We have a winner! This contest, which has lasted the last four years, has been rough and tumble. Many people have vied for the crown, but there can be only one. The winner for the single stupidest thing written about the Pope and the Church goes to former Catholic turned religious black hole with a soft spot for call-girl clothing, Maureen Dowd.
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.
But wait, there’s more! How ’bout this humdinger?
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!
Now that some Anglicans are potentially affiliated with the Catholic Church, let’s have a go at them as well!
As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.
Now I know, the celibate priesthood is not a dogma but a practice you say! It is merely a longstanding discipline and not a matter of faith and certainly not a dogma you further protest. I say, let’s not let facts that can be ascertained withing two minutes on the google stand in her way, the woman is on a roll!
Now before you are too hard on poor little Maureen for all this magnificent inanity, there is an explanation. This can be seen in the opening anecdote…
Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.
Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.
Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church.
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.
If only lil’ Maureen hadn’t been late to class or Sr. Hiltruda had hit her repeatedly upside the head, she might have learned something. Alas alack.
October 26, 2009 at 3:02 am
If only lil' Maureen hadn't been late to class or Sr. Hiltruda had hit her repeatedly upside the head…
Maybe she wasn't hit enough times.
BTW – that was a hugely funny line.
October 26, 2009 at 3:28 am
There is a great advantage to reading Maureen Dowd (et al) in the jakes as it saves on Charmin.
October 26, 2009 at 3:47 am
I can't believe MoDo won. I figured Anthony Stevens Arroyo or Fr. McBrien would win. I knew I shouldn't have bet on this contest.
October 26, 2009 at 4:06 am
Wow. All in a single op-ed.
October 26, 2009 at 4:31 am
Sorry Maureen, but the Nuns I had in grade school were anything but 2nd class citizens.
I read the whole thing on the NYT site. It was disgusting. & while this is definitely the winner for now, I suspect that there is someone out there who will 1 day top it.
PS I wonder how long it will be before she applauds Patrick Kennedy for what she will see as his courage stand or the abortion assisting nun from across the river.
October 26, 2009 at 4:32 am
You are right, Pat: Mo has really outdone herself. She will have a tough time topping this. Just when you though the Nazi insinuations were getting to be old hat, she finds a new way to amp up the volume (without ever just coming right and saying: "The Pope is a Nazi.")
But you left out one of the most remarkable passages. Fret not – Fr. Z fisked the daylights out of it:
"When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” [Actually, I think she didn’t just try to "reconcile", she condoned homosexuals acts.] The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women. [How UNJUST to go after Mansour! How UNJUST to object to abortions! Imagine objecting to paying for abortions for poor women! Because that is what they really need isn’t it, state-paid abortions! That’s what our nuns should really be doing. Get them out of those habits and convents out there fighting for homosexual marriage and abortion! This is what young Catholic girls should grow up aspiring to. Mo Dowd’s idea of Mother Teresa: Sr. Mary Agnes Mansour, making sure that Michigan pays for abortions of poor women! That’s what women religious should be doing. Why isn’t the Pope applauding them for it? Instead he is welcoming Christians who would also be against that. He must be a Nazi-loving, holocaust denying, pedophile-protecting, Africa-hating, misogynistic homophobe.]
October 26, 2009 at 12:10 pm
In addition, she is also misinformed. The "Global South" – a name chosen by the conservative Anglicans in the southern hemisphere who have taken in the stray northern hemisphere Anglicans (Episcopalians) – has announced that they are interested in reforming Anglicanism rather than entering the Church. They have no particular love for the Pope, sadly.
October 26, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Also, last I heard there were something like 200 odd (maybe it is nearly 300 now) in one little community in Nashville, Tennessee. So much for the 70 or so. And what a perverse moral to draw from her initial story! One does hope though that the priest had chosen someone else to be kind to that morning. (Although one wonders whether Maureen isn't being a leetle economical from the truth, as well as plagiaristic: It has shadows of that movie, Doubt)
October 26, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Meh. People whose youth has slipped away desperately trying to stay relevant. Tick-tock, tick-tock…
October 26, 2009 at 4:07 pm
After skimming this post, I thought, "this can be none other than Maureen Dowd." Sadly, I was correct. I take offense that she calls the Holy Father a Nazi. How disgusting.
October 26, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Another feminazi harpy loudly proclaiming her "relevance" into the silence of encrouching sensescence.
October 26, 2009 at 5:12 pm
This Dowd person writes for the New York Times.
'nuff said!
October 26, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Every time I read one of these idiotic screeds by MoDo, I just keep repeating these words to myself and it makes me feel so much better:
Catherine Zeta-Jones.
October 26, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Guys, I was trying to be obedient to my spouse for he warned me not to read MoDo because it would only piss me off. So, I kept my NYT scan to 'safe' subjects and op-eds only to get snared by "stupidest thing written".
October 28, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Hey, it's not complete drivel; at least she got the last sentence right!
October 28, 2009 at 3:27 pm
You critics of Sr. Mary Mansour and Maureen Dowd are a sick bunch. You call yourselves Christians? You don't have a clue.