(Disclosure: I went to Catholic school for the first three grades although my family is not Catholic. I loved some of the nuns and was terrified of others. Our priest, it was reported, spent plenty of time at a bar. There was a waitress with whom he had many conversations. All we knew is that he was good with the school and the church.)

Staff nurses in one of the teaching hospitals where I worked spoke admiringly of the nuns who ran a clinic nearby. Some of our nurses were devout Catholics and they were among the nuns’ ardent supporters.

The sisters had concluded the only way to help their inner-city clinic patients was to give them birth control. When a woman has 14 children, it is unsafe for her to try to care for that many children or try to stay healthy herself, to cite an extreme example. They also offered birth control to women who were being sexually abused by male relatives from whom they could not escape.  Finally, they helped women who needed to work, to be able to plan their pregnancies.

Back then, the nuns did all of this. Discreetly, true. But they did it.  Where they got the Pill, no one knew. They had a good supply.

There was good reason to believe the bishop knew at the time but nothing was said and no one stopped them. He mast have been a one-of-a-kind bishop. Now he would not have a chance.

It could be unwise to say where or when this was. Headlines have been made as a result of the church’s rapid excommunication of one nun who helped one critically ill patient with a first trimester abortion. The holy fathers might do the math and figure out which nuns would have been near that hospital and passing out (horrors!) contraceptives, hunt them down and excommunicate them. Hearsay evidence might be enough. You never know. Even if these nuns were dead and they were deemed guilty of this offense, the holy fathers might dig them up because such nuns would be unfit to occupy space in a good Catholic cemetery.

In my lifetime, nuns have been the ones who keep doing the church’s important work while so many priests have been involved in tragic cases of sexual abuse. Let us add, many priests are not accused.

However, one does not hear of nuns involved in scandals—or they are scandals only in the eyes of the church.

It does make one wonder. How could the church dispense such severe, swift justice to a highly respected nun, while dragging its feet over priests whose abuse of vulnerable young males and others has been known to them for decades?

Oh, of course. Abuse is not an anti-abortion issue.

One other issue may be playing out here.  One cardinal quoted below speaks of a “secular mentality” that seems to be spreading and “perhaps a certain feminist spirit.”

The church has an investigation of all 60,000 American nuns for these reasons. Wait. Now it is only 59,999. They just got rid of one.

To state the problem in secular terms, the church seems to feel it has an uppity woman problem.

This case is one example of  an uppity nun in the eyes of the church.  Although they never would use such American language, this nun was guilty of thinking about the patient and, on the spot, making what she, as a care-giver, thought was the least-worst outcome in a bad situation.

In addition, although they have not put it this way, this very ill pregnant woman also might be an example of an uppity Catholic mother problem to the church. So far, Catholic mothers are not being investigated—or, at least, not yet.

Neither kind of uppity woman is acceptable to the fathers of the church. If these females team up—nuns and mothers—they could turn the whole church upside down.

No uppity women allowed.

Once again, the church has come out against many of its best servants, the ones the public and parishioners trust most.

The Catholic leadership has acted in this one case in such a swift fashion that it reveals a painful double standard.

Stay tuned for the investigation of the 59,999 remaining nuns.

The church has only begun its American Inquisition, which is, of course, limited to the sisters.

Newsweek

“Earlier this month, in something of a surprise, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix was excommunicated for approving a first-trimester abortion last year at that hospital to save the life of a critically ill patient. “An unborn child is not a disease,” said Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Phoenix diocese. “While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother’s life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child.” The irony here is thick: it has taken years, sometimes decades, to bring sex-abusing priests to justice, but this observant sister, Margaret McBride, was excommunicated in a matter of months for making a compassionate and impossible decision for one of her parishioners. (Emphasis added)

“This decisive action against one nun in one ethically murky case comes as an “apostolic visitation,” or investigation, of all of America’s 60,000 religious sisters is underway. Its purpose is unclear, though the man who ordered it, Cardinal Franc Rode, is well known for his views about “irregularities” in post–Vatican II religious life. “You could say,” he told a radio interviewer last year, that the investigation “involves a certain secular mentality that has spread in these religious families, and perhaps also a certain feminist spirit.” (Emphasis added)

Source: Newsweek, May 27, 2010