leadership conference of women religious

Nuns say: “They can crush a few flowers, but they cannot hold back the springtime.”

Tourist buses are fixtures on Capitol Hill, but the arrival at the Methodist Building of “Nuns on the Bus: Nuns Drive for Faith, Family and Fairness” in noonday heat to the cheers of their colleagues had to be a first.

It’s easy to understand the Vatican’s consternation when faced with sisters radical enough to think their own thoughts and write them down. Nuns aren’t trained to be troublemakers.

Bishops are not only concerned with nuns and girl scouts.

When the Church claims that marriage exists between “one man” and “one woman,” which kind of man or woman do they mean?

Having now cracked down on U.S. nuns and the Girl Scouts the Catholic hierarchy is aiming to define womanhood. Problem is, both of those groups are held in far higher regard than the men at the helm of the crackdowns.

Mourning the loss of a scholar, an activist, a mentor.

The only thing that will get the bishops’ attention? Money.

Perhaps the Vatican’s hard-line tactics are an intentional purge.

Throughout the history of the Church, bishops and popes have struggled mightily to keep committed celibate Catholic women under control. Already in the early Christian centuries male Church leaders forced virgins to describe themselves as “brides of Christ” rather than use the male martial imagery they had come to use during the Roman persecutions. The early equality between male and female desert monastics was likewise undercut when eighth century bishops began taking control of women’s monasteries and ordained monks to the priesthood for the first time (but not nuns, of course). And as, throughout the following centuries, groups of dedicated Christian women came together—canonesses, Beguines, beatas, recluses—popes, bishops, and male theologians went to great lengths to rein them in.