An Archbishop's outrage and the column that sparked it

Archbishop's blog slams Gray Lady's

Excerpt:

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan has condemned The New York Times -- blasting the Gray Lady and its columnist Maureen Dowd for what he says are examples of unfair, prejudicial and just downright mean anti-Catholicism.

Dolan used his blog last Thursday on the Archdiocese of New York's Web site to rail against the Times a day after the paper refused to print his critique as an op-ed piece.

He singled out Dowd -- a poison-penned, Pulitzer winner and former Catholic-school girl -- for "the most combustible," "intemperate and scurrilous" "diatribe" she wrote on Oct. 25, which "rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American religious issue."

Comment: Full blog post here.

Maureen Dowd: The Nuns’ Story

Excerpt:

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.

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.”

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!

Comments: I'm not a Catholic, but I think the Archbishop is onto something. More on Maureen Dowd AND Timothy Dolan.

An article where Dolan takes on Pelosi and Biden over abortion: How can anyone be silent on this key civil rights question?

Excerpt:

It was not the bishops who started this rhubarb but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), who took it upon themselves to explain Catholic teaching on abortion to the nation - and blundered badly.

Now, to be sure, church teaching highly respects the charism of civic responsibility and political leadership as belonging to the laity, not the clergy, a tenet especially strong in the writings of Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and defends as well a properly understood separation of church and state, so clear in Pope Benedict's remarks in France just two weeks ago.

But church tradition is equally clear that bishops are the authentic teachers of the faith. So, when prominent Catholics publicly misrepresent timeless Church doctrine - as Biden and Pelosi regrettably did (to say nothing of erring in biology!) - a bishop has the duty to clarify. Cardinal Justin Rigali and Bishop William E. Lori were thus hardly acting as politicians, "telling people how to vote," but as teachers.

Even more significantly, when all is said and done, abortion is hardly a religious issue at all. Women and men of every religion, or none at all, express grave reservations about our abortion-on-demand culture, insisting that it is not a theological matter but a civil rights one.

Does the baby alive in the womb (a biological, not a doctrinal, fact) deserve the full protection of the law or not? Does one have the right to terminate the life of another at will? Can we consider one form of life - that of the innocent, fragile baby in the womb - inferior and expendable?

Or does the American proposition of certain self-evident truths mentioned in our foundational documents, the first of which is the right to life, have a say in all of this? Was Robert Kennedy correct in observing that the true test of a society's mettle is how it treats the most vulnerable among us, which has to include the tiny baby in the womb?