
But the ones I’m really waiting for are the Joan Chittisters, osb, and the legions of other women who, in one lifetime, devastated the power and tradition of religious communities in the U.S. Certainly, some one of these unhappy women is eventually going to exhale, “Well, that was a mistake.”
Two weeks ago, I spent two days of meetings in a Chicago airport hotel. Waiting at the curb at O’Hare for the Wyndham shuttle, I found myself suddenly surrounded by a flock of overweight, grey-haired women in Walmart clothes and sensible shoes. “Nuns” I knew with certainty.
As we boarded the shuttle, I said to one of the fourteen nuns, “What Congregation are you with, Sister?” The woman was annoyed at me for asking for some reason. I have experienced this cagey coldness before from the secular religious who, I guess, are too busy campaigning for social justice to be nice to strangers on an airport shuttle. The nun murmured back, “Sinsinawa” and then leaned into a conversation with the sister beside her…
churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/2005/05/fighting-hard-for-legacy-of-failure-in.html
